I did take up the book again, and read as demanded.

“It is very ingenious,” said I, really appreciating the difficulty of being lively in this connection:  it seemed even more wonderful than that a Vibrio should have an eye.

“You are probably surprised to see no notices from the London press,” said Vorticella.  “I have one—­a very remarkable one.  But I reserve it until the others have spoken, and then I shall introduce it to wind up.  I shall have them reprinted, of course, and inserted in future copies.  This from the ‘Candelabrum’ is only eight lines in length, but full of venom.  It calls my style dull and pompous.  I think that will tell its own tale, placed after the other critiques.”

“People’s impressions are so different,” said I.  “Some persons find ’Don Quixote’ dull.”

“Yes,” said Vorticella, in emphatic chest tones, “dulness is a matter of opinion; but pompous!  That I never was and never could be.  Perhaps he means that my matter is too important for his taste; and I have no objection to that.  I did not intend to be trivial.  I should just like to read you that passage about the drag-nets, because I could make it clearer to you.”

A second (less ornamental) copy was at her elbow and was already opened, when to my great relief another guest was announced, and I was able to take my leave without seeming to run away from ‘The Channel Islands,’ though not without being compelled to carry with me the loan of “the marked copy,” which I was to find advantageous in a re-perusal of the appendix, and was only requested to return before my departure from Pumpiter.  Looking into the volume now with some curiosity, I found it a very ordinary combination of the commonplace and ambitious, one of those books which one might imagine to have been written under the old Grub Street coercion of hunger and thirst, if they were not known beforehand to be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen whose circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity that happened to have been directed towards authorship.  Its importance was that of a polypus, tumour, fungus, or other erratic outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring in its effect on the individual organism which nourishes it.  Poor Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on a visit than the majority of her neighbours, but for this disease of magnified self-importance belonging to small authorship.  I understand that the chronic complaint of ‘The Channel Islands’ never left her.  As the years went on and the publication tended to vanish in the distance for her neighbours’ memory, she was still bent on dragging it to the foreground, and her chief interest in new acquaintances was the possibility of lending them her book, entering into all details concerning it, and requesting them to read her album of “critical opinions.”  This really made her more tiresome than Gregarina, whose distinction was that she had had cholera, and who did not feel herself in her true position with strangers until they knew it.