Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-like, through the world of literature, and he was more amused than interested by the stir he was making.  One thing was puzzling him, a little thing that would have puzzled the world had it known.  But the world would have puzzled over his bepuzzlement rather than over the little thing that to him loomed gigantic.  Judge Blount invited him to dinner.  That was the little thing, or the beginning of the little thing, that was soon to become the big thing.  He had insulted Judge Blount, treated him abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him on the street, invited him to dinner.  Martin bethought himself of the numerous occasions on which he had met Judge Blount at the Morses’ and when Judge Blount had not invited him to dinner.  Why had he not invited him to dinner then? he asked himself.  He had not changed.  He was the same Martin Eden.  What made the difference?  The fact that the stuff he had written had appeared inside the covers of books?  But it was work performed.  It was not something he had done since.  It was achievement accomplished at the very time Judge Blount was sharing this general view and sneering at his Spencer and his intellect.  Therefore it was not for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that Judge Blount invited him to dinner.

Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling the while at his complacence.  And at the dinner, where, with their womankind, were half a dozen of those that sat in high places, and where Martin found himself quite the lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded by Judge Hanwell, urged privately that Martin should permit his name to be put up for the Styx—­the ultra-select club to which belonged, not the mere men of wealth, but the men of attainment.  And Martin declined, and was more puzzled than ever.

He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts.  He was overwhelmed by requests from editors.  It had been discovered that he was a stylist, with meat under his style.  The Northern Review, after publishing “The Cradle of Beauty,” had written him for half a dozen similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, had not Burton’s Magazine, in a speculative mood, offered him five hundred dollars each for five essays.  He wrote back that he would supply the demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay.  He remembered that all these manuscripts had been refused by the very magazines that were now clamoring for them.  And their refusals had been cold-blooded, automatic, stereotyped.  They had made him sweat, and now he intended to make them sweat.  Burton’s Magazine paid his price for five essays, and the remaining four, at the same rate, were snapped up by Mackintosh’s Monthly, The Northern Review being too poor to stand the pace.  Thus went out to the world “The High Priests of Mystery,” “The Wonder-Dreamers,” “The Yardstick of the Ego,” “Philosophy of Illusion,” “God and Clod,” “Art and Biology,” “Critics and Test-tubes,” “Star-dust,” and “The Dignity of Usury,”—­to raise storms and rumblings and mutterings that were many a day in dying down.