Resolute young men with large
expensive-looking cameras and a general air of complete authorisation
took possession of the flat for brief but fruitful periods, let off
flash lights in it that filled it for days with dense, intolerable
vapour, and retired to fill the pages of the syndicated magazines with
their admirable photographs of Mr. Bensington complete and at home in
his second-best jacket and his slashed shoes. Other resolute-mannered
persons of various ages and sexes dropped in and told him things about
Boomfood--it was _Punch_ first called the stuff "Boomfood"--and
afterwards reproduced what they had said as his own original
contribution to the Interview. The thing became quite an obsession with
Broadbeam, the Popular Humourist. He scented another confounded thing he
could not understand, and he fretted dreadfully in his efforts to "laugh
the thing down." One saw him in clubs, a great clumsy presence with the
evidences of his midnight oil burning manifest upon his large
unwholesome face, explaining to every one he could buttonhole: "These
Scientific chaps, you know, haven't a Sense of Humour, you know. That's
what it is. This Science--kills it." His jests at Bensington became
malignant libels....

An enterprising press-cutting agency sent Bensington a long article
about himself from a sixpenny weekly, entitled "A New Terror," and
offered to supply one hundred such disturbances for a guinea, and two
extremely charming young ladies, totally unknown to him, called, and, to
the speechless indignation of Cousin Jane, had tea with him and
afterwards sent him their birthday books for his signature. He was
speedily quite hardened to seeing his name associated with the most
incongruous ideas in the public press, and to discover in the reviews
articles written about Boomfood and himself in a tone of the utmost
intimacy by people he had never heard of. And whatever delusions he may
have cherished in the days of his obscurity about the pleasantness of
Fame were dispelled utterly and for ever.

At first--except for Broadbeam--the tone of the public mind was quite
free from any touch of hostility. It did not seem to occur to the public
mind as anything but a mere playful supposition that any more
Herakleophorbia was going to escape again. And it did not seem to occur
to the public mind that the growing little band of babies now being fed
on the food would presently be growing more "up" than most of us ever
grow. The sort