ness problem which creates a permanent
need for a literary agent. It consists in this--that our work, even
when it has become entirely a duty and a worry, still remains in some
vague way a pleasure. And how can we put a fair price on what is at
once a worry and a pleasure? Suppose someone comes to me and says, "I
offer you sixpence for your _History of the Gnostic Heresy_." Why,
after all, should I charge more than sixpence for a work it was so
exuberant to write? You, on the other hand, seeing it from the
outside, would say that it was worth--so and so. And you would get it.

Shaw continued his attempts to stimulate the reluctant playwright.
Two years after drafting the scenario, he writes:

10 Adelphi Terrace, W.C.
5th April 1912.

DEAR MRS. CHESTERTON,

I have promised to drive somebody to Beaconsfield on Sunday
morning; and I shall be in that district more or less for the rest of
the day. If you are spending Easter at Overroads, and have no
visitors who couldn't stand us, we should like to call on you at any
time that would be convenient.

The convenience of time depends on a design of my own which I wish
to impart to you first. I want to read a play to Gilbert. It began by
way of being a music-hall sketch; so it is not 31/2 hours long as
usual: I can get through it in an hour and a half. I want to insult
and taunt and stimulate Gilbert with it. It is the sort of thing he
could write and ought to write: a religious harlequinade.* In fact,
he could do it better if a sufficient number of pins were stuck into
him. My proposal is that I read the play to him on Sunday (or at the
next convenient date), and that you fall into transports of
admiration of it; declare that you can never love a man who cannot
write things like that; and definitely announce that if Gilbert has
not finished a worthy successor to it before the end of the third
week next ensuing, you will go out like the lady in A Doll's House,
and live your own life--whatever that dark threat may mean.

[* Androcles and The Lion evidently. G.B.S.]

If you are at home, I count on your ready complicity; but the
difficulty is that you may have visitors; and if they are pious
Gilbert will be under a tacit obligation not to blaspheme, or let me
blaspheme, whilst they are beneath his roof (my play is about
Christian Martyrs, and perfectly awful in parts); an