st, a rather painfully modest income. And one
evening he burst into my rooms and told me it was all right.
Antigone had come round. Wrackham hadn't, but that didn't matter.
Antigone had said she didn't care. They might have to wait a bit,
but that didn't matter either. The great thing was that she had
accepted him, that she had had the courage to oppose her father. You
see, they scored because, as long as Wrackham had his eye on Burton,
he didn't forbid him the house.

I went down with him soon after that by Wrackham's invitation. I'm
not sure that he hadn't his eye on me; he had his eye on everybody
in those days when, you know, his vogue, his tremendous vogue, was
just perceptibly on the decline.

I found him changed, rather pitiably changed, and in low spirits.
"They"--the terrible, profane young men--had been "going for him"
again, as he called it.

Of course when they really went for him he was all right. He could
get over it by saying that they did it out of sheer malevolence,
that they were jealous of his success, that a writer cannot be great
without making enemies, and that perhaps he wouldn't have known how
great he was if he hadn't made any. But they didn't give him much
opportunity. They were too clever for that. They knew exactly how to
flick him on the raw. It wasn't by the things they said so much as
by the things they deliberately didn't say; and they could get at
him any time, easily, by praising other people.

Of course none of it did any violence to the supreme illusion. He
was happy. I think he liked writing his dreadful books. (There must
have been something soothing in the act with its level, facile
fluency.) I know he enjoyed bringing them out. He gloated over the
announcements. He drew a voluptuous pleasure from his proofs. He
lived from one day of publication to the other; there wasn't a
detail of the whole dreary business that he would have missed. It
all nourished the illusion. I don't suppose he ever had a shadow of
misgiving as to his power. What he worried about was his prestige.
He couldn't help being aware that, with all he had, there was still
something that he hadn't. He knew, he must have known, that he was
not read, not recognized by the people who admired Ford Lankester.
He felt their silence and their coldness strike through the warm
comfort of his vogue. We, Burton and I, must have made him a bit
uneasy. I never in my life saw anybody so alert and so suspicious,
so miserably