success, and was
clearly determined to take London by storm. He had been to Oxford, and to
Heidelberg, he drank beer and smoked long pipes, he talked of nothing else.
Soon, very soon, I grew conscious that he thought me a simpleton; he
pooh-poohed my belief in Naturalism and declined to discuss the symbolist
question. He curled his long legs upon the rickety sofa and spoke of the
British public as the "B.P.," and of the magazine as the "mag." There were
generally tea-things and jam-pots on the table. In a little while he
brought a little creature about five feet three to live with him, and when
the little creature and the long creature went out together, it was like
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza setting forth in quest of adventures in the
land of Strand. The little creature indulged in none of the loud, rasping
affectation of humour that was so maddening in the long creature; the
little creature was dry, hard, and sterile, and when he did join in the
conversation it was like an empty nut between the teeth--dusty and bitter.
He was supposed to be going in for the law, but the part of him to which he
drew our attention was his knowledge of the Elizabethan dramatists. He kept
a pocket-book, in which he held an account of his reading. Holding the
pocket-book between finger and thumb, he would say, "Last year I read ten
plays by Nash, twelve by Peele, six by Greene, fifteen by Beaumont and
Fletcher, and eleven anonymous plays,--fifty-four in all." He neither
praised nor blamed, he neither extolled nor criticised; he told you what he
had read, and left you to draw your own conclusions.

What the little creature thought of the long creature I never discovered,
but with every new hour I became freshly sensible that they held me in
still decreasing estimation. This, I remember, was wildly irritating to me.
I knew myself infinitely superior to them; I knew the long creature's novel
was worthless; I knew that I had fifty books in me immeasurably better than
it, and savagely and sullenly I desired to trample upon them, to rub their
noses in their feebleness; but oh, it was I who was feeble! and full of
visions of a wider world I raged up and down the cold walls of impassable
mental limitations. Above me there was a barred window, and, but for my
manacles, I would have sprung at it and torn it with my teeth. Then passion
was so strong in me that I could scarce refrain from jumping off the
counter, stamping my feet, and slapping my frie