as the one fixed meal of the day.... Now work put in its claim.

At breakfast, he told people, was the only time that he could skim the
daily; he was so intensely busy; and certainly he propped the
_Telegraph_ before him on the table every morning (this shocked Helena
at first, for she had not seen any farces and had no notion it was ever
done); but somehow or other he appeared never to have quite finished
just the paragraph that he was reading when the meal concluded. There
was an armchair temptingly near alike to table, fire, and cigarettes.

Helena's first important duty was to steer him tactfully from this
chair to the harder one whereon he sat to write. She must not jar him,
must not hurry him, or he lost every one of his ideas, and it was all
her fault at lunch.... But, on the other hand, she must not let him
sit there, gazing at a thrice-read page--"thinking out my day's work,"
he called it--till too late. This she certainly did not desire to do,
for Lily never was allowed to come and clear the meal away till he had
gone into his study (that upset him, too), so that delay bred chaos in
the household.

When once, however, he was safely at his writing-table, all was quiet,
must be, until lunch-time. These were his best hours for work. The
small house brooded under a funereal silence.

Lunch was a movable affair.

Hubert could not endure clocks in his working-room. Their sound, which
he declared was just not regular, got on his nerves, and he found
himself on days when his inspiration would not flow, gazing at the dial
with growing despair, like a bad sleeper who begins to count the hours
which strike at ever lessening intervals, until he knows at last that
now he will not sleep at all.

The writer's estimate of time varied largely with the amount of his
success. When he was writing well, the hours would speed away and he
would then emerge at half-past two or even--once--at three, full of a
joy so intense as to ignore, or even to melt, the iciness of Helena and
Lily. At other times, when his pen dragged itself along the paper
sleepily or idly drew vague circles on the blotting-pad, he would get
tired and hungry. On these days lunch was punctual at one o'clock.

After lunch, which was a meal solid almost to the limits of bad art, he
would subside on the tempting armchair again and Helena be asked to
bring him the weekly reviews. Not only the literary pages were
digested; Hubert read the music, art,