than, overcome by shyness, as always in these stores of dusty literature, I asked for the Drama in Muslin, pronouncing the title so timidly that the bookseller guessed me at once to be the author, and began telling of the books that were doing well in first editions.  ‘If I had any I wanted to get rid of?’ he mentioned several he would be glad to buy.  Whereupon in turn I grew confidential and confided to him my present dilemma, failing, however, to dissuade him from his opinion that A Drama in Muslin ought to be included.  ’Any corrections you make in the new edition will keep up the price of the old,’ he added as he wrapped up the brown paper parcel.  ’You will like the book better than you think for.’  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ I cried after me, and hopped into a taxi, unsuspicious that I carried a delightful evening under my arm.  A comedy novel, written with sprightliness and wit, I said, as I turned to the twentieth page, and it needs hardly any editing.  A mere re-tying of a few bows that the effluxion of time has untied, or were never tied by the author, who, if I remember right, used to be less careful of his literary appearance than his prefacer, neglecting to examine his sentences, and to scan them as often as one might expect from an admirer, not to say disciple, of Walter Pater.

An engaging young man rose out of the pages of his book, one that Walter Pater would admire (did admire), one that life, I added, seems to have affected through his senses violently, and who was (may we say therefore) a little over anxious to possess himself of a vocabulary which would suffer him to tell all he saw, heard, smelt and touched.

Upon this sudden sympathy the book, of which I had read but twenty pages, dropped on my knees, and I sat engulfed in a reverie of the charming article I should have written about this book if it had come to me for review.  ‘But it couldn’t have come to me,’ I reflected, ’for myself and the young man that wrote it were not contemporaries.’  It would be true, however, to say that our lives overlapped; but when did the author of the Drama in Muslin disappear from literature?  His next book was Confession of a Young Man.  It was followed by Spring Days; he must have died in the last pages of that story, for we find no trace of him in Esther Waters!  And my thoughts, dropping away from the books he had written, began to take pleasure in the ridiculous appearance that the author of A Drama in Muslin presented in the mirrors of Dublin Castle as he tripped down the staircases in parly morning.  And a smile played round my lips as I recalled his lank yellow hair (often standing on end), his sloping shoulders and his female hands—­a strange appearance which a certain vivacity of mind sometimes rendered engaging.