The man took no notice of the question, and went on:--
"And if I haven't written anything for twenty years, I'm still an author at heart. In fact, I've got something 'in the air' now. Oh! I've always had the literary temperament badly. Do you ever catch yourself watching instinctively for the characteristic phrase?"
"I'm afraid I don't quite know what you mean."
Richard repeated what he had said, but Mr. Aked was absorbed in pouring out another glass of wine.
"I wish you'd tell me," Richard began, after a pause, "how you first _began_ to write, or rather to get printed."
"My dear little friend, I can't tell you anything new. I wrote for several years and never sold a line. And for what peculiar reason, should you think? Simply because not a line was worth printing. Then my things began to be accepted. I sold a story first; I forget the title, but I remember there was a railway accident in it, and it happened to come before the editor of a magazine just when everyone was greatly excited about a railway smash in the West of England. I got thirty shillings for that."
"I think I should get on all right enough if only I could sell _one_ thing." Richard sighed.
"Well, you must wait. Why, damn it all, man!"--he stopped to drink, and Richard noticed how his hand shook. "How long have you been working seriously? Not a year! If you were going in for painting, you surely wouldn't expect to sell pictures after only a year's study?" Mr. Aked showed a naïve appreciation of himself in the part of a veteran who deigns to give a raw recruit the benefit of vast experience.
"Of course not," assented Richard, abashed.
After the cheese Mr. Aked ordered coffee and cognac, and sixpenny cigars. They smoked in silence.
"Do you know," Richard blurted out at length, "the fact is I'm not sure that I'm meant for writing at all. I never take any pleasure _in_ writing. It's a confounded nuisance." He almost trembled with apprehension as he uttered the words.
"You like thinking about what you're going to write, arranging, observing, etc.?"
"Well, here's a secret. No writer does like writing, at least not one in a hundred, and the exception, ten to one, is a howling mediocrity. That's a fact. But all the same they're miserable if they don't write."