paper!" she sighed all resignedly at the door.

CHAPTER VIII.
I BLUSH to confess it, but I invited Mr. Paraday that very day to

transcribe into the album one of his most characteristic passages.
I told him how I had got rid of the strange girl who had brought it

- her ominous name was Miss Hurter and she lived at an hotel; quite
agreeing with him moreover as to the wisdom of getting rid with

equal promptitude of the book itself. This was why I carried it to
Albemarle Street no later than on the morrow. I failed to find her

at home, but she wrote to me and I went again; she wanted so much
to hear more about Neil Paraday. I returned repeatedly" target="_blank" title="ad.反复地；再三地">repeatedly, I may

briefly declare, to supply her with this information. She had been
immensely taken, the more she thought of it, with that idea of mine

about the act of homage: it had ended by filling her with a
generous rapture. She positively desired to do something sublime

for him, though indeed I could see that, as this particular flight
was difficult, she appreciated the fact that my visits kept her up.

I had it on my conscience to keep her up: I neglected nothing that
would contribute to it, and her conception of our cherished

author's independence became at last as fine as his very own.
"Read him, read him - THAT will be an education in decency," I

constantly repeated; while, seeking him in his works even as God in
nature, she represented herself as convinced that, according to my

assurance, this was the system that had, as she expressed it,
weaned her. We read him together when I could find time, and the

generous creature's sacrifice was fed by our communion. There were
twenty selfish women about whom I told her and who stirred her to a

beautiful rage. Immediately after my first visit her sister, Mrs.
Milsom, came over from Paris, and the two ladies began to present,

as they called it, their letters. I thanked our stars that none
had been presented to Mr. Paraday. They received invitations and

dined out, and some of these occasions enabled Fanny Hurter to
perform, for consistency's sake, touching feats of submission.

Nothing indeed would now have induced her even to look at the
object of her admiration. Once, hearing his name announced at a

party, she instantly left the room by another door and then
straightway quitted the house. At another time when I was at the

opera with them - Mrs. Milsom had invited me to their box - I
attempted to point Mr. Paraday out to her in the stalls. On this

she asked her sister to change places with her and, while that lady
devoured the great man through a powerful glass, presented, all the

rest of the evening, her inspired back to the house. To torment
her tenderly I pressed the glass upon her, telling her how

wonderfully near it brought our friend's handsome head. By way of
answer she simply looked at me in charged silence, letting me see

that tears had gathered in her eyes. These tears, I may remark,
produced an effect on me of which the end is not yet. There was a

moment when I felt it my duty to mention them to Neil Paraday, but
I was deterred by the reflexion that there were questions more

relevant to his happiness.
These question indeed, by the end of the season, were reduced to a

single one - the question of reconstituting so far as might be
possible the conditions under which he had produced his best work.

Such conditions could never all come back, for there was a new one
that took up too much place; but some perhaps were not beyond

recall. I wanted above all things to see him sit down to the
subject he had, on my making his acquaintance, read me that

admirablesketch of. Something told me there was no security but
in his doing so before the new factor, as we used to say at Mr.

Pinhorn's, should render the problem incalculable. It only half-
reassured me that the sketch itself was so copious and so eloquent

that even at the worst there would be the making of a small but
complete book, a tiny volume which, for the faithful, might well

become an object of adoration. There would even not be wanting
critics to declare, I foresaw, that the plan was a thing to be more

thankful for than the structure to have been reared on it. My
impatience for the structure, none the less, grew and grew with the

interruptions. He had on coming up to town begun to sit for his
portrait to a young painter, Mr. Rumble, whose little game, as we

also used to say at Mr. Pinhorn's, was to be the first to perch on
the shoulders of renown. Mr. Rumble's studio was a circus in which

the man of the hour, and still more the woman, leaped through the
hoops of his showy frames almost as electrically as they burst into

telegrams and "specials." He pranced into the exhibitions on their
back; he was the reporter on canvas, the Vandyke up to date, and

there was one roaring year in which Mrs. Bounder and Miss Braby,
Guy Walsingham and Dora Forbes proclaimed in chorus from the same

pictured walls that no one had yet got ahead of him.
Paraday had been promptly caught and saddled, accepting with

characteristic good-humour his confidential hint that to figure in
his show was not so much a consequence as a cause of immortality.

From Mrs. Wimbush to the last "representative" who called to
ascertain his twelve favourite dishes, it was the same ingenuous

assumption that he would rejoice in the repercussion. There were
moments when I fancied I might have had more patience with them if

they hadn't been so fatally benevolent. I hated at all events Mr.
Rumble's picture, and had my bottled resentment ready when, later

on, I found my distracted friend had been stuffed by Mrs. Wimbush
into the mouth of another cannon. A young artist in whom she was

intensely interested, and who had no connexion with Mr. Rumble, was
to show how far he could make him go. Poor Paraday, in return, was

naturally to write something somewhere about the young artist. She
played her victims against each other with admirableingenuity, and

her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest and the
biggest wheels went round to the same treadle. I had a scene with

her in which I tried to express that the function of such a man was
to exercise his genius - not to serve as a hoarding for pictorial

posters. The people I was perhaps angriest with were the editors
of magazines who had introduced what they called new features, so

aware were they that the newest feature of all would be to make him
grind their axes by contributing his views on vital topics and

taking part in the periodical prattle about the future of fiction.
I made sure that before I should have done with him there would

scarcely be a current form of words left me to be sick of; but
meanwhile I could make surer still of my animosity to bustling

ladies for whom he drew the water that irrigated their social
flower-beds.

I had a battle with Mrs. Wimbush over the artist she protected, and
another over the question of a certain week, at the end of July,

that Mr. Paraday appeared to have contracted to spend with her in
the country. I protested against this visit; I intimated that he

was too unwell for hospitality without a nuance, for caresses
without imagination; I begged he might rather take the time in some

restorative way. A sultry air of promises, of ponderous parties,
hung over his August, and he would greatly profit by the interval

of rest. He hadn't told me he was ill again that he had had a
warning; but I hadn't needed this, for I found his reticence his

worst symptom. The only thing he said to me was that he believed a
comfortable attack of something or other would set him up: it

would put out of the question everything but the exemptions he
prized. I'm afraid I shall have presented him as a martyr in a

very small cause if I fail to explain that he surrendered himself
much more liberally than I surrendered him. He filled his lungs,

for the most part; with the comedy of his queer fate: the tragedy
was in the spectacles through which I chose to look. He was

conscious of inconvenience, and above all of a great renouncement;
but how could he have heard a mere dirge in the bells of his

accession? The sagacity and the jealousy were mine, and his the
impressions and the harvest. Of course, as regards Mrs. Wimbush, I

was worsted in my encounters, for wasn't the state of his health
the very reason for his coming to her at Prestidge? Wasn't it

precisely at Prestidge that he was to be coddled, and wasn't the
dear Princess coming to help her to coddle him? The dear Princess,

now on a visit to England, was of a famous foreign house, and, in
her gilded cage, with her retinue of keepers and feeders, was the

most expensivespecimen in the good lady's collection. I don't
think her august presence had had to do with Paraday's consenting