Lucian was disappointed and gratified; amused and annoyed. It was disappointing to find that the incense to which he had become accustomed was not offered up to him in the usual lavish fashion; but it was pleasing to hear the nice things said of what he had done and of what the critics believed him capable of doing. He was amused at the disappointment of the gentlemen who preferred Lucian the earlier to Lucian the later--and, after all, it was annoying to find one’s great effort somewhat looked askance at. ‘I’ve given them too much,’ he said, turning to considerations of breakfast with a certain amount of pity for himself. ‘I ought to have remembered that the stomach of this generation is a weak one--Tennyson was wise in giving his public the _Idylls of the King_ in fragments--if he’d given his most fervent admirers the whole lot all at once they’d have had a surfeit. I should have followed his example, but I wanted to present the thing as a whole. And it _is_ good, however they may damn it with faint praise.’ ‘Does this mean that the book won’t sell?’ asked Haidee, who had gathered up the papers, and was glancing through the columns at the head of which Lucian’s name stood out in bold letters. ‘Sell? Why, I don’t think reviews make much difference to the sales of a book,’ answered Lucian. ‘I really don’t know--I suppose the people who bought all my other volumes will buy this.’ But as he ate his chop and drank his coffee he began to wonder what would happen if the new volume did not sell. He knew exactly how many copies of his other volumes had been sold up to the end of the previous half-year: it was no business instinct that made him carry the figures in his mind, but rather the instinct of the general who counts his prisoners, his captured eagles, and his dead enemies after a victory, and of the sportsman who knows that the magnitude of the winnings of a great racehorse is a tribute to the quality of its blood and bone and muscle. He recalled the figures of the last statement of account rendered to him by his publisher, and their comfortable rotundity cheered him. Whatever the critics might say, he had a public, and a public of considerable size. And after all, this was the first time the critics had not burned incense at his shrine--he forgave them with generous readiness, and ere he rose from the breakfast table was as full as ever of confident optimism. He felt as regards those particular reviewers as a man might feel who bids all and sundry to a great feast, and finds that the first-comers are taken aback by the grand proportions of the banquet--he pitied them for their lack of appetite, but he had no doubt of the verdict of the vast majority of later comers.