they harped
on this string, until one day I flung myself out of their office and
rattled down the stairs muttering, 'What a smell of shop!' But in the
Strand near the Cecil Inn, the thought glided into my mind that the
pages that seemed so disgraceful in memory might not seem so in print,
'and the only way to find out if this be so,' the temptation continued,
'will be to ask the next policeman the way to Charing Cross Road.'
Another saw me over a dangerous crossing (London is the best policed
city in Europe), a third recommended a shop 'over yonder: you've just
passed it by, sir.' 'Thank you, thank you,' I cried back, and no sooner
was I on the other side than, overcome by shyness, as always in these
stores of dusty literature, I asked for the _Drama in Muslin_,
pronouncing the title so timidly that the bookseller guessed me at once
to be the author, and began telling of the books that were doing well in
first editions. 'If I had any I wanted to get rid of?' he mentioned
several he would be glad to buy. Whereupon in turn I grew confidential
and confided to him my present dilemma, failing, however, to dissuade
him from his opinion that _A Drama in Muslin_ ought to be included. 'Any
corrections you make in the new edition will keep up the price of the
old,' he added as he wrapped up the brown paper parcel. 'You will like
the book better than you think for.' 'Thank you, thank you,' I cried
after me, and hopped into a taxi, unsuspicious that I carried a
delightful evening under my arm. A comedy novel, written with
sprightliness and wit, I said, as I turned to the twentieth page, and it
needs hardly any editing. A mere re-tying of a few bows that the
effluxion of time has untied, or were never tied by the author, who, if
I remember right, used to be less careful of his literary appearance
than his prefacer, neglecting to examine his sentences, and to scan them
as often as one might expect from an admirer, not to say disciple, of
Walter Pater.

An engaging young man rose out of the pages of his book, one that Walter
Pater would admire (did admire), one that life, I added, seems to have
affected through his senses violently, and who was (may we say
therefore) a little over anxious to possess himself of a vocabulary
which would suffer him to tell all he saw, heard, smelt and touched.

Upon this sudden sympathy the book, of which I had read but twenty
pages, dropped on my knees, and I sat engulfed in a reverie of the
charming