Moore, George: A communication to my friends ([London]: Nonesuch Pr., 1933)

VI

ih hree days afterwards I wrote to my brother, who
had lodgings in Cecil Street, Strand, offering to pay him
a guinea a week for his spare room. “I shall be in all day
writing a book and shall not interfere with you,” and no
man was ever more faithful to a promise made to myself
rather than to my brother, for I could not put aside the
thought that solitude and privation were as much needed
by a man of letters as pen, ink and paper. And it was
only because I did not wish to chagrin my brother that
I sometimes consented to accompany him to a fashionable
restaurant where he dined with prize fighters and young
lords whose only interests in life were champagne, comic
songs and chorus girls. However much I might try, I
could not associate myself intimately with this company.
I felt that the bluster and bluff of the restaurant turned
my thoughts from the pages I had written and from those
that I hoped to write on the following day. I wondered
how this was, and at last discovered myself to be irre--
parably aesthetic, which explained my aversion from my
Galway cousins and the lords who drank champagne at
Romano’s.