My circumstances demanded that one or other should be finished before I took any rest, and so I wound up the Sleeper sufficiently to make it a marketable work, hoping to be able to revise it before the book printers at any rate got hold of it.

But fortune was against me.

I came back to England from Italy only to fall dangerously ill, and I still remember the impotent rage and strain of my attempt to put some sort of finish to my story of Mr.Lewisham, with my temperature at a hundred and two.

I couldn't endure the thought of leaving that book a fragment.

I did afterwards contrive to save it from the consequences of that febrile spurt--_Love and Mr.Lewisham_ is indeed one of my most carefully balanced books--but the Sleeper escaped me.
It is twelve years now since the Sleeper was written, and that young man of thirty-one is already too remote for me to attempt any very drastic reconstruction of his work.