Chapter I

IT was at a war-charity sale, in a hot, crowded public room of a fashionable hotel, amid the humorous bellowings of an amateur auctioneer and the guffaws of amused bidders, that this thing happened to me. A young woman was passing, and, as she passed, she looked and stopped, and abruptly charged me with being myself. I admitted the undeniable.

‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’ve read all your books.’

‘The usual amiable chatter,’ I thought, and made aloud my usual, stilted, self-conscious reply to such a conversational opening:

‘You must have worked very hard.’

She frowned--just a little frown in the middle of her forehead. She was very well-dressed (which is not a fault), and she had a pleasant, sympathetic, serious face. She said:

‘I’ve often wanted to tell you; in fact, I thought I ought to tell you about all those little books of yours about life and improving oneself, and being efficient and not wasting time, and so on, and so on. They’re very nice to read, but they’ve never done me any good--practically.’ She smiled.

(No; it was not to be the usual amiable chatter!)

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But, of course, books don’t act by themselves. You can’t expect them to be of much practical good until you begin to put them into practice.’

‘But that’s just the point,’ she answered. ‘I can’t _begin_ to put them into practice. I can’t resolve, and I can’t concentrate, and I can’t clench my teeth and make up my mind. And if I do make a sort of start, it’s a failure after the first day. And this goes on year after year. No use blaming me--I can’t help myself. I want awfully--but I can’t.’

‘But _what_ do you want?’

‘I want to make the best of myself. I want to stop wasting time and to perfect my “human machine.” I want to succeed in life. I want to live properly and bring out all my faculties. Only, you see, I haven’t got any resolution. I simply have not got it in me. You tell me to make up my mind, steel myself, resolve, stick to it, and so forth. Well, I just can’t. And yet I do want to. You’ve never dealt with my case--and, what’s more, I don’t think you can deal with it. I hope you’ll pardon all this bluntness. But I thought that, as a student of human nature, you might be interested.’

I stood silent for a moment. She bowed with much charm and fled away. I gazed everywhere. But she was lost in the huge room. I could not very well run in pursuit of her--these things are not done in literary circles. She had vanished. And I knew naught of her. She might be young girl, young wife, young mother, anything--but I knew naught of her except that she had a sympathetic, rather sad face, and that she had left an arrow quivering in my side.