Thanks to this editor, for the others would have nothing
to say to me though I battered on all their doors, she was soon
able to sleep at nights without the dread that I should be waking
presently with the iron-work of certain seats figured on my person,
and what relieved her very much was that I had begun to write as if
Auld Lichts were not the only people I knew of. So long as I
confined myself to them she had a haunting fear that, even though
the editor remained blind to his best interests, something would
one day go crack within me (as the mainspring of a watch breaks)
and my pen refuse to write for evermore. 'Ay, I like the article
brawly,' she would say timidly, 'but I'm doubting it's the last - I
always have a sort of terror the new one may be the last,' and if
many days elapsed before the arrival of another article her face
would say mournfully, 'The blow has fallen - he can think of
nothing more to write about.' If I ever shared her fears I never
told her so, and the articles that were not Scotch grew in number
until there were hundreds of them, all carefully preserved by her:
they were the only thing in the house that, having served one
purpose, she did not convert into something else, yet they could
give her uneasy moments. This was because I nearly always assumed
a character when I wrote; I must be a country squire, or an
undergraduate, or a butler, or a member of the House of Lords, or a
dowager, or a lady called Sweet Seventeen, or an engineer in India,
else was my pen clogged, and though this gave my mother certain
fearful joys, causing her to laugh unexpectedly (so far as my
articles were concerned she nearly always laughed in the wrong
place), it also scared her.
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