I have in mind a man with whom I once went walking among the mountains on the French-Italian border.  He was enormously particular about trains and arrangements the day or the week before we needed them, and he was wonderfully efficient at the job.  But as the time approached for catching a train he became exasperatingly calm and leisured.  He began to take his time over everything and to concern himself with the arrangements of the next day or the next week, as though he had forgotten all about the train that was imminent, or was careless whether he caught it or not.  And when at last he had got to the train, he began to remember things.  He would stroll off to get a time-table or to buy a book, or to look at the engine—­especially to look at the engine.  And the nearer the minute for starting the more absorbed he became in the mechanism of the thing, and the more animated was his explanation of the relative merits of the P.L.M. engine and the North-Western engine.  He was always given up as lost, and yet always stepped in as the train was on the move, his manner aggravatingly unruffled, his talk pursuing the quiet tenor of his thought about engines or about what we should do the week after next.

Now I am different.  I have been catching trains all my life, and all my life I have been afraid I shouldn’t catch them.  Familiarity with the habits of trains cannot get rid of a secret conviction that their aim is to give me the slip if it can be done.  No faith in my own watch can affect my doubts as to the reliability of the watch of the guard or the station clock or whatever deceitful signal the engine-driver obeys.  Moreover, I am oppressed with the possibilities of delay on the road to the station.  They crowd in on me like the ghosts into the tent of King Richard.  There may be a block in the streets, the bus may break down, the taxi-driver may be drunk or not know the way, or think I don’t know the way, and take me round and round the squares as Tony Lumpkin drove his mother round and round the pond, or—­in fact, anything may happen, and it is never until I am safely inside (as I am now) that I feel really happy.

Now, of course this is a very absurd weakness.  I ought to be ashamed to confess it.  I am ashamed to confess it.  And that is the advantage of writing under a pen name.  You can confess anything you like, and nobody thinks any the worse of you.  You ease your own conscience, have a gaol delivery of your failings—­look them, so to speak, straight in the face, and pass sentence on them—­and still enjoy the luxury of not being found out.  You have all the advantages of a conviction without the nuisance of the penalty.  Decidedly, this writing under a pen name is a great easement of the soul.