Gusts of fury came at intervals all the morning.  He wrote her appalling letters and destroyed them.  He shook his fist and snapped his fingers at her, and went out for drink (having none in the house), and called a hansom to take him to Mrs. Jerry’s, and tore round the park again and glared at everybody.  He rushed on and on.  “But the one thing you shall never do, Grizel, is to interfere with my work; I swear it, do you hear?  In all else I am yours to mangle at your will, but touch it, and I am a beast at bay.”

And still saying such things, he drew near the publishing offices of Goldie & Goldie, and circled round them, less like a beast at bay than a bird that is taking a long way to its nest.  And about four of the afternoon what does this odd beast or bird or fish do but stalk into Goldie & Goldie’s and order “Unrequited Love” to be withdrawn from circulation.

“Madam, I have carried out your wishes, and the man is hanged.”

Not thus, but in words to that effect, did Tommy announce his deed to Grizel.

“I think you have done the right thing,” she wrote back, “and I admire you for it.”  But he thought she did not admire him sufficiently for it, and he did not answer her letter, so it was the last that passed between them.

Such is the true explanation (now first published) of an affair that at the time created no small stir.  “Why withdraw the book?” Goldie & Goldie asked of Tommy, but he would give no reason.  “Why?” the public asked of Goldie & Goldie, and they had to invent several.  The public invented the others.  The silliest were those you could know only by belonging to a club.

I swear that Tommy had not foreseen the result.  Quite unwittingly the favoured of the gods had found a way again.  The talk about his incomprehensible action was the turning-point in the fortunes of the book.  There were already a few thousand copies in circulation, and now many thousand people wanted them.  Sandys, Sandys, Sandys! where had the ladies heard that name before?  Society woke up, Sandys was again its hero; the traveller had to go lecturing in the provinces.

The ladies!  Yes, and their friends, the men.  There was a Tommy society in Mayfair that winter, nearly all of the members eminent or beautiful, and they held each other’s hands.  Both sexes were eligible, married or single, and the one rule was something about sympathy.  It afterwards became the Souls, but those in the know still call them the Tommies.

They blackballed Mrs. Jerry (she was rather plump), but her married stepdaughter, Lady Pippinworth (who had been a Miss Ridge-Fulton), was one of them.  Indeed, the Ridge-Fultons are among the thinnest families in the country.