It was cheap--a white demy of unpretentious quality--so that sixpennorth lasted a long time.

My daily allowance of composition was five pages of this demy in quarto; and I held my natural laziness sternly to that task day in, day out, to the end.

I remember also that Bizet's Carmen being then new in London, I used it as a safety-valve for my romantic impulses.

When I was tired of the sordid realism of Whatshisname (I have sent my only copy of The Irrational Knot to the printers, and cannot remember the name of my hero) I went to the piano and forgot him in the glamorous society of Carmen and her crimson toreador and yellow dragoon.

Not that Bizet's music could infatuate me as it infatuated Nietzsche.