with attempted cheerfulness. He said
he never went there now. 'No absinthe there,' he muttered. It was the
sort of thing that in the old days he would have said for effect; but it
carried conviction now. Absinthe, erst but a point in the 'personality'
he had striven so hard to build up, was solace and necessity now. He no
longer called it 'la sorciere glauque.' He had shed away all his French
phrases. He had become a plain, unvarnished, Preston man.

Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even
though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I avoided
Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had published,
by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a pleasant
little success of esteem. I was a--slight but definite--'personality.'
Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in The Saturday Review,
Alfred Harmsworth was letting me do likewise in The Daily Mail. I was
just what Soames wasn't. And he shamed my gloss. Had I known that he
really and firmly believed in the greatness of what he as an artist
had achieved, I might not have shunned him. No man who hasn't lost his
vanity can be held to have altogether failed. Soames' dignity was an
illusion of mine. One day in the first week of June, 1897, that illusion
went. But on the evening of that day Soames went too.

I had been out most of the morning, and, as it was too late to reach
home in time for luncheon, I sought 'the Vingtieme.' This little
place--Restaurant du Vingtieme Siecle, to give it its full title--had
been discovered in '96 by the poets and prosaists, but had now been more
or less abandoned in favour of some later find. I don't think it lived
long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in
Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that
house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with
her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and
hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The Vingtieme was
but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street at one end and
into a kitchen at the other. The proprietor and cook was a Frenchman,
known to us as Monsieur Vingtieme; the waiters were his two daughters,
Rose and Berthe; and the food, according to faith, was good. The tables
were so narrow, and were set so close together, that there was space for
twelve of them, six jutting from either wall.