earning three guineas a week. (He
preferred now to regard himself as a common shorthand clerk, not as
private secretary to a knight: the piquancy of the situation was thereby
intensified.) And as the day of publication of _A Question of Cubits_
came nearer and nearer, he more and more resembled a little Jack Horner
sitting in his private corner, and pulling out the plums of fame, and
soliloquizing, 'What a curious, interesting, strange, uncanny, original
boy am I!'

Then one morning he received a telegram from Mark Snyder requesting his
immediate presence at Kenilworth Mansions.

CHAPTER XIX

HE JUSTIFIES HIS FATHER

He went at once to Kenilworth Mansions, but he went against his will.
And the reason of his disinclination was that he scarcely desired to
encounter Geraldine. It was an ordeal for him to encounter Geraldine.
The events which had led to this surprising condition of affairs were as
follows:

Henry was one of those men--and there exist, perhaps, more of them than
may be imagined--who are capable of plunging off the roof of a house,
and then reconsidering the enterprise and turning back. With Henry it
was never too late for discretion. He would stop and think at the most
extraordinary moments. Thirty-six hours after the roseate evening at the
Louvre and the Alhambra, just when he ought to have been laying a
scheme for meeting Geraldine at once by sheer accident, Henry was coldly
remarking to himself: 'Let me see exactly where I am. Let me survey the
position.' He liked Geraldine, but now it was with a sober liking, a
liking which is not too excited to listen to Reason. And Reason said,
after the position had been duly surveyed: 'I have nothing against this
charming lady, and much in her favour. Nevertheless, there need be no
hurry.' Geraldine wrote to thank Henry for the most enjoyable evening
she had ever spent in her life, and Henry found the letter too effusive.
When they next saw each other, Henry meant to keep strictly private the
advice which he had accepted from Reason; but Geraldine knew all about
it within the first ten seconds, and Henry knew that she knew.
Politeness reigned, and the situation was felt to be difficult.
Geraldine intended to be sisterly, but succeeded only in being
resentful, and thus precipitated too soon the second stage of the
entanglement, the stage in which a man, after seeing everything in a
woman, sees nothing in her; this second stage is usually of the
briefes