that. He was awfully clever--I stuck to
that, but he wasn't a bit the biggest of the lot. I didn't allude to the
lot, however; I flattered myself that I emerged on this occasion from
the infancy of art. "It's all right," they declared vividly at the
office; and when the number appeared I felt there was a basis on which
I could meet the great man; It gave me confidence for a day or two, and
then that confidence dropped. I had fancied him reading it with relish,
but if Corvick was not satisfied how could Vereker himself be? I
reflected indeed that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even
than the appetite of the scribe. Corvick at all events wrote me from
Paris a little ill-humouredly. Mrs. Erme was pulling round, and I hadn't
at all said what Vereker gave him the sense of.

II

The effect of my visit to Bridges was to turn me out for more
profundity. Hugh Vereker, as I saw him there, was of a contact so void
of angles that I blushed for the poverty of imagination involved in my
small precautions. If he was in spirits it was not because he had read
my review; in fact on the Sunday morning I felt sure he hadn't read
it, though _The Middle_ had been out three days and bloomed, I assured
myself, in the stiff garden of periodicals which gave one of the ormolu
tables the air of a stand at a station. The impression he made on me
personally was such that I wished him to read it, and I corrected to
this end with a surreptitious hand what might be wanting in the careless
conspicuity of the sheet. I am afraid I even watched the result of my
manouvre, but up to luncheon I watched in vain.

When afterwards, in the course of our gregarious walk, I found myself
for half an hour, not perhaps without another manoeuvre, at the great
man's side, the result of his affability was a still livelier desire
that he should not remain in ignorance of the peculiar justice I had
done him. It was not that he seemed to thirst for justice; on the
contrary I had not yet caught in his talk the faintest grunt of a
grudge--a note for which my young experience had already given me an
ear. Of late he had had more recognition, and it was pleasant, as we
used to say in _The Middle_, to see that it drew him out. He wasn't of
course popular, but I judged one of the sources of his good humour to be
precisely that his success was independent of that. He had none the less
become in a manner the fashion; the critics at least had put on a spurt
and