Onions Winter's mercantile sagacity, in the immense preliminary
noise and rattle of _A Question of Cubits_: to wit, the genuine and
ever-increasing vogue of _Love in Babylon_, and the beautiful hopes of
future joy which it aroused in the myriad breast of Henry's public.
_Love in Babylon_ had falsified the expert prediction of Mark Snyder,
and had reached seventy-five thousand in Great Britain alone. What
figure it reached in America no man could tell. The average citizen and
his wife and daughter were truly enchanted by _Love in Babylon_, and
since the state of being enchanted is one of almost ecstatic felicity,
they were extremely anxious that Henry in a second work should repeat
the operation upon them at the earliest possible instant.

The effect of the whole business upon Henry was what might have been
expected. He was a modest young man, but there are two kinds of modesty,
which may be called the internal and the external, and Henry excelled
more in the former than in the latter. While never free from a secret
and profound amazement that people could really care for his stuff (an
infallible symptom of authentic modesty), Henry gradually lost the
pristine virginity of his early diffidence. His demeanour grew confident
and bold. His glance said: 'I know exactly who I am, and let no one
think otherwise.' His self-esteem as a celebrity, stimulated and
fattened by a tremendous daily diet of press-cuttings, and letters from
feminine admirers all over the vastest of empires, was certainly in no
immediate danger of inanition. Nor did the fact that he was still
outside the rings known as literary circles injure that self-esteem in
the slightest degree; by a curious trick of nature it performed the same
function as the press-cuttings and the correspondence. Mark Snyder said:
'Keep yourself to yourself. Don't be interviewed. Don't do anything
except write. If publishers or editors approach you, refer them to me.'
This suited Henry. He liked to think that he was in the hands of Mark
Snyder, as an athlete in the hands of his trainer. He liked to think
that he was alone with his leviathan public; and he could find a sort of
mild, proud pleasure in meeting every advance with a frigid, courteous
refusal. It tickled his fancy that he, who had shaken a couple of
continents or so with one little book; and had written another and a
better one with the ease and assurance of a novelist born, should be
willing to remain a shorthand clerk