“That’s true. In any case, it’s celebrity against the respite, obscurity against Miss Goodwin. While the system is in operation you will be free but inglorious. You choose freedom? All right, then. Pass the matches.” CHAPTER 12 THE FIRST GHOST _(James Orlebar Cloyster’s narrative continued)_ Such was the suggestion Julian made; and I praised its ingenuity, little thinking how bitterly I should come to curse it in the future. I was immediately all anxiety to set the scheme working. “Will you be one of my three middlemen, Julian?” I asked. He shook his head. “Thanks!” he said; “it’s very good of you, but I daren’t encroach further on my hours of leisure. Skeffington’s Sloe Gin has already become an incubus.” I could not move him from this decision. It is not everybody who, in a moment of emergency, can put his hand on three men of his acquaintance capable of carrying through a more or less delicate business for him. Certainly I found a difficulty in making my selection. I ran over the list of my friends in my mind. Then I was compelled to take pencil and paper, and settle down seriously to what I now saw would be a task of some difficulty. After half an hour I read through my list, and could not help smiling. I had indeed a mixed lot of acquaintances. First came Julian and Malim, the two pillars of my world. I scratched them out. Julian had been asked and had refused; and, as for Malim, I shrank from exposing my absurd compositions to his critical eye. A man who could deal so trenchantly over a pipe and a whisky-and-soda with Established Reputations would hardly take kindly to seeing my work in print under his name. I wished it had been possible to secure him, but I did not disguise it from myself that it was not. The rest of the list was made up of members of the Barrel Club (impossible because of their inherent tendency to break out into personal paragraphs); writers like Fermin and Gresham, above me on the literary ladder, and consequently unapproachable in a matter of this kind; certain college friends, who had vanished into space, as men do on coming down from the ’Varsity, leaving no address; John Hatton, Sidney Price, and Tom Blake. There were only three men in that list to whom I felt I could take my suggestion. Hatton was one, Price was another, and Blake was the third. Hatton should have my fiction, Price my Society stuff, Blake my serious verse.