tment. But there was no need for vindictiveness. You say he
contracted to pay the price he is paying; yes; but I maintain that he
was induced to do so by fraud. Well-informed in all things, the Devil
must have known that my friend would gain nothing by his visit to
futurity. The whole thing was a very shabby trick. The more I think of
it, the more detestable the Devil seems to me.

Of him I have caught sight several times, here and there, since that day
at the Vingtieme. Only once, however, have I seen him at close quarters.
This was in Paris. I was walking, one afternoon, along the Rue d'Antin,
when I saw him advancing from the opposite direction--over-dressed as
ever, and swinging an ebony cane, and altogether behaving as though
the whole pavement belonged to him. At thought of Enoch Soames and the
myriads of other sufferers eternally in this brute's dominion, a great
cold wrath filled me, and I drew myself up to my full height. But--well,
one is so used to nodding and smiling in the street to anybody whom one
knows that the action becomes almost independent of oneself: to prevent
it requires a very sharp effort and great presence of mind. I was
miserably aware, as I passed the Devil, that I nodded and smiled to him.
And my shame was the deeper and hotter because he, if you please, stared
straight at me with the utmost haughtiness.

To be cut--deliberately cut--by HIM! I was, I still am, furious at
having had that happen to me.

HILARY MALTBY AND STEPHEN BRAXTON

People still go on comparing Thackeray and Dickens, quite cheerfully.
But the fashion of comparing Maltby and Braxton went out so long ago as
1795. No, I am wrong. But anything that happened in the bland old days
before the war does seem to be a hundred more years ago than actually
it is. The year I mean is the one in whose spring-time we all went
bicycling (O thrill!) in Battersea Park, and ladies wore sleeves that
billowed enormously out from their shoulders, and Lord Rosebery was
Prime Minister.

In that Park, in that spring-time, in that sea of sleeves, there was
almost as much talk about the respective merits of Braxton and Maltby as
there was about those of Rudge and Humber. For the benefit of my younger
readers, and perhaps, so feeble is human memory, for the benefit of
their elders too, let me state that Rudge and Humber were rival makers
of bicycles, that Hilary Maltby was the author of 'Ariel in Mayfair,'
and Stephen Braxton of 'A Fau