One day, a man meets a writer at his hotel and the two talk around the city of London all day, walking by the river and stopping in pubs along the way. The man shares about his life briefly, but the writer begins to tell him about the first novel he wrote. The writer had married a strong and educated woman and they had two kids together. However, the writer always put his wife second to his creative work, and after coming home from his job he would lock himself up in a room and write for hours on end. During these times he would ignore his wife completely. He was writing his first novel about his wife, but one day while he was writing his wife walked in and he turned around and struck her. After that, she divorced him and took the kids to her father’s house. He then finished his first novel and sold it, allowing him to send his ex-wife money for their children. He then began to work on his second novel, but this one was even harder to write than the first one. He would write and then rewrite and felt as if the story was living inside of him somehow. He felt bad for the way he treated his wife and kids before and so used them as inspiration, but could not come up with anything. One night, he decided to walk around and brought some paper and a pencil. He sat in a park and watched the people around him and suddenly began to write on the paper. He felt greatly inspired and wrote until it turned dark and then continued writing by the moonlight. He finally finished the novel before morning, writing it all in one sitting and returned home. He wrote about two lovers and thought of his wife and children, knowing this piece would bring true justice to them. However, before he checked the papers the next day he knew they would all be blank. The writer walks with the man and, laughing, tells him that his lost novel will never be matched in beauty by any other he writes.