aid, with unwonted emphasis, 'Anything second-rate.'

I had read little of Shelley, but 'Of course,' I murmured, 'he's very
uneven.'

'I should have thought evenness was just what was wrong with him. A
deadly evenness. That's why I read him here. The noise of this place
breaks the rhythm. He's tolerable here.' Soames took up the book and
glanced through the pages. He laughed. Soames' laugh was a short, single
and mirthless sound from the throat, unaccompanied by any movement of
the face or brightening of the eyes. 'What a period!' he uttered, laying
the book down. And 'What a country!' he added.

I asked rather nervously if he didn't think Keats had more or less held
his own against the drawbacks of time and place. He admitted that there
were 'passages in Keats,' but did not specify them. Of 'the older men,'
as he called them, he seemed to like only Milton. 'Milton,' he said,
'wasn't sentimental.' Also, 'Milton had a dark insight.' And again, 'I
can always read Milton in the reading-room.'

'The reading-room?'

'Of the British Museum. I go there every day.'

'You do? I've only been there once. I'm afraid I found it rather a
depressing place. It--it seemed to sap one's vitality.'

'It does. That's why I go there. The lower one's vitality, the more
sensitive one is to great art. I live near the Museum. I have rooms in
Dyott Street.'

'And you go round to the reading-room to read Milton?'

'Usually Milton.' He looked at me. 'It was Milton,' he certificatively
added, 'who converted me to Diabolism.'

'Diabolism? Oh yes? Really?' said I, with that vague discomfort and that
intense desire to be polite which one feels when a man speaks of his own
religion. 'You--worship the Devil?'

Soames shook his head. 'It's not exactly worship,' he qualified, sipping
his absinthe. 'It's more a matter of trusting and encouraging.'

'Ah, yes.... But I had rather gathered from the preface to "Negations"
that you were a--a Catholic.'

'Je l'etais a cette epoque. Perhaps I still am. Yes, I'm a Catholic
Diabolist.'

This profession he made in an almost cursory tone. I could see that what
was upmost in his mind was the fact that I had read 'Negations.' His
pale eyes had for the first time gleamed. I felt as one who is about to
be examined, viva voce, on the very subject in which he is shakiest. I
hastily asked him how soon his poems were to be published. 'Next week,'
he told me.

'And are they to be published without a title?'