re are in London at this moment," he continued, "about one thousand
celebrated authors. There are, I imagine, about fifty distinct circles
where they meet. Fifty distinct hells where they're bound to meet each
other. Hells where they're driven round and round, meeting each other.
Steaming hells where they sit stewing in each other's sweat----"

"_Don't_, George!" cried Nina.

"Loathsome hells, where they swarm and squirm and wriggle in and out of
each other. Sanguinary, murderous hells, where they're all tearing at
each other's throats. How can you hope, how can you possibly hope to do
anything original, if you're constantly breathing that atmosphere?
Horrid used-up air that authors--beasts!--have breathed over and over
and over again."

"As if," said Nina, "_we_ weren't authors."

"My dear Nina, nobody would think it of us. Nobody would have thought it
of Jinny if she hadn't gone and got celebrated."

"You'll be celebrated yourself some day."

"I shall be dead," said he. "I shan't know anything about it."

At this point Prothero, with an exquisite vagueness, stated that he
wanted to get work on a paper. He was not, he intimated, looking to his
poems to keep him. On the contrary, he would have to keep them.

Tanqueray wondered if he realized how disastrous, how ruinous they were.
He had no doubt about Nina's poet. But there were poets and poets. There
were dubious, delicate splendours, for ever trembling on the verge of
immortality. And there were the infrequent, enormous stars that wheel on
immeasurable orbits, so distant that they seem of all transitory things
most transitory. Prothero was one of these. There was not much chance
for him in his generation. His poems were too portentously inspired.
They were the poems of a saint, a seer, an exile from life and time. He
stood alone on the ultimate, untrodden shores, watching strange tides
and the courses of unknown worlds. On any reasonable calculation he
could not hope to make himself heard for half a century, if then. There
was something about him alien and terrible, inaccessibly divine. The
form of his poems was uncouth, almost ugly. Their harmonies, stupendous
and unforeseen, struck the ear with the shock of discord.

It was, of course, absurd that he should want work on a paper; still
more absurd that he should think, or that Nina should think, that
Tanqueray could get it for him.

He didn't, it appeared, expect anybody to get it for him. He just wrote
th