The chance had gone, "conversational openings" were valueless to one pitted against Adrian Grant. Henry fumbled nervously among the commonplaces of speech, and his friend, with scarcely another reference to himself, was presently making the young journalist talk of--Henry Charles. "You seem to have been burning the midnight oil too assiduously, I think. A trifle paler than when I saw you last. Still grinding away, I suppose." "Yes; it is grinding. I have moments when I think journalism sheer hack-work. The glamour of the thing is as delusive as the _ignis fatuus_." "And there you have life itself. _Ergo_, to journalise is to live." "I begin to believe you are right, but I could have wished to make the discovery later." "It's never too early to know the truth. But come, you are surely thriving professionally, for I heard your study of the Bronte's which you wrote for the _Lyceum_ highly praised by the editor when I was in London last week." "That is indeed welcome news. You know Swainton, then?" "A little. You see, I have done some work for him myself. The fact is--" "Are you Adrian Grant?" Henry blurted out the question and eyed his friend eagerly, nervously, ashamed of his clumsiness and desperate to have done with it. Without a tremor of his eyelids the other replied: "Since you put it so bluntly--I am. But I have peculiar ideas of authorship, and you will search my rooms in vain for any book or article I have written. My conception of literature is an artistic expression of what life has told me. I say my say and have done with that work. I say it as it pleases my artistic sense, and I pass to some other phase of life that attracts me and asks me to express it. To the profession of letters I have no strong attachment. To live is better than to write. I know some Sardinian peasants who are kings compared with Tennyson--yes, I will say Tennyson." Henry was dumb at the vagaries of the man. "The craft of letters," he went on, "I know only as a branch of life, and far from the noblest." Adrian Grant could make a thousand pounds, perhaps two, out of any novel he now cared to write. The thought flashed through Henry's mind and left confusion in its tract. What were fame, success, fortune, if one who had won them set such small store thereby?