There happened to be a room to let on the same floor as Richard's own. The rent was only five shillings per week, and he arranged to take it and use it as a bedroom, transforming the other and larger room into a study. Mrs. Rowbotham was asked to remove all her tables, chairs, carpets, pictures, ornaments¹, and accessories from both rooms, as he proposed to furnish them entirely² anew at his own cost. This did not indicate that a sudden increase of revenue had, as once on a previous occasion, engendered³ in him a propensity⁴ to squander⁵. On the contrary, his determination to live economically was well established, and he hoped to save a hundred pounds per annum with ease. But the influence of an æsthetic environment upon his literary work would, he argued, probably be valuable enough to justify⁶ the moderate expenditure⁷ involved, and so all the leisure of the last days of the year was given to the realisation of certain theories in regard to the furnishing of a study and a bedroom. Unfortunately the time at his disposal was very limited—- was it not essential that the place should be set in order by the 31st of December, that work might commence on the 1st of January?—but he did not spare himself, and the result, when he contemplated⁸ it on New Year's Eve, filled him with pleasure and pride. He felt that he could write worthily⁹ in that study, with its four autotype reproductions of celebrated¹⁰ pictures on the self-coloured walls, its square of Indian carpet over Indian matting, its long, low bookshelves, its quaint¹¹ table with the elm top, its plain rush-bottomed chairs, and its broad luxurious¹² divan¹³. He marvelled¹⁴ that he had contrived¹⁵ so long to exist in the room as it was before, and complacently¹⁶ attributed his ill-success as a writer to the lack of harmonious¹⁷ surroundings. By the last post arrived a New Year's card from Mrs. Clayton Vernon. Twelve months ago she had sent a similar kind token of remembrance, and he had ignored it; in the summer she had written inviting¹⁸ him to spend a few days at Bursley, and he had somewhat too briefly¹⁹ asked to be excused. To-night, however, he went out, bought a New Year's card, and despatched it to her at once. He flowed over with benevolence²⁰, viewing the world through the rosy²¹ spectacles of high resolve. Mrs. Clayton Vernon was an excellent woman, and he would prove to her and to Bursley that they had not estimated too highly the possibilities of Richard Larch²². He was, in truth, prodigiously²³ uplifted. The old sense of absolute power over himself for good or evil returned. A consciousness of exceptional ability possessed²⁴ him. The future, splendid in dreams, was wholly his; and yet again—perhaps more thoroughly²⁵ than ever before—the ineffectual past was effaced²⁶. To-morrow was the New Year, and to-morrow the new heaven and the new earth were to begin.  
He had decided²⁷ to write a novel. Having failed in short stories and in essays, it seemed to him likely that the novel, a form which he had not so far seriously attempted, might suit his idiosyncrasy better. He had once sketched²⁸ out the plot of a short novel, a tale of adventure in modern London, and on examination this struck him as ingenious and promising²⁹. Moreover, it would appeal—like Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights," which in Richard's mind it distantly resembled—both to the general and to the literary public. He determined³⁰ to write five hundred words of it a day, five days a week; at this rate of progress he calculated that the book would be finished in four months; allowing two months further for revision, it ought to be ready for a publisher at the end of June.
 
He drew his chair up to the blazing fire, and looked down the vista³¹ of those long, lamplit evenings during which the novel was to grow under his hands. How different he from the average clerk, who with similar opport............