He dined at his club and wondered if it would be bad taste for so new a member to make a complaint to the committee. Afterwards he drifted into a music-hall, where quailing brutes who had been created to scamper on four legs were distorted to maintain a smirking brute who was unworthy to walk on two. The animals' sufferings diverted the audience vastly, and the applause sickened Conrad more than the club dinner. And though his disappointment at Tooting may sound a very trivial matter, it continued to depress him. He was sad, not because one woman was different from what he had hoped to find her, but because the difference in the one woman typified so much that seemed pathetic to him in life. And to sneer at him as a sentimentalist absorbed by opal-tinted sorrows blown of indolence, would not be conclusive. It is, of course, natural that those of us who have to struggle should set up the Man of Leisure as a figure to be pelted with precepts--indeed, we pelt so hard at the silver spoon in his mouth that between the shies we might well reflect that Ethics is often an _alias_ of Envy--but with Conrad the leisure was quite recent and the sentiment had ached for years. In his case wealth had not formed a temperament, wealth had simply freed it. Let us accept him as he was. My business is to present, not to defend. Were tales tellable only when the "hero" fulfilled both definitions of the word, reviewers would have less to do. If I could draw, a frontispiece should enlist your sympathies for him: "Conrad and the Coquette;" for that is Youth--a laughing jilt showing us her heels, and tempting over her dimpled shoulder as she flies. This is where you begin to think me insufferably dull. I see your fair brow clouding, I can see your beautiful lips shaping to say, "Oh, bother!" Be patient with me; we have arrived at a brief interval in which nothing particular happened. It is true that soon afterwards Conrad went to Monte Carlo, but details would not interest you in the least. Be gracious to me; yield to the book another finger-tip--I feel it slipping. Say, "Poor drivel as it is, a man has written it in the hope of pleasing me." For he has indeed. On many a fine morning I have plodded when I would rather have sunned myself where the band played; on many an evening I have wound my feet round the legs of the table and budged not, when the next room and a new novel--paid for and unopened--wooed me as with a siren song. And all to win a smile from You.