felt sure so attractive a lady would have no difficulty in
finding another escort. Unfortunately this speech made so favorable an
impression on her that she immediately took my arm and declared her
willingness to go anywhere with me, on the flattering ground that I was
a perfect gentleman. In vain did I try to persuade her that in coming up
Bond Street and deserting Piccadilly, she was throwing away her last
chance of a hansom: she attached herself so devotedly to me that I could
not without actual violence shake her off. At last I made a stand at the
end of Old Bond Street. I took out my purse; opened it; and held it
upside down. Her countenance fell, poor girl! She turned on her heel
with a melancholy flirt of her skirt, and vanished.

Now on both these occasions I had been in the company of people who
spent at least as much in a week as I did in a year. Why was I, a
penniless and unknown young man, admitted there? Simply because, though
I was an execrable pianist, and never improved until the happy
invention of the pianola made a Paderewski of me, I could play a simple
accompaniment at sight more congenially to a singer than most amateurs.
It is true that the musical side of London society, with its streak of
Bohemianism, and its necessary toleration of foreign ways and
professional manners, is far less typically English than the sporting
side or the political side or the Philistine side; so much so, indeed,
that people may and do pass their lives in it without ever discovering
what English plutocracy in the mass is really like: still, if you wander
in it nocturnally for a fitful year or so as I did, with empty pockets
and an utter impossibility of approaching it by daylight (owing to the
deplorable decay of the morning wardrobe), you have something more
actual to go on than the hallucinations of a peasant lad setting his
foot manfully on the lowest rung of the social ladder. I never climbed
any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation; and I hereby
warn all peasant lads not to be duped by my pretended example into
regarding their present servitude as a practicable first step to a
celebrity so dazzling that its subject cannot even suppress his own bad
novels.

Conceive me then at the writing of The Irrational Knot as a person
neither belonging to the world I describe nor wholly ignorant of it, and
on certain points quite incapable of conceiving it intuitively. A whole
world of art which did not exist fo