There is something pathetic in this eager search for a book to illustrate at a moment when Beardsley has achieved the færy of one design in particular of the several good designs in the _Pierrot of the Minute_, that “_cul-de-lampe_” in which Pierrot, his jesting done, is leaving the garden, the beauty and hauntingness of the thing wondrously enhanced by the dotted tracery of its enclosing framework--a tragic comment on the wonderful _Headpiece_ when Pierrot holds up the hour-glass with its sands near run out. It is a sigh, close on a sob, blown across a sheet of white paper as by magic rather than the work of human hands. It was in this November that there appeared the futile essay on Beardsley by Margaret Armour which left Beardsley cold except for the appearance of his own _Outline Profile Portrait of himself in line_, “an atrocious portrait of me,” which he seems to have detested for some reason difficult to plumb--it is neither good nor bad, and certainly not worse than one or two things that he passed with approval at this time for the _Book of Fifty Drawings_. It is a pathetically tragic thought that the November of the exquisite _Pierrot of the Minute_ was for Beardsley a month of terrible suffering. He had not left his room for six weeks. Yet, for all his sad state, he fervently clings to the belief that change will rid him of that gaunt spectre that flits about the shadows of his room. “I still continue in a very doubtful state, a sort of helpless, hopeless condition, as nobody really seems to know what is the matter with me. I fancy it is only change I want, & that my troubles are principally nervous.... It is nearly six weeks now since I have left my room. I am busy with drawing & should like to be with writing, but cannot manage both in my weak state.” He complains bitterly of the wretched weather. “I have fallen into a depressed state,” and “Boscombe is ignominiously dull.” It was now that Beardsley himself saw, for the first time, the published prints for the cover and the title-page of _Evelina_--of his “own early designing.” The _Savoy_ for December gives us some clue to the busy work upon drawings in November of which he speaks, but some of the drawings that now appeared were probably done somewhat before this time.