r
hack-work. The glamour of the thing is as delusive as the _ignis
fatuus_."

"And there you have life itself. _Ergo_, to journalise is to live."

"I begin to believe you are right, but I could have wished to make the
discovery later."

"It's never too early to know the truth. But come, you are surely
thriving professionally, for I heard your study of the Bronte's which
you wrote for the _Lyceum_ highly praised by the editor when I was in
London last week."

"That is indeed welcome news. You know Swainton, then?"

"A little. You see, I have done some work for him myself. The fact is--"

"Are you Adrian Grant?"

Henry blurted out the question and eyed his friend eagerly, nervously,
ashamed of his clumsiness and desperate to have done with it. Without a
tremor of his eyelids the other replied:

"Since you put it so bluntly--I am. But I have peculiar ideas of
authorship, and you will search my rooms in vain for any book or article
I have written. My conception of literature is an artistic expression of
what life has told me. I say my say and have done with that work. I say
it as it pleases my artistic sense, and I pass to some other phase of
life that attracts me and asks me to express it. To the profession of
letters I have no strong attachment. To live is better than to write. I
know some Sardinian peasants who are kings compared with Tennyson--yes,
I will say Tennyson."

Henry was dumb at the vagaries of the man.

"The craft of letters," he went on, "I know only as a branch of life,
and far from the noblest."

Adrian Grant could make a thousand pounds, perhaps two, out of any novel
he now cared to write. The thought flashed through Henry's mind and left
confusion in its tract. What were fame, success, fortune, if one who had
won them set such small store thereby?

"I have no wish to be associated with my books," he continued. "The
reverse. All great art should be anonymous. Think of the precious
sculptures of Greece, the work of unknown men who knew that the joy of
expressing truth was immortal fame. It is a stupid convention of a
stupid age that a book should bear an author's name. My own name is
scarcely pleasant to eye or ear; but I do not quarrel with a scurvy
trick of Fate. It tickets the man, and that is enough. My pen-name has
served its purpose in securing a sort of impersonal appeal for my books,
which cease to be mine once the printer has done his work. You will
never, I hope, identify me with