When I returned to London, in 1910, it was with a little more assurance than I had felt a few years earlier. Then I had been intensely conscious of my youth, my lack of experience, my incapacity for anything but a kind of literary beachcombing, gathering fragments for obscure publishers — The Proverbs of Japan, The Proverbs of China, The Potted Policy of Parnell. Through a chance meeting with Lionel Lindsay in Sydney I had been admitted to an attic near the British Museum that had once sheltered him and had still one of his abandoned self-portraits on the wall. The landlady, Mrs. Sweeting, an applecheeked countrywoman from Devonshire, had been ready to mother me as she had mothered her adored Lionel until (she said disconsolately) a rough, loud-voiced man (whom I guessed to be Randolph Bedford) had carried him off to Spain.

Those days held little for me but memories of dreary hack-work carried on far into the night, the sound of rejected manuscripts dropping in through the downstairs door, and the depressing smell of cocoa boiled on a tiny petrol-stove; though there had been brighter moments when I had climbed the gallery-stairs of some theatre or sat listening to Yeats or Shaw in a little hall off the Strand. Still, while I was away from it, my fixed image of London was of a solitary attic and the naptha-flares of fruit-barrows reflected in the slush of Theobald’s Road.