“Then please get a messenger to take this letter, at once.”

“In a cab, sir?”

“Yes, in a cab.  I don’t know whether there will be an answer.  He will see.  Then let him call at the cloak-room at South Kensington Station and get my luggage.  Here’s the ticket.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I can rely on you to see that he goes at once?”

“You can, sir,” said the valet, in such accents as carry absolute conviction.

“Thank you.  That will do, I think.”

The man retired, and the door was closed by an expert in closing doors, one who had devoted his life to the perfection of detail in valetry.

Fame

He lay on the sofa at the foot of the bed, with all illumination extinguished save one crimson-shaded light immediately above him.  The evening papers—­white, green, rose, cream, and yellow—­shared his couch.  He was about to glance at the obituaries; to glance at them in a careless, condescending way, just to see the sort of thing that journalists had written of him.  He knew the value of obituaries; he had often smiled at them.  He knew also the exceeding fatuity of art criticism, which did not cause him even to smile, being simply a bore.  He recollected, further, that he was not the first man to read his own obituary; the adventure had happened to others; and he could recall how, on his having heard that owing to an error it had happened to the great so-and-so, he, in his quality of philosopher, had instantly decided what frame of mind the great so-and-so ought to have assumed for the perusal of his biography.  He carefully and deliberately adopted that frame of mind now.  He thought of Marcus Aurelius on the futility of fame; he remembered his life-long attitude of gentle, tired scorn for the press; he reflected with wise modesty that in art nothing counts but the work itself, and that no quantity of inept chatter could possibly affect, for good or evil, his value, such as it might be, to the world.

Then he began to open the papers.

The first glimpse of their contents made him jump.  In fact, the physical result of it was quite extraordinary.  His temperature increased.  His heart became audible.  His pulse quickened.  And there was a tingling as far off as his toes.  He had felt, in a dim, unacknowledged way, that he must be a pretty great painter.  Of course his prices were notorious.  And he had guessed, though vaguely, that he was the object of widespread curiosity.  But he had never compared himself with Titanic figures on the planet.  It had always seemed to him that his renown was different from other renowns, less—­somehow unreal and make-believe.  He had never imaginatively grasped, despite prices and public inquisitiveness, that he too was one of the Titanic figures.  He grasped it now.  The aspect of the papers brought it home to him with tremendous force.