nd all about it. We won't mention the subject to one another any
more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is
my grumpy, frumpy story, and we'll keep it to ourselves, Trot!'

CHAPTER 48. DOMESTIC

I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere with the
punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came out and was very
successful. I was not stunned by the praise which sounded in my ears,
notwithstanding that I was keenly alive to it, and thought better of
my own performance, I have little doubt, than anybody else did. It has
always been in my observation of human nature, that a man who has any
good reason to believe in himself never flourishes himself before the
faces of other people in order that they may believe in him. For this
reason, I retained my modesty in very self-respect; and the more praise
I got, the more I tried to deserve.

It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials
it is my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions. They
express themselves, and I leave them to themselves. When I refer to
them, incidentally, it is only as a part of my progress.

Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that nature and
accident had made me an author, I pursued my vocation with confidence.
Without such assurance I should certainly have left it alone, and
bestowed my energy on some other endeavour. I should have tried to find
out what nature and accident really had made me, and to be that, and
nothing else. I had been writing, in the newspaper and elsewhere, so
prosperously, that when my new success was achieved, I considered myself
reasonably entitled to escape from the dreary debates. One joyful night,
therefore, I noted down the music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the
last time, and I have never heard it since; though I still recognize the
old drone in the newspapers, without any substantial variation (except,
perhaps, that there is more of it), all the livelong session.

I now write of the time when I had been married, I suppose, about a year
and a half. After several varieties of experiment, we had given up the
housekeeping as a bad job. The house kept itself, and we kept a page.
The principal function of this retainer was to quarrel with the cook;
in which respect he was a perfect Whittington, without his cat, or the
remotest chance of being made Lord Mayor.

He appears to me to have lived in a hail of saucepan