"Ay, ay indeed!" said Morgeson soothingly--"Or perhaps you _thought_ you felt, which is another very curious phase of the literary temperament. You see, to convince people at all, you must first yourself be convinced. The result of this is generally a singular magnetic attraction between author and public. However I am a bad hand at argument,--and it is possible that in hasty reading I may have gathered a wrong impression of your intentions. Anyhow the book shall be a success if we can make it so. All I venture to ask of you is that you should personally endeavour to manage McWhing!" I promised to do my best, and on this understanding we parted. I realised that Morgeson was capable of greater discernment than I had imagined, and his observations had given me material for thought which was not altogether agreeable. For if my book, as he said, lacked tenacity, why then it would not take root in the public mind,--it would be merely the ephemeral success of a season,--one of those brief 'booms' in literary wares for which I had such unmitigated contempt,--and Fame would be as far off as ever, except that spurious imitation of it which the fact of my millions had secured. I was in no good humour that afternoon, and Lucio saw it. He soon elicited the sum and substance of my interview with Morgeson, and laughed long and somewhat uproariously over the proposed 'managing' of the redoubtable McWhing. He glanced at the five names of the other leading critics and shrugged his shoulders. "Morgeson is quite right,"--he said--"McWhing is intimate with the rest of these fellows--they meet at the same clubs, dine at the same cheap restaurants and make love to the same painted ballet-girls. All in a comfortable little fraternal union together, and one obliges the other on their several journals when occasion offers. Oh yes! I should make up to McWhing if I were you." "But how?" I demanded, for though I knew McWhing's name well enough having seen it signed _ad nauseam_ to literary articles in almost every paper extant, I had never met the man; "I cannot ask any favour of a press critic." "Of course not!" and Lucio laughed heartily again--"If you were to do such an idiotic thing what a slating you'd get for your pains! There's no sport a critic loves so much as the flaying of an author who has made the mistake of lowering himself to the level of asking favours of his intellectual inferiors! No, no, my dear fellow!--we shall manage McWhing quite differently,--_I_ know him, though you do not." "Come, that's good news!" I exclaimed--"Upon my word Lucio, you seem to know everybody."