"You know--you wouldn't think it--but I'm tremendously glad the fog drove you in here to-day. There are so many things I want to talk about, but I've lost my confidence somehow in any one being interested in what I think."
"If you imagine it was the fog," said Martha Proctor, "that brought me in to-day, you are greatly mistaken. I've been meaning to come for weeks. You say you're diffident, well, I'm diffident too, although I wouldn't have any one in the world to know it. Here I am at forty-two, and I'm a failure. No, don't protest. It's true. I know I've got a name and something of a position and young authors are said to wait nervously for my Olympian utterances, but as a matter of fact I've got about as much influence and power as that jam-pot there. But it isn't only with myself I'm disappointed--I'm disappointed with everybody."
She paused then, as though she expected Peter to say something, so he said:
"No, it isn't. The state of literature in London is rotten, more rotten than I've ever known it. Everybody over forty is tired and down and out, and everybody under thirty has swelled head. And they're all in sets and cliques. And they're all hating one another and abusing one another and running their own little pets. And all the little pets that might have turned into good writers if they'd been let alone have been spoiled and ruined." She paused for breath, then went on, growing really excited: "Look at young Burnley for instance. There's quite a promising dramatist--you know that _The Rivers' Family_ was a jolly good play. Then Monteith gets hold of him, persuades him that he's a critic, which, poor infant, he never was and never will be, lets him loose on his paper and ruins his character. Yes, ruins it! Six months later he's reviewing the same book in four different papers under four different names, and hasn't the least idea that he's doing anything dishonest!
"But Burnley isn't the point. It's the general state of things. Monteith and Murphy and the rest think they're Olympian. They're as full of prejudices as an egg is full of meat, and they haven't got a grain of humour amongst the lot. They aren't consciously dishonest, but they run round and round after their own tails with their eyes on the ground. Now, I'm only saying what lots of us are feeling. We want literature to become a jollier, freer thing; to be quit of schools and groups, and to have altogether more fun in it. That's why I've come to you!"