would
not leave me. I went at it again, I suppose in 1904; consumed with a
bitter determination to finish what I had begun. Everything now had
become difficult. I tried this way and that way and the other way. They
all failed and I broke down on every one of them; and I tried and tried
again. At last I cobbled up some sort of an end, an utterly bad one, as
I realized as I wrote every single line and word of it, and the story
appeared, in 1904 or 1905, in Horlick's Magazine under the editorship of
my old and dear friend, A. E. Waite._

_Still; I was not satisfied. That end was intolerable and I knew it.
Again, I sat down to the work, night after night I wrestled with it. And
I remember an odd circumstance which may or may not be of some
physiological interest. I was then living in a circumscribed "upper
part" of a house in Cosway Street, Marylebone Road. That I might
struggle by myself, I wrote in the little kitchen; and night after night
as I fought grimly, savagely, all but hopelessly for some fit close for
"A Fragment of Life," I was astonished and almost alarmed to find that
my feet developed a sensation of most deadly cold. The room was not
cold; I had lit the oven burners of the little gas cooking stove. I was
not cold; but my feet were chilled in a quite extraordinary manner, as
if they had been packed in ice. At last I took off my slippers with a
view of poking my toes into the oven of the stove, and feeling my feet
with my hand, I perceived that, in fact, they were not cold at all! But
the sensation remained; there, I suppose, you have an odd case of a
transference of something that was happening in the brain to the
extremities. My feet were quite warm to the palm of my hand, but to my
sense they were frozen. But what a testimony to the fitness of the
American idiom, "cold feet," as signifying a depressed and desponding
mood! But, somehow or other, the tale was finished and the "notion" was
at last out of my head. I have gone into all this detail about "A
Fragment of Life" because I have been assured in many quarters that it
is the best thing that I have ever done, and students of the crooked
ways of literature may be interested to hear of the abominable labours
of doing it._

_"The White People" belongs to the same year as the first chapter of "A
Fragment of Life," 1899, which was also the year of "Hieroglyphics." The
fact was I was in high literary spirits, just then. I had been harassed
and worried for a wh