He began to fish absently for a dead fly with his finger. "It just shows you the vanity of authors," he said, looking up at me. "It wasn't no trick of his. He'd meant perfectly fair. He'd really thought I was really going home to read that blessed book of his through. But it shows you, don't it?"--his eye went down to the tankard again,--"It shows you, too, how we poor human beings fail to understand one another." But there was no misunderstanding the eloquent thirst of his eye. He accepted with ill-feigned surprise. He said, in the usual subtle formula, that he didn't mind if he did. THE SAD STORY OF A DRAMATIC CRITIC I was--you shall hear immediately why I am not now--Egbert Craddock Cummins. The name remains. I am still (Heaven help me!) Dramatic Critic to the _Fiery Cross_. What I shall be in a little while I do not know. I write in great trouble and confusion of mind. I will do what I can to make myself clear in the face of terrible difficulties. You must bear with me a little. When a man is rapidly losing his own identity, he naturally finds a difficulty in expressing himself. I will make it perfectly plain in a minute, when once I get my grip upon the story. Let me see--where _am_ I? I wish I knew. Ah, I have it! Dead self! Egbert Craddock Cummins! In the past I should have disliked writing anything quite so full of "I" as this story must be. It is full of "I's" before and behind, like the beast in Revelation--the one with a head like a calf, I am afraid. But my tastes have changed since I became a Dramatic Critic and studied the masters--G.R.S., G.B.S., G.A.S., and the others. Everything has changed since then. At least the story is about myself--so that there is some excuse for me. And it is really not egotism, because, as I say, since those days my identity has undergone an entire alteration. That past!... I was--in those days--rather a nice fellow, rather shy--taste for grey in my clothes, weedy little moustache, face "interesting," slight stutter which I had caught in early life from a schoolfellow. Engaged to a very nice girl, named Delia. Fairly new, she was--cigarettes--liked me because I was human and original. Considered I was like Lamb--on the strength of the stutter, I believe. Father, an eminent authority on postage stamps. She read a great deal in the British Museum. (A perfect pairing ground for literary people, that British Museum--you should read George Egerton and Justin Huntly M'Carthy and Gissing and the rest of them.) We loved in our intellectual way, and shared the brightest hopes. (All gone now.) And her father liked me because I seemed honestly eager to hear about stamps. She had no mother. Indeed, I had the happiest prospects a young man could have. I never went to theatres in those days. My Aunt Charlotte before she died had told me not to.