It was quite improbable that anyone had, you know, and that’s where it stimulated the imagination and took people out of their narrow, humdrum selves. No one has ever called me narrow or humdrum, but even I felt worked up now and then at the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it. It simply wasn’t nice. But the editors were unanimous in leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done before and done worse, and that the market for that sort of work was extremely limited.

It was just on the top of that discouragement that the duchess wanted me to write something in her album⁠—something Persian, you know, and just a little bit decadent⁠—and I thought a quatrain on an unwholesome egg would meet the requirements of the case. So I started in with⁠—