specialty of seeing nothing in
certain celebrities, of seeing overmuch in an occasional nobody, and of
judging from a point of view that, say what I would for it (and I had a
monstrous deal to say) remained perverse and obscure. Mine was in short
the love that killed, for my subtlety, unlike Mrs. Highmore's, produced
no tremor of the public tail. She had not forgotten how, toward the
end, when his case was worst, Limbert would absolutely come to me with
a funny, shy pathos in his eyes and say: "My dear fellow, I think I've
done it this time, if you'll only keep quiet." If my keeping quiet in
those days was to help him to appear to have hit the usual taste, for
the want of which he was starving, so now my breaking out was to help
Mrs. Highmore to appear to have hit the unusual.

The moral of all this was that I had frightened the public too much for
our late friend, but that as she was not starving this was exactly
what her grosser reputation required. And then, she good-naturedly and
delicately intimated, there would always be, if further reasons were
wanting, the price of my clever little article. I think she gave that
hint with a flattering impression--spoiled child of the booksellers as
she is--that the price of my clever little articles is high. Whatever it
is, at any rate, she had evidently reflected that poor Limbert's
anxiety for his own profit used to involve my sacrificing mine. Any
inconvenience that my obliging her might entail would not in fine be
pecuniary. Her appeal, her motive, her fantastic thirst for quality and
her ingenious theory of my influence struck me all as excellent comedy,
and when I consented contingently to oblige her she left me the sheets
of her new novel. I could plead no inconvenience and have been looking
them over; but I am frankly appalled at what she expects of me. What
is she thinking of, poor dear, and what has put it into her head that
"quality" has descended upon her? Why does she suppose that she has been
"artistic"? She hasn't been anything whatever, I surmise, that she has
not inveterately been. What does she imagine she has left out? What
does she conceive she has put in? She has neither left out nor put
in anything. I shall have to write her an embarrassed note. The book
doesn't exist, and there's nothing in life to say about it. How can
there be anything but the same old faithful rush for it?

I

This rush had already begun when, early in the seventies, in the
int