In A Literary Household

In the literary household of fiction and the drama, things are usually
in a distressing enough condition. The husband, as you know, has a
hacking cough, and the wife a dying baby, and they write in the
intervals of these cares among the litter of the breakfast things.
Occasionally a comic, but sympathetic, servant brings in an
armful--"heaped up and brimming over"--of rejected MSS., for, in the
dramatic life, it never rains but it pours. Instead of talking about
editors in a bright and vigorous fashion, as the recipients of
rejections are wont, the husband groans and covers his face with his
hands, and the wife, leaving the touching little story she is
writing--she posts this about 9 p.m., and it brings in a publisher and
£100 or so before 10.30--comforts him by flopping suddenly over his
shoulder. "Courage," she says, stroking his hyacinthine locks (whereas
all real literary men are more or less grey or bald). Sometimes, as in
_Our Flat_, comic tradesmen interrupt the course of true literature with
their ignoble desire for cash payment, and sometimes, as in _Our Boys_,
uncles come and weep at the infinite pathos of a bad breakfast egg. But
it's always a very sordid, dusty, lump-in-your-throaty affair, and no
doubt it conduces to mortality by deterring the young and impressionable
from literary vices. As for its truth, that is another matter
altogether.

Yet it must not be really imagined that a literary household is just
like any other. There is the brass paper-fastener, for instance. I have
sometimes thought that Euphemia married me with an eye to these
conveniences. She has two in her grey gloves, and one (with the head
inked) in her boot in the place of a button. Others I suspect her of.
Then she fastened the lamp shade together with them, and tried one day
to introduce them instead of pearl buttons as efficient anchorage for
cuffs and collars. And she made a new handle for the little drawer under
the inkstand with one. Indeed, the literary household is held together,
so to speak, by paper-fasteners, and how other people get along without
them we are at a loss to imagine.

And another point, almost equally important, is that the husband is
generally messing about at home. That is, indeed, to a superficial
observer, one of the most remarkable characteristics of the literary
household. Other husbands are cast out in the morning to raven for
income and return to a home that is swept and garnished towards the end
of the day; but the literary husband is ever in possession. His work
must not be disturbed even when he is merely thinking. The study is
consequently a kind of domestic cordite factory, and you are never
certain when it may explode. The concussion of a dust-pan and