"Of course! what else did you expect? Only the man should have worded his telegram differently, for I do not suppose he would accept the book with pleasure if he had to lay out his own cash upon it. 'Accept money for publishing book with pleasure' should have been the true message of the wire. Well, what are you going to do?" "I shall see about this at once"--I answered, feeling a thrill of satisfaction that at last the time of vengeance on certain of my enemies was approaching--"The book must be hurried through the press as quickly as possible,--and I shall take a particular pleasure in personally attending to all the details concerning it. For the rest of my plans,--" "Leave them to me!" said Rimânez laying his finely shaped white hand with a masterful pressure on my shoulder; "Leave them to me!--and be sure that before very long I shall have set you aloft like the bear who has successfully reached the bun on the top of a greased pole,--a spectacle for the envy of men, and the wonder of angels!" VII The next three or four weeks flew by in a whirl of excitement, and by the time they were ended I found it hard to recognize myself in the indolent, listless, extravagant man of fashion I had so suddenly become. Sometimes at stray and solitary moments the past turned back upon me like a revolving picture in a glass with a flash of unwelcome recollection, and I saw myself worn and hungry, and shabbily clothed, bending over my writing in my dreary lodging, wretched, yet amid all my wretchedness receiving curious comfort from my own thoughts which created beauty out of penury, and love out of loneliness. This creative faculty was now dormant in me,--I did very little, and thought less. But I felt certain that this intellectual apathy was but a passing phase,--a mental holiday and desirable cessation from brain-work to which I was deservedly entitled after all my sufferings at the hands of poverty and disappointment. My book was nearly through the press,--and perhaps the chiefest pleasure of any I now enjoyed was the correction of the proofs as they passed under my supervision. Yet even this, the satisfaction of authorship, had its drawback,--and my particular grievance was somewhat singular. I read my own work with gratification of course, for I was not behind my contemporaries in thinking well of myself in all I did,--but my complacent literary egoism was mixed with a good deal of disagreeable astonishment and incredulity, because my work, written with enthusiasm and feeling, propounded sentiments and inculcated theories which I personally did not believe in. Now, how had this happened, I asked myself? Why had I thus invited the public to accept me at a false valuation? I paused to consider,--and I found the suggestion puzzling. How came I to write the book at all, seeing that it was utterly unlike me as I now knew myself? My pen, consciously or unconsciously, had written down things which my reasoning faculties entirely