When at last I had modelled it into some sort of
coherency, I stepped back from it in my mind, as it were, and
contemplated it as a whole. No sooner had I done so than it began to
seem vaguely familiar. "Where have I seen this story before?" I asked
myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes
that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's _Hedda Gabler_. Thus, when we
think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in
fact, ransacking the store-house of memory. The plot which chooses us
is much more to be depended upon--the idea which comes when we least
expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter, clamours at the gates
of birth, and will not let us rest till it be clothed in dramatic flesh
and blood.[5] It may very well happen, of course, that it has to
wait--that it has to be pigeon-holed for a time, until its due turn
comes.[6] Occasionally, perhaps, it may slip out of its pigeon-hole for
an airing, only to be put back again in a slightly more developed form.
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