er in
the very act of praising him. To make the thing right he talked to me
exactly as an equal and on the ground of what we both loved best. The
hour, the place, the unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn't
have done anything more exquisitely successful.

III.

"I don't quite know how to explain it to you," he said, "but it was the
very fact that your notice of my book had a spice of intelligence, it
was just your exceptional sharpness that produced the feeling--a very
old story with me, I beg you to believe--under the momentary influence
of which I used in speaking to that good lady the words you so naturally
resent. I don't read the things in the newspapers unless they're thrust
upon me as that one was--it's always one's best friend that does it!
But I used to read them sometimes--ten years ago. I daresay they were
in general rather stupider then; at any rate it always seemed to me that
they missed my little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when
they patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins. Whenever
since I've happened to have a glimpse of them they were still blazing
away--still missing it, I mean, deliciously. _You_ miss it, my dear
fellow, with inimitable assurance; the fact of your being awfully clever
and your article's being awfully nice doesn't make a hair's breadth
of difference. It's quite with you rising young men," Vereker laughed,
"that I feel most what a failure I am!"

I listened with intense interest; it grew in-tenser as he talked. "_You_
a failure--heavens! What then may your 'little point' happen to be?"

"Have I got to _tell_ you, after all these years and labours?" There was
something in the friendly reproach of this--jocosely exaggerated--that
made me, as an ardent young seeker for truth, blush to the roots of my
hair. I'm as much in the dark as ever, though I've grown used in a sense
to my obtuseness; at that moment, however, Vereker's happy accent made
me appear to myself, and probably to him, a rare donkey. I was on the
point of exclaiming, "Ah, yes, don't tell me: for my honour, for that of
the craft, don't!" when he went on in a manner that showed he had read
my thought and had his own idea of the probability of our some day
redeeming ourselves. "By my little point I mean--what shall I call
it?--the particular thing I've written my books most _for_. Isn't there
for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most
makes him a