wife. . . . So it is we do our shopping in the Great Emporium."
"You will have to re-write your Ballade," said I, "and put all that in."
"I wish I could," said the Poet.
"And while you were having these very fine moods?"
"Annie and the shopman settled most of the furniture between them. Perhaps it's just as well. I was never very good at the practical details of life. . . . Cigarette's out! Have you any more matches?"
"Horribly depressed you are!" I said.
"There's to-morrow. Well, well. . . ."
And then he went off at a tangent to tell me what he expected to make by his next volume of poems, and so came to the congenial business of running down his contemporaries, and became again the cheerful little Poet that I know.
THE LITERARY REGIMEN
At the risk of offending the young beginner's illusions, he must be reminded of one or two homely but important facts bearing upon literary production. Homely as they are, they explain much that is at first puzzling. This perplexing question of distinction; the quality of being somehow fresh—individual. Really it is a perfectly simple matter. It is common knowledge that, after a prolonged fast, the brain works in a feeble manner, the current of one's thoughts is pallid and shallow, it is difficult to fix the attention and impossible to mobilise the full
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