d nothing, but cruelly did not cease to look at me.

"Are you sure," I temporized, "quite sure you copied the thing out
correctly?"

"Quite."

"Well, then, it's this wretched Nupton who must have made--must be
going to make--some idiotic mistake. Look here Soames, you know me
better than to suppose that I-- After all, the name Max Beerbohm is
not at all an uncommon one, and there must be several Enoch Soameses
running around, or, rather, Enoch Soames is a name that might occur to
any one writing a story. And I don't write stories; I'm an essayist,
an observer, a recorder. I admit that it's an extraordinary
coincidence. But you must see--"

"I see the whole thing," said Soames, quietly. And he added, with a
touch of his old manner, but with more dignity than I had ever known in
him, "Parlons d'autre chose."

I accepted that suggestion very promptly. I returned straight to the
more immediate future. I spent most of the long evening in renewed
appeals to Soames to come away and seek refuge somewhere. I remember
saying at last that if indeed I was destined to write about him, the
supposed "stauri" had better have at least a happy ending. Soames
repeated those last three words in a tone of intense scorn.

"In life and in art," he said, "all that matters is an INEVITABLE
ending."

"But," I urged more hopefully than I felt, "an ending that can be
avoided ISN'T inevitable."

"You aren't an artist," he rasped. "And you're so hopelessly not an
artist that, so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem
true, you're going to make even a true thing seem as if you'd made it
up. You're a miserable bungler. And it's like my luck."

I protested that the miserable bungler was not I, was not going to be
I, but T. K. Nupton; and we had a rather heated argument, in the thick
of which it suddenly seemed to me that Soames saw he was in the wrong:
he had quite physically cowered. But I wondered why--and now I guessed
with a cold throb just why--he stared so past me. The bringer of that
"inevitable ending" filled the doorway.

I managed to turn in my chair and to say, not without a semblance of
lightness, "Aha, come in!" Dread was indeed rather blunted in me by
his looking so absurdly like a villain in a melodrama. The sheen of
his tilted hat and of his shirt-front, the repeated twists he was
giving to his mustache, and most of all the magnificence of his sneer,
gave token that he was there only to be