the Trianon. The Trianon was at once
recognised as the Louvre, and the tall commissionaire at the Louvre
thereby trebled his former renown. 'Not dead in the snow yet?' the wits
of the West End would greet him on descending from their hansoms, and he
would reply, infinitely gratified: 'No, sir. No snow, sir.' A
music-hall star of no mean eminence sang a song with the refrain:

'You may think what you like,
You may say what you like,
It was simply a question of cubits.'

The lyric related the history of a new suit of clothes that was worn by
everyone except the person who had ordered it.

Those benefactors of humanity, the leading advertisers, used 'A Question
of Cubits' for their own exalted ends. A firm of manufacturers of
high-heeled shoes played with it for a month in various forms. The
proprietors of an unrivalled cheap cigarette disbursed thousands of
pounds in order to familiarize the public with certain facts. As thus:
'A Question of Cubits. Every hour of every day we sell as many
cigarettes as, if placed on end one on the top of the other, would make
a column as lofty as the Eiffel Tower. Owing to the fact that cigarettes
are not once mentioned in _A Question of Cubits_, we regret to say that
the author has not authorized us to assert that he was thinking of our
cigarettes when he wrote Chapter VII. of that popular novel.'

Editors and publishers cried in vain for Henry. They could get from him
neither interviews, short stories, nor novels. They could only get
polite references to Mark Snyder. And Mark Snyder had made his
unalterable plans for the exploitation of this most wonderful racehorse
that he had ever trained for the Fame Stakes. The supply of chatty
paragraphs concerning the hero and the book of the day would have
utterly failed had not Mr. Onions Winter courageously come to the rescue
and allowed himself to be interviewed. And even then respectable
journals were reduced to this sort of paragraph: 'Apropos of Mr.
Knight's phenomenal book, it may not be generally known what the exact
measure of a cubit is. There have been three different cubits--the
Scriptural, the Roman, and the English. Of these, the first-named,' etc.

So the thing ran on.

And at the back of it all, supporting it all, was the steady and
prodigious sale of the book, the genuine enthusiasm for it of the
average sensible, healthy-minded woman and man.

Finally, the information leaked out that Macalistairs