And the next afternoon he arrived.  I met him at the threshold of the hotel, introduced him to our landlady, Madame Pamparagoux (who stared rather wildly, not being accustomed to see her lodgers so mediaevally attired), and showed him upstairs to the room I had engaged.

There he invited me to be seated while he unpacked his portmanteau and put his things in order.  These, I noticed, were un-Britishly few and simple.  I could discern no vestiges of either sponge or tub.  As he moved backwards and forwards between his chest of drawers and dressing-table, he would cast frequent affectionate glances at his double, now in the glass of the armoire, now in that above the chimney.  He was favouring me meantime with a running monologue of an autobiographical complexion.

’I am a self-educated man.  My father was a wine merchant in Leeds.  At sixteen he put me to serve in the shop of a cousin, a print-seller.  It was there, I think, that my literary instincts awoke.  I contributed occasional art notes to a local paper.  At twenty I came up to London and began my definite career, as a reporter.  I was soon earning thirty shillings a week, which seemed to me magnificent.  But I aspired to higher things.  I felt within me the stirrings of what I could not help believing to be genius—­true genius.  I longed to distinguish myself, to emerge from the crowd, from the background, to make myself remarked, to do something, to be somebody, to see my name a famous one.  I was fortunate enough at this epoch to attract the notice of X——­, the poet.  He believed in me, and encouraged me to believe in myself.  It is one of the regrets of my life that he died before I had achieved my celebrity.  However, I have achieved it.  My name is a household word wherever the English language is read.  I have written the only novels of my time that are sure to live.  They will live not only by virtue of their style and matter, but because of a quality they possess which I must call universal—­a quality which appeals with equal force to readers of every rank, and which will procure for them as wide a popularity five hundred years hence as they enjoy to-day.  I call them novels, but they are really prose-poems.  The novel,’ he continued, rising for an instant to impersonal heights, ’the novel is the literary form or expression of my period, as the drama was that of Shakespeare’s, the epic of Homer’s.  Do you follow me?  Ah, here is a copy of “Crispin Dorr”—­here is “The Card Dealer.”  Take them and read them, and return them when you have finished.  Being author’s copies, they possess an exceptional value.  This is my autograph upon the fly-leaf.  This is a photograph of my wife.  She is a good woman, but has no great literary culture, and we are not so happy together as I could wish.  Men of commanding parts seldom make good husbands, and I committed the imprudence of marrying very young.  My wife, you see, belongs to that class of society from which I have risen.  I am the son of a wine merchant, yet I dine with peers, and have been favoured with smiles from peeresses.  My wife has not kept pace with me.  This is my little girl—­our only child—­my daughter Judith.  Here is the Illustrated Gazette with the portrait of myself.’