my second year in London I became approximately wealthy. Early
in the third year, at all events, I earned as much as five guineas in
a single month, and ate meat almost every day; in other words I began
to earn pretty nearly one-third as much as I had earned some years
previously in Sydney. I now bought books, and no longer always, as
before, at the cost of a meal or so. Holywell Street was a great
delight to me, and I never quite comprehended how Londoners could
bring themselves to let it go. I doubt if Fleet Street raised a single
protest, and yet-- Well, it was surprising.

I wrote rather less in this period, and used more method in my attacks
upon the editors. I even succeeded in actually interviewing one or two
of them, including the gentleman to whom I carried a note of
introduction from a colleague he had never met. But I do not think I
gained anything by these interviews. I might possibly have done so had
they come earlier, while yet the freedom of easier days and of
sunshine was in my veins. But my mean street period had affected me
materially. It had made me morbidly self-conscious, and suspiciously
alive to the least hint of patronage or brusqueness.

It is true I gave hours to the penetration of editorial sanctums; but
in nearly every case my one desire, when I reached them, was to escape
from them quickly without humiliation. In a busy man's very natural
dislike of interruption, or anxious glance toward his clock, I saw
contempt for my obscurity and suspicion of my poverty. And, after all,
I had nothing to say to these gentlemen, save to beg them to read the
effusions I pressed upon them; an appeal they would far rather receive
on half a sheet of notepaper. As to impressing my personality upon
them in any way, as I say, my uneasy thoughts in their presence were
usually confined to the problem of how best I might escape without
actual discredit.

Once, I remember, in a very lean month, I chanced to see one of the
Olympians passing with god-like nonchalance into the restaurant of a
well-known hotel. On the instant, and without giving myself time for
reflection, I followed him down the glittering vestibule, and into a
palatial dining-hall. The hour was something between one and two
o'clock, and a minute before I had been thoughtfully weighing the
relative merits of an immediate allowance of sausages and mashed
potatoes for fivepence, or a couple of stale buns for one penny, to be
followed at nightfall by a