inside to smear it as tears smudge the
face of a dirty child. The clerk pored over a ledger, and from the gray
afternoon the cries of the porters in Covent Garden came drearily in. At
last a bell sounded, and the clerk invited him "to step this way,"
lifting the counter and pointing up a narrow staircase beyond a glass
door. Guy went up, and at last entered Mr. Worrall's private office.

The publisher was a short, fat man with a bald and curiously conical
head, reminding Guy very much of a dentist in his manner. The poet sat
down and immediately caught in his first survey Mr. William Worrall's
caricature by Max Beerbohm. As a result of this observation Guy
throughout the interview could only perceive Mr. Worrall as the
caricaturist had perceived him, and like a shape in a dream his head all
the time grew more and more conical, until it seemed as if it would soon
bore a hole in the festooned ceiling.

"Well, Mr. Hazlewood," said the publisher, referring as he spoke to
Guy's card with what Guy thought was a rather unnecessary implication of
oblivion--"well, Mr. Hazlewood, my reader reports very favorably on your
poems, and there seems no reason why I should not publish them."

Guy bowed.

"No reason at all," Mr. Worrall continued. Then making a Gothic arch
with his fingers and looking up at the ceiling, he added:

"Though, of course, there will be a risk. However, my reader's opinion
was certainly favorable."

And so it ought to be, thought Guy, for a guinea.

"And I don't think," Mr. Worrall went on, "that in the circumstances we
need be very much afraid. Have you any ideas about the price at which
your sheaf, your little harvest is to be offered to the public?"

"Oh, I should leave that to you," said Guy, hastily.

"Precisely," said the publisher. "Yes, I think perhaps we might say five
shillings or ... of course it _might_ be done in paper in the Covent
Garden Series of Modern English Poets. Yes, the reader speaks most
highly of your work. You know the Covent Garden Series of Modern Poets?
In paper at half-a-crown net?"

"I should be very proud to appear in such a series," said Guy,
pleasantly. The series, as a matter of fact, was one that could do him
no discredit.

"It's a charming idea, isn't it?" said Mr. Worrall, fondling one of the
set that lay on his desk. "Every five volumes has its own floral emblem.
We've done The Rose, The Lily, The Violet. Let me see, your poems are
mostly about London, aren't