waving his cigarette.

Rothenstein objected that absence of title might be bad for the sale
of a book. 'If,' he urged, 'I went into a bookseller's and said simply
"Have you got?" or "Have you a copy of?" how would they know what I
wanted?'

'Oh, of course I should have my name on the cover,' Soames answered
earnestly. 'And I rather want,' he added, looking hard at Rothenstein,
'to have a drawing of myself as frontispiece.' Rothenstein admitted
that this was a capital idea, and mentioned that he was going into the
country and would be there for some time. He then looked at his watch,
exclaimed at the hour, paid the waiter, and went away with me to dinner.
Soames remained at his post of fidelity to the glaucous witch.

'Why were you so determined not to draw him?' I asked.

'Draw him? Him? How can one draw a man who doesn't exist?'

'He is dim,' I admitted. But my mot juste fell flat. Rothenstein
repeated that Soames was non-existent.

Still, Soames had written a book. I asked if Rothenstein had read
'Negations.' He said he had looked into it, 'but,' he added crisply,
'I don't profess to know anything about writing.' A reservation very
characteristic of the period! Painters would not then allow that any one
outside their own order had a right to any opinion about painting. This
law (graven on the tablets brought down by Whistler from the summit of
Fujiyama) imposed certain limitations. If other arts than painting were
not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practised them,
the law tottered--the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good.
Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning
you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a better judge
of literature than Rothenstein; but it wouldn't have done to tell him
so in those days; and I knew that I must form an unaided judgment on
'Negations.'

Not to buy a book of which I had met the author face to face would
have been for me in those days an impossible act of self-denial. When
I returned to Oxford for the Christmas Term I had duly secured
'Negations.' I used to keep it lying carelessly on the table in my room,
and whenever a friend took it up and asked what it was about I would
say 'Oh, it's rather a remarkable book. It's by a man whom I know.' Just
'what it was about' I never was able to say. Head or tail was just what
I hadn't made of that slim green volume. I found in the preface no clue
to the exiguous labyrin