mind.  One weighs all contingencies too minutely; one is too considerate, if that is possible; and if one makes up one’s mind, perhaps, to find fault, the presence in the house of a dissatisfied person is an undue weight on the mind.  Or one reads an unfavourable review, and is too much occupied with its possible results on one’s literary prospects.  It is not depression that these things induce, but one expends too much energy and thought upon them.

But this on the whole matters little.  There is time to be slow in decision; there is time to forecast possibilities.  Indeed, it is an advantage for the solitary man to cultivate an over-elaborate way of considering a subject, a slow picking-up and matching of patterns, a maddening deliberation, simply by way of recreation.  For a danger of solitude, if one likes one’s work, is that one works too much and too hard.  Then one writes too much, forgets to fill the cistern; one uses up the old phrases, the old ideas.  All which is a sore temptation to a forgetful writer like myself, who re-invents and re-discovers the old sentences with a shock of pleasing novelty and originality, only to find it all written in an earlier book.

But these are all superficial material difficulties such as have to be faced in every life.  The real and dark danger of solitude is the self-absorption that is bound to follow.  With one like myself, to whom the meeting of a new person is a kind of momentous terror, who feels forced instinctively to use all possible arts to render a clumsy presence and a heavy manner bearable, whose only hope is to be respectfully tolerated, to whom society is not an easy recreation but an arduous game, who would always sooner write a dozen letters than have an interview, with such an one the solitary life tends to make one ghost-like and evasive before one’s time.  Yet it is not for nothing, I reflect, that Providence has never pushed a pawn to me in the shape of an official wife, and has markedly withheld me from nephews and nieces.  It is not for nothing that relationships with others appear to me in the light of a duty, at least in the initial stages, rather than a pleasure.

And yet I reflect that I should doubtless be a better man, even with a shrewish wife and a handful of heavy, unattractive children.  I should have to scheme for them, to make things easier for them, to work for them, to recommend them, to cherish them, to love them.  These dear transforming burdens are denied me.  And yet would the sternest and severest mentor in the world bid me marry without love, for the sake of its effect on my character?  “No,” he would say, “not that! but let yourself go, be rash, fall in love, marry in haste!  It is your only salvation.”  But that is like telling a dwarf that it is his only salvation to be six feet high—­it cannot be done by taking thought.  No one can see more acutely and clearly, in more terrible and melancholy detail, than myself what one misses.