What the little creature thought of the long creature I never discovered, but with every new hour I became freshly sensible that they held me in still decreasing estimation.  This, I remember, was wildly irritating to me.  I knew myself infinitely superior to them; I knew the long creature’s novel was worthless; I knew that I had fifty books in me immeasurably better than it, and savagely and sullenly I desired to trample upon them, to rub their noses in their feebleness; but oh, it was I who was feeble! and full of visions of a wider world I raged up and down the cold walls of impassable mental limitations.  Above me there was a barred window, and, but for my manacles, I would have sprung at it and torn it with my teeth.  Then passion was so strong in me that I could scarce refrain from jumping off the counter, stamping my feet, and slapping my friends in the face, so tepid were their enthusiasms, so thin did their understanding appear to me.  The Straddlers seemed inclined for a moment to take the long creature very seriously, and in the office which I had marked down for my own I saw him installed as a genius.

Fortunately for my life and my sanity, my interests were, about this time, attracted into other ways—­ways that led into London life, and were suitable for me to tread.  In a restaurant where low-necked dresses and evening clothes crushed with loud exclamations, where there was ever an odour of cigarette and brandy and soda, I was introduced to a Jew of whom I had heard much, a man who had newspapers and race horses.  The bright witty glances of his brown eyes at once prejudiced me in his favour, and it was not long before I knew that I had found another friend.  His house was what was wanted, for it was so trenchant in character, so different to all I knew of, that I was forced to accept it, without likening it to any French memory and thereby weakening the impression.  It was a house of champagne, late hours, and evening clothes, of literature and art, of passionate discussions.  So this house was not so alien to me as all else I had seen in London; and perhaps the cosmopolitanism of this charming Jew, his Hellenism, in fact, was a sort of plank whereon I might pass and enter again into English life.  I found in Curzon Street another “Nouvelle Athenes,” a Bohemianism of titles that went back to the Conquest, a Bohemianism of the ten sovereigns always jingling in the trousers pocket, of scrupulous cleanliness, of hansom cabs, of ladies’ pet names; of triumphant champagne, of debts, gaslight, supper-parties, morning light, coaching; a fabulous Bohemianism; a Bohemianism of eternal hardupishness and eternal squandering of money,—–­money that rose at no discoverable well-head and flowed into a sea of boudoirs and restaurants, a sort of whirlpool of sovereigns in which we were caught, and sent eddying through music halls, bright shoulders, tresses of hair, and slang; and I joined in the adorable game of Bohemianism that was played round and about Piccadilly Circus, with Curzon Street for a magnificent rallying point.