would prove this portrait incomplete.  He noticed with a vague astonishment that the flimsy scraps of paper were trembling in his fingers like banknotes in the hands of a gambler, and he laid them down on the breakfast-table in disgust of the feminine weakness.  This unmistakable proof that he had written a book, a real book, made him at once happy and uneasy.  These fragments of smudged prints were his passport into a new and delightful world; they were, it might be said, the name of his destination in the great republic of letters, and yet he hesitated to look at them.  He heard of the curious blindness of authors that made it impossible for them to detect the most egregious failings in their own work, and it occurred to him that this might be his malady.  Why:  had he published his book?  He felt at that moment that he had taken too great a risk.  It would have been so easy to have had it privately printed and contented himself with distributing it among his friends.  But these people were paid for writing about books, these critics who had sent Keats to his gallipots and Swinburne to his fig-tree, might well have failed to have recognised that his book was sacred, because it was his own.

When he had at last achieved a fatalistic tranquillity, he once more picked up the notices, and this time he read them through carefully.  The Rutlandshire Gazette quoted Shakespeare, the Thrums Times compared him with Christopher North, the Stamford-bridge Herald thought that his style resembled that of Macaulay, but they were unanimous in praising his book without reservation.  It seemed to the author that he was listening to the authentic voice of fame.  He rested his chin on his hand and dreamed long dreams.

He could afford in this hour of his triumph to forget the annoyances he had undergone since his book was first accepted.  The publisher, with a large first edition to dispose of, had been rather more than firm with the author.  He had changed the title of the book from “Earth’s Returns”—­a title that had seemed to the author dignified and pleasantly literary—­to “The Improbable Marquis,” which seemed to him to mean nothing at all.  Moreover, instead of giving the book a quiet and scholarly exterior, he had bound it in boards of an injudicious heliotrope, inset with a nasty little coloured picture of a young woman with a St. Bernard dog.  This binding revolted the author, who objected, with some reason, that in all his book there was no mention of a dog of that description, or, indeed, of any dog at all.  The book was wrapped in an outer cover that bore a recommendation of its contents, starting with a hideous split infinitive and describing it as an exquisite social comedy written from within.  On the whole it seemed to the author that his book was flying false and undesirable colours, and since art lies outside the domesticities, he was hardly relieved when his wife told him that she thought the binding was very pretty.  The author had shuddered