I wish you'd come and dine
with _me_ some night, at a restaurant.'

'Oh!' she exclaimed, 'I should love it.'

'And we might go somewhere afterwards.' He was certainly capable of
sublime conceptions.

And she exclaimed again: 'I should love it!' The naive and innocent
candour of her bliss appealed to him with extraordinary force.

In a moment or so he had regained his self-control, and he managed to
tell her in a fairly usual tone that he would write and suggest an
evening.

He parted from her in a whirl of variegated ecstasies. 'Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die,' he remarked to the street. What he meant
was that, after more than a month's excogitation, he had absolutely
failed to get any single shred of a theme for the successor to _Love in
Babylon_--that successor out of which a mere couple of thousand pounds
was to be made; and that he didn't care.

CHAPTER XV

HIS TERRIBLE QUANDARY

There was to be an important tea-meeting at the Munster Park Chapel on
the next Saturday afternoon but one, and tea was to be on the tables at
six o'clock. The gathering had some connection with an attempt on the
part of the Wesleyan Connexion to destroy the vogue of Confucius in
China. Mrs. Knight and Aunt Annie had charge of the department of
sandwiches, and they asked Henry whether he should be present at the
entertainment. They were not surprised, however, when he answered that
the exigencies of literary composition would make his attendance
impossible. They lauded his self-denial, for Henry's literary work was
quite naturally now the most important and the most exacting work in the
world, the crusade against Confucius not excepted. Henry wrote to
Geraldine and invited her to dine with him at the Louvre Restaurant on
that Saturday night, and Geraldine replied that she should be charmed.
Then Henry changed his tailor, and could not help blushing when he gave
his order to the new man, who had a place in Conduit Street and a way of
looking at the clothes Henry wore that reduced those neat garments to
shapeless and shameful rags.

The first fatal steps in a double life having been irrevocably taken,
Henry drew a long breath, and once more seriously addressed himself to
book number two. But ideas obstinately refused to show themselves above
the horizon. And yet nothing had been left undone which ought to have
been done in order to persuade ideas to arrive. The whole domestic
existence of the house in Dawes Roa