Almost before I had dropped the last limp hand, a burly ruffian, with a beard, rumbled in my ear: "I trust you were satisfied with my estimate of your powers in last week's _Concertina_?" Now I don't see the _Concertina_ because it's too expensive, but I murmured: "Immense! immense! Most gratifying. Totally undeserved." And the ruffian said: "In a measure, yes. Not wholly. I flatter myself that----" "Oh, not in the least," said I. "No sugar, thanks." This to the hostess, who was waving Sally Lunns under my nose. A female, who could not have been less than seven feet high, came on, half speed ahead, through the fog of the tea-steam, and docked herself on the sofa just like an Inman liner. "Have you ever considered," said she, "the enormous moral responsibility that rests in the hands of one who has the gift of literary expression? In my own case--but you surely know my collaborator." A much huger woman arrived, cast anchor, and docked herself on the other side of the sofa. She was the collaborator. Together they confided to me that they were desperately in earnest about the amelioration of something or other. Their collective grievance against me was that I was not in earnest. "We have studied your works--all," said the five-thousand-ton four-master, "and we cannot believe that you are in earnest." "Oh, no," I said hastily, "I never was." Then I saw that that was the wrong thing to say, for the eight-thousand-ton palace Cunarder signalled to the sister ship, saying: "You see, my estimate was correct." "Now, my complaint against him is that he is too savagely _farouche_," said a weedy young gentleman with tow hair, who ate Sally Lunns like a workhouse orphan. "_Faroucherie_ in his age is a fatal mistake." I reflected a moment on the possibility of getting that young gentleman out into a large and dusty maidan and gently _chukkering_ him before _chota hazri_. He looked too sleek to me as he then stood. But I said nothing, because a tiny-tiny woman with beady-black eyes shrilled: "I disagree with you entirely. He is too much bound by the tradition of the commonplace. I have seen in his later work signs that he is afraid of his public. You must _never_ be afraid of your public." Then they began to discuss me as though I were dead and buried under the hearth-rug, and they talked of "tones" and "notes" and "lights" and "shades" and tendencies. "And which of us do you think is correct in her estimate of your character?" said the tiny-tiny woman when they had made me out (a) a giddy Lothario; (b) a savage; (c) a pre-Rafaelite angel; (d) co-equal and co-eternal with half a dozen gentlemen whose names I had never heard; (e) flippant; (f) penetrated with pathos; (g) an open atheist; (h) a young man of the Roman Catholic faith with a mission in life. I smiled idiotically, and said I really didn't know. Then a man entered whom I knew, and I fled to him for comfort. "Have I missed the fun?" he asked with a twinkle in his eye.