ew his Thackeray, and he remembered that old Major
Pendennis, society personified, did not exactly boast of his nephew's
occupation. Even Warrington was rather ashamed to own his connection with
journalism, and Pendennis himself laughed openly at his novel-writing as
an agreeable way of making money, a useful appendage to the cultivation
of dukes, his true business in life. This was the plain English view, and
Mr. Taylor was no doubt right enough in thinking it good, practical
common sense. Therefore when he saw Lucian loitering and sauntering,
musing amorously over his manuscript, exhibiting manifest signs of that
fine fury which Britons have ever found absurd, he felt grieved at heart,
and more than ever sorry that he had not been able to send the boy to
Oxford.

"B.N.C. would have knocked all this nonsense out of him," he thought. "He
would have taken a double First like my poor father and made something of
a figure in the world. However, it can't be helped." The poor man sighed,
and lit his pipe, and walked in another part of the garden.

But he was mistaken in his diagnosis of the symptoms. The book that
Lucian had begun lay unheeded in the drawer; it was a secret work that he
was engaged on, and the manuscripts that he took out of that inner pocket
never left him day or night. He slept with them next to his heart, and he
would kiss them when he was quite alone, and pay them such devotion as he
would have paid to her whom they symbolized. He wrote on these leaves a
wonderful ritual of praise and devotion; it was the liturgy of his
religion. Again and again he copied and recopied this madness of a lover;
dallying all days over the choice of a word, searching for more exquisite
phrases. No common words, no such phrases as he might use in a tale would
suffice; the sentences of worship must stir and be quickened, they must
glow and burn, and be decked out as with rare work of jewelry. Every part
of that holy and beautiful body must be adored; he sought for terms of
extravagant praise, he bent his soul and mind low before her, licking the
dust under her feet, abased and yet rejoicing as a Templar before the
image of Baphomet. He exulted more especially in the knowledge that there
was nothing of the conventional or common in his ecstasy; he was not the
fervent, adoring lover of Tennyson's poems, who loves with passion and
yet with a proud respect, with the love always of a gentleman for a lady.
Annie was not a lady; the