Finishing this with a bold dash, he put it in an envelope and addressed it to the office of the journal on which he was employed and known, simply as Alfred Brown. Mr Alfred Brown was on the staff of that journal as a critic; and as Brown he praised himself in the person of Aubrey Grovelyn. The great editor of the journal, being half his time away shooting, golfing, or otherwise amusing himself, didn’t know anything about either Grovelyn or Brown, and didn’t care. And the public, seeing Grovelyn described as a Shakespeare, promptly concluded he must be a humbug, and avoided his books as cautiously as though they had been labelled ‘Poison.’ Hence Brown-Aubrey-Grovelyn’s chronic yellow melancholy—his poems wouldn’t ‘sell.’ He crammed his eulogistic review of his own latest production into his pocket, and went over to the doctor, from whose cigar he kindled his own. ‘Have you seen the papers this evening?’ he asked languidly, dropping into a chair next to the club’s ‘Galen,’ and running one skinny hand through his door-mat curls. ‘I have just glanced through them,’ replied the doctor, indifferently. ‘I never do read anything but the telegrams.’ The poet raised his eyebrows superciliously. ‘So? You don’t allow your mind to be influenced by the ebb and flow of the human tide of events,’ he murmured vaguely. ‘But I should have thought you would have observed the ridiculous announcement concerning the new book by that horrid woman, Delicia Vaughan. It is monstrous! A sale of one hundred thousand copies; it’s an infernal lie!’ ‘It’s a damnation truth!’ said a pleasant voice, suddenly, in the mildest of accents; and a good-looking man with a pretty trick of twirling his moustache, and an uncomfortable way of flashing his eyes, squared himself upright in front of both physician and poet. ‘I’m the publisher, and I know!’ There was a silence, during which Mr Grovelyn smiled angrily and re-arranged his door-mat. ‘When,’ proceeded the publisher, sweetly, ‘will you enable me to do the same thing for you, Mr Grovelyn?’ The doctor, whose name was Dalley, laughed; the poet frowned. ‘Sir,’ said Grovelyn, ‘my work does not appeal to this age, which is merely prolific in the generating of idiots; I trust myself and my productions to the justice of posterity.’ ‘Then you must appeal to posterity’s publishers as well, mustn’t he, Mr Granton?’ suggested Doctor Dalley, with a humorous twinkle in his eyes, addressing the publisher, who, being the head of a wealthy and influential firm, was regarded by all the penniless scribblers in the ‘Bohemian’ with feelings divided betwixt awe and fear. ‘He must, indeed!’ said Granton. ‘Personally, I prefer to speculate in Delicia Vaughan, now Lady Carlyon. Her new book is a masterpiece; I am proud to be the publisher of it. And upon my word, I think the public show capital taste in “rushing” for it.’ ‘Pooh, she can’t write!’ sneered Grovelyn. ‘Did you ever know a woman who could?’