He began to blame his publishers--they had not advertised him enough; he even, secretly, cherished that most hopeless of all convictions--that his book was above the heads of the public. He noticed, also, that wherever he might be, this name of Rondel appeared before him, Mr. Rondel with his foolish face and thin mother in black, was obviously the young man of the moment--in the literary advertisements of any of the weekly papers you might see The Violet novel in its tenth edition and “The Stone House” by Peter Westcott, second edition selling rapidly. He was again bewildered, as he had been after the publication of “Reuben Hallard” by the extraordinary variance of opinions amongst reviewers and amongst his own personal friends. One man told him that he had no style, that he must learn the meaning and feeling of words, another told him that his characters were weak but that his style was “splendid--a real knowledge of the value and meaning of words.” Some one told him that he knew nothing at all about women and some one else that his women were by far the best part of his work. The variety was endless--amongst those who had appeared to him giants there was the same uncertainty. He seemed too to detect with the older men a desire to praise those parts of his work that resembled their own productions and to blame anything that gave promise of originality. For himself it seemed to him that Mrs. Launce's opinion was nearest the truth. There were parts of it that were good, chapters that were better than anything in “Reuben Hallard” and then again there were many chapters where he saw it all in a fog, groped dimly for his characters, pushed, as it seemed to him, away from their lives and interests, by the actual lives and interests of the real people about him. This led him to think of Clare and here he was suddenly arrested by a perception, now only dimly grasped, of a change in her attitude to his writings. He dated it, thinking of it now for the first time, from the birth of young Stephen--or was it not earlier than that, on that evening when they had met Cards at that supper party, on that evening of their first quarrel?