“One day I was in rather a fix, so I went out. I strolled along in the dazzling sunlight of early spring, lost in thought, seeing and hearing nothing, really ; forming no kind of picture of what was going on around me in the Saturday bustle of the country village. Nothing. Funny, it was so typical : one of those times when a writer feels stale, when his pen has been showing signs of going on of going on strike and will soon cease to obey him altogether. Driven by his restlessness, the writer goes away like a rat leaving a sinking ship...”