Henry deemed that Sir George's perspective was somewhat awry, but he said nothing. Worse was in store for him. On the evening of that same day he bought the _Whitehall Gazette_ as usual to read in the train, and he encountered the following sentences: 'TWADDLE IN SATIN. 'Mr. Onions Winter's new venture, the Satin Library, is a pretty enough thing in its satinesque way. The _format_ is pleasant, the book-marker voluptuous, the binding Arty-and-Crafty. We cannot, however, congratulate Mr. Winter on the literary quality of the first volume. Mr. Henry S. Knight, the author of _Love in Babylon_ (2s.), is evidently a beginner, but he is a beginner from whom nothing is to be expected. That he has a certain gross facility in the management of sentimental narrative we will not deny. It is possible that he is destined to be the delight of "the great public." It is possible--but improbable. He has no knowledge of life, no feeling for style, no real sense of the dramatic. Throughout, from the first line to the last, his story moves on the plane of tawdriness, theatricality, and ballad pathos. There are some authors of whom it may be said that they will never better themselves. They are born with a certain rhapsodic gift of commonness, a gift which neither improves nor deteriorates. Richly dowered with crass mediocrity, they proceed from the cradle to the grave at one low dead level. We suspect that Mr. Knight is of these. In saying that it is a pity that he ever took up a pen, we have no desire to seem severe. He is doubtless a quite excellent and harmless person. But he has mistaken his vocation, and that is always a pity. We do not care so see the admirable grocery trade robbed by the literary trade of a talent which was clearly intended by Providence to adorn it. As for the Satin Library, we hope superior things from the second volume.' Henry had the fortitude to read this pronouncement aloud to his mother and Aunt Annie at the tea-table. 'The cowards!' exclaimed Mrs. Knight. Aunt Annie flushed. 'Let me look,' she whispered; she could scarcely control her voice. Having looked, she cast the paper with a magnificent gesture to the ground. It lay on the hearth-rug, open at a page to which Henry had not previously turned. From his arm-chair he could read in the large displayed type of one of Mr. Onions Winter's advertisements: 'Onions Winter. The Satin Library. The success of the year. _Love in Babylon._ By Henry S. Knight. Two shillings. Eighteenth thousand.--Onions Winter. The Satin Library. The success of the year. _Love in Babylon._ By Henry S. Knight. Two shillings. Eighteenth thousand.' And so it went on, repeated and repeated, down the whole length of the twenty inches which constitute a column of the _Whitehall Gazette_. CHAPTER XII HIS FAME