alive to the qualifying shade, the furtive turn, the
disastrous reservation.

But no, never a misgiving about Himself. Only, I think, moments of a
dreadful insight when he heard behind him the creeping of the tide
of oblivion, and it frightened him. He was sensitive to every little
fluctuation in his vogue. He had the fear of its vanishing before
his eyes. And there he was, shut up among all his splendor with his
fear; and it was his wife's work and Antigone's to keep it from
him, to stand between him and that vision. He was like a child when
his terror was on him; he would go to anybody for comfort. I
believe, if Antigone and his wife hadn't been there, he'd have
confided in his chauffeur.

He confided now in us, walking dejectedly with us in his "grounds."

"They'd destroy me," he said, "if they could. How they can take
pleasure in it, Simpson! It's incredible, incomprehensible."

We said it was, but it wasn't in the least. We knew the pleasure,
the indestructible pleasure, he gave us; we knew the irresistible
temptation that he offered. As for destroying him, we knew that they
wouldn't have destroyed him for the world. He was their one bright
opportunity. What would they have done without their Wrackham?

He kept on at it. He said there had been moments this last year
when, absurd as it might seem, he had wondered whether after all he
hadn't failed. That was the worst of an incessant persecution; it
hypnotized you into disbelief, not as to your power (he rubbed that
in), but as to your success, the permanence of the impression you
had made. I remember trying to console him, telling him that he was
all right. He'd got his public, his enormous public.

There were consolations we might have offered him. We might have
told him that he _had_ succeeded; we might have told him that, if he
wanted a monument, he'd only got to look around him. After all, he'd
made a business of it that enabled him to build a Tudor mansion with
bathrooms everywhere and keep two motor-cars. We could have reminded
him that there wasn't one of the things he'd got with it--no, not
one bathroom--that he would have sacrificed, that he was capable of
sacrificing; that he'd warmed himself jolly well all over and all
the time before the fire of life, and that his cucumbers alone must
have been a joy to him. And of course we might have told him that he
couldn't have it both ways; that you cannot have bathrooms and
motor-cars and cucumber-frames (n