They have time and leisure to foregather, laugh, be silly, discuss, banter, flirt, make love, and cut up all the various harmless capers that humanity is heir to.

_That's_ what you mean, but you don't realise it.

And you think, and they think, that my solemn and owlish self-suppression is drying me up, squeezing out of me the essence of that warm, lovable humanity in which, they say, my work is deficient.
They say, too, that my inspiration is lacking in that it is not founded on personal experience; that I have never known any deep emotion, any suffering, any of the sterner, darker regrets--anything of that passion which I sometimes depict.

They say that the personal and convincing element is totally absent because I have not lived"-- he laughed--"and loved; that my work lacks the one thing which only the self-knowledge of great happiness and great pain can lend to it....

And--I think they are right, Valerie.