Charteris grinned. "The author of _Jurgen_." "I begin already," I commented, "to dislike that phrase--" "Nevertheless, you need never look to find yourself regarded as anything save the author of _Jurgen_ and, just incidentally, of some other books. There, after all, my friend, the Tumble-bug has scored: and nobody, for the rest of your lifetime, will you ever hear speak of those other books except, more or less politely, to find fault with their likeness or their unlikeness to _Jurgen_. Either quality, as you perhaps have learned already, is equally to be deplored and shrugged over." "As the subscriber to a clipping bureau," I admitted, "I have noticed the fact rather unavoidably. Any likeness to _Jurgen_ is the tiresome reworking of an exhausted vein: but any difference from _Jurgen_ proves my exhausted abilities." Again beneath his moustache his teeth showed. "So you remain, you see, the author of _Jurgen_." "Scott," I replied, "wrote _The Antiquary_; and Thackeray wrote _Henry Esmond_; and Dickens wrote _Our Mutual Friend_: yet people even to-day continue to think of them as the authors, severally, of _Ivanhoe_ and _Vanity Fair_ and _Pickwick Papers_. So I suppose that nothing can be done about it." Charteris regarded me for a lengthened while. "I see: you have become stoically reconciled to having posterity go on thinking of you, for century after century, as merely the author of _Jurgen_." It may be that I flushed. "But, Charteris, I never said--" And now his shoulders went up. "My dear man! as if you had to!" § 4 "Yet, in this epilogue at least," John Charteris went on, "you may, as it happens by rare good luck, hope to avoid the ephemeral--" "Not utterly," I dissented. "In literary fields there are always so many May-flies about--But then, Charteris, I had thought to add footnotes which would explain all such allusions--" "As may be incomprehensible to your readers of a few hundred years hence? I see. Such carefulness must be granted to display a kindly heart, in an illuminating blaze of self-complacency. But I was in train to suggest, my friend, that you might avoid the ephemeral by rather different methods." "As how?" I asked. "By listening," replied Charteris, "to me, while I discourse of eternal verities. This happens to be one of my loquacious afternoons--" And here I raised my hand, in utterly unheeded protest. "--For you inform me that you need for this debatable Biography," John Charteris continued, "an epilogue,--which of course ought to be spoken by the same person who afforded the prologue. Well, I shall overlook your crass misrepresentation of me in that prologue, which you so ill-advisedly called _Beyond Life_. You will remember how many 'spiritualists' turned to it with fervor, and away from it with disgust? I, none the less, forgive: and off-hand, I would say--" "No, Charteris! No, for I must myself contrive this epilogue--"