I laughed. “You won’t get credit for literary skill out of the sort of books I want you to put your name to. They’re potboilers. You needn’t worry about Fame. You’ll be a martyr, not a hero.” “You may be right. You wrote the book. But, in any case, I should be more of a charlatan than I care about.” “You won’t do it?” I said. “I’m sorry. It would have been a great convenience to me.” “On the other hand,” continued Hatton, ignoring my remark, “there are arguments in favour of such a scheme as you suggest.” “Stout fellow!” I said encouragingly. “To examine the matter in its—er—financial—to suppose for a moment—briefly, what do I get out of it?” “Ten per cent.” He looked thoughtful. “The end shall justify the means,” he said. “The money you pay me can do something to help the awful, the continual poverty of Lambeth. Yes, James Cloyster, I will sign whatever you send me.” “Good for you,” I said. “And I shall come better out of the transaction than you.” No one would credit the way that man—a clergyman, too—haggled over terms. He ended by squeezing fifteen per cent out of me. CHAPTER 13 THE SECOND GHOST _(James Orlebar Cloyster’s narrative continued)_ The reasons which had led me to select Sidney Price as the sponsor of my Society dialogues will be immediately apparent to those who have read them. They were just the sort of things you would expect an insurance clerk to write. The humour was thin, the satire as cheap as the papers in which they appeared, and the vulgarity in exactly the right quantity for a public that ate it by the pound and asked for more. Every thing pointed to Sidney Price as the man. It was my intention to allow each of my three ghosts to imagine that he was alone in the business; so I did not get Price’s address from Hatton, who might have wondered why I wanted it, and had suspicions. I applied to the doorkeeper at Carnation Hall; and on the following evening I rang the front-door bell of The Hollyhocks, Belmont Park Road, Brixton. Whilst I was waiting on the step, I was able to get a view through the slats of the Venetian blind of the front ground-floor sitting-room. I could scarcely restrain a cry of pure aesthetic delight at what I saw within. Price was sitting on a horse-hair sofa with an arm round the waist of a rather good-looking girl. Her eyes were fixed on his. It was Edwin and Angelina in real life. Up till then I had suffered much discomfort from the illustrated record of their adventures in the comic papers. “Is there really,” I had often asked myself, “a body of men so gifted that they can construct the impossible details of the lives of nonexistent types purely from imagination? If such creative genius as theirs is unrecognized and ignored, what hope of recognition is there for one’s own work?” The thought had frequently saddened me; but here at last they were—Edwin and Angelina in the flesh!