Heinemann the publisher accepted The White Peacock at once, and gave me fifty pounds. My mother was dying of cancer: I was twenty-five. Heinemann’s kindly sent me an advance copy of my novel. My mother held it in her hands, opened it—then it was enough. She died two days later. Perhaps she thought it spelled success. Perhaps she thought it helped to justify her life. Perhaps she only felt terribly, terribly bitter that she was dying, just as the great adventure was opening before her. Anyhow she died.

A few months before she died, Austin Harrison, who had taken over the English Review, which published all my early things, wrote to her: “By the time he is forty, he will be riding in his own carriage—” And my mother is supposed to have said:“Ay! if he lives to be forty!”—She was so sure of my not living, it seems! I might even ride in my carriage, if I lived! But I was not to live—I don’t know why. I always had more vitality than all the rest put together. My very vitality wore me thin. But vitality doesn’t kill a man till it is dammed up.

Well, I am forty-one, and am not dead, neither have I yet ridden in my own carriage, not even in my own motor-car: only in my own buggy, driving my own two horses down the rocky trail of my own little ranch in New Mexico. That is all. Whether it justifies the oracle, who knows.

And what my mother would say to it all, I don’t know. She would have hated my“sexual” writing, and have felt I had brought deep shame on her, when the“Rainbow” was suppressed. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she would have decided I was worth her backing. But she would have been chagrined at my lack of“real” success: that I don’t make more money; that I am not really popular, like Michael Arlen, or really genteel, like Mr Galsworthy: that I have a bad reputation as an improper writer, so that she couldn’t discuss me complacently with my aunts: that I don’t make any“real” friends among the upper classes: that I don’t really rise in the world, only drift about without any real status. All this would have been a chagrin to her. It is perhaps as well she did not live to take part in the adventure.