nd the inclusion of the
hundred or more pages of new matter written for the American edition led me
into a third revision of the story. But no more than in the second has the
skeleton, or the attitude of the skeleton been altered in this third
version, only flesh and muscle have been added, and, I think, a little
life. _Vain Fortune_, even in its present form, is probably not my best
book, but it certainly is far from being my worst. But my opinion regarding
my own work is of no value; I do not write this Prefatory Note to express
it, but to ask my critics and my readers to forget the original _Vain
Fortune_, and to read this new book as if it were issued under another
title.

G.M.

I

The lamp had not been wiped, and the room smelt slightly of paraffin. The
old window-curtains, whose harsh green age had not softened, were drawn.
The mahogany sideboard, the threadbare carpet, the small horsehair sofa,
the gilt mirror, standing on a white marble chimney-piece, said clearly,
'Furnished apartments in a house built about a hundred years ago.' There
were piles of newspapers, there were books on the mahogany sideboard and on
the horsehair sofa, and on the table there were various manuscripts,--_The
Gipsy_, Act I.; _The Gipsy_, Act III., Scenes iii. and iv.

A sheet of foolscap paper, and upon it a long slender hand. The hand traced
a few lines of fine, beautiful caligraphy, then it paused, correcting with
extreme care what was already written, and in a hesitating, minute way,
telling of a brain that delighted in the correction rather than in the
creation of form.

The shirt-cuff was frayed and dirty. The coat was thin and shiny. A
half-length figure of a man drew out of the massed shadows between the
window and sideboard. The red beard caught the light, and the wavy brown
hair brightened. Then a look of weariness, of distress, passed over the
face, and the man laid down the pen, and, taking some tobacco from a paper,
rolled a cigarette. Rising, and leaning forward, he lighted it over the
lamp. He was a man of about thirty-six feet, broad-shouldered, well-built,
healthy, almost handsome.

The time he spent in dreaming his play amounted to six times, if not ten
times, as much as he devoted to trying to write it; and he now lit
cigarette after cigarette, abandoning himself to every meditation,--the
unpleasantness of life in lodgings, the charm of foreign travel, the beauty
of the south, what he would do if his pla