Marguerite Olmé had come to play in England for three weeks. The French critics had set down her genius as the greatest of the age. In England, few people understanding her, this verdict had been enthusiastically repeated; and after a triumphant procession through the United States, where she was understood still less, it was written down that she was even greater than that. And indeed she was little less. Meanwhile, Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre increased in violence and in volume, magnified by the reflected light; and his conceit grew ecstatic. He made his enemies. They called him Quogge Myre, for short, or The Brixton Celt. There was some spite in it. This at first fretted him somewhat. He had always been distressed that his name was only of one syllable--Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Milton, Chaucer, Balzac were of two. Still, there was Poe! He tried his own name on his tongue. He wondered if it could ever sound like the name of a man of genius. Then there came to him a sudden glow--it was more original. He felt that the time was come to gather in disciples; he chose a foreign restaurant, in the French quarter where, he darkly hinted in the press, and to all and sundry, that the wits might be seen of an evening, glittering resplendent. It was at this time that he gave forth the now famous essay in which he showed once for all how the home life checked the range of genius; in which he proved how the wifely _milieu_ stunted the view and narrowed the eagle flight of the original intellect; that same essay in which he showed that a woman should be well content to be simply beautiful, relying on man’s chivalry for her sufficient empire; in which he also proved beyond shadow of doubt that it was due to the meeting of the wits in the tavern and the resulting whetting of the national genius that the French achievement so far transcended the English--indeed, he pointed the moral in a florid picture of Shakespeare glittering at the Sign of the Mermaid--he even invented some lines for Shakespeare. The tavern club was like to be born again. Netherby Gomme, seeing the inquisitive mind of the lad Noll beginning to run upon the literary warfare of the day, set Noll’s heart jigging one evening by calling for him, together with the airy Fluffy Reubens, and taking him out into the London night to spend an hour or two at the great man’s tavern. CHAPTER XIX _Wherein a Strutting Cock comes near to Losing a Feather upon his Own Dunghill_ At a table, with his disciples, sat Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre--a slack-headed, loose-lipped, colourless-haired, untidy-minded fellow enough to outward seeming. As Noll listened to his affected voice and caught the tenor of his mind he understood why the man was known amongst the robuster wits as The Brixton Celt.