ays of my tenancy I had produced
a favourable impression. For a fortnight past I had been spared the
unattractive sight of the domestic slave. The girls in that Bessborough
Gardens house were often changed, but whether short or long, fair or
dark, they were always untidy and particularly bedraggled as if in a
sordid version of the fairy tale the ashbin cat had been changed into a
maid. I was infinitely sensible of the privilege of being waited on by
my landlady's daughter. She was neat if anaemic.

"Will you please clear away all this at once?" I addressed her in
convulsive accents, being at the same time engaged in getting my pipe
to draw. This, I admit, was an unusual request. Generally on getting up
from breakfast I would sit down in the window with a book and let them
clear the table when they liked; but if you think that on that morning
I was in the least impatient, you are mistaken. I remember that I was
perfectly calm. As a matter of fact I was not at all certain that I
wanted to write, or that I meant to write, or that I had anything to
write about. No, I was not impatient. I lounged between the mantelpiece
and the window, not even consciously waiting for the table to be
cleared. It was ten to one that before my landlady's daughter was done I
would pick up a book and sit down with it all the morning in a spirit of
enjoyable indolence. I affirm it with assurance, and I don't even know
now what were the books then lying about the room. Whatever they were
they were not the works of great masters, where the secret of clear
thought and exact expression can be found. Since the age of five I have
been a great reader, as is not perhaps wonderful in a child who was
never aware of learning to read. At ten years of age I had read much
of Victor Hugo and other romantics. I had read in Polish and in French,
history, voyages, novels; I knew "Gil Blas" and "Don Quixote" in
abridged editions; I had read in early boyhood Polish poets and some
French poets, but I cannot say what I read on the evening before I began
to write myself. I believe it was a novel and it is quite possible
that it was one of Anthony Trollope's novels. It is very likely. My
acquaintance with him was then very recent. He is one of the English
novelists whose works I read for the first time in English. With men of
European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was
otherwise. My first introduction to English imaginative literature was
"N