ABSTRACT
There is no need to say that, as soon as the news spread among my English associates that I was seeking to meet Thomas Hardy, the difficulties began. I was lamenting my failure and almost despairing when, one day in June, an employee of the Hyde Park Hotel interrupted our family lunch with these words: ‘There’s someone to see you, sir. He has no visiting-card. He says he’s a Mr Hardy; Thomas, I believe. He seemed to me so tired that I asked him to sit down in the hall. He is very warm. He must have come a long way’.
