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“Is it two hundred pence or two hundred pounds?”

“Don’t be absurd, George. Even you know that you can’t get a furnished house like this for two hundred pence a year.”

“Four times into two hundred—let me see—fifty. Yes, fifty. You can safely write down fifty pounds.”

That little incident safely over, we turned to tea.

I induced Shaw to talk about his own work, and I quickly discovered that, unlike most authors, he had no feeling of bitterness that he had had to spend years in hard work before he won public recognition.

“A writer of originality must expect to have to wait. If a writer is acclaimed immediately—I mean a writer on social and artistic subjects—he may be pretty sure that he is saying things that have been said before. He may be saying them better than anybody else; nevertheless, they are the same things. My own success has been gained, and is very largely maintained, by the force of my personality and by the tradition about myself that has gradually grown up in the mind of the public. For example, if I were to write an article and give it to you to copy out and offer to editors in your own name, you being the professional author, I doubt very much if a single editor would look at it twice. A good deal, you see, is in a name.”