as many a City
clerk; far less so than any young man behind a draper's counter in
Oxford Street. He was below medium height, quite without distinction of
features, and wore a faded brown suit. Withal, his publishers could sell
fifty thousand copies of any book he cared to write, and the Press of
the Anglo-Saxon race resounded with anecdotes about him.

"Ma name's pronounced Sinkler, but they pock-puddens will ca' me St.
Clair, so what can a body do, Mr. Chairles?"

Mr. Charles couldn't enlighten him; but his host suggested that the
Scotch didn't know how to pronounce their own names, and weren't very
particular how they treated English ones. The secretary of the club
dragged Mr. Sinclair off before he could return fire to introduce him to
one craving his hand-shake, and Mr. Puddephatt, who appeared to be known
only as Adrian Grant among the members, said to Henry that whenever he
saw Sinclair he thought of a boiled egg, because the fellow seemed so
small and thin that he felt he could break his skull with a tap of a
spoon.

"Ah, Mr. Grinton, how do you do?... My guest, Mr. Charles, of the
_Watchman_--a coming man, my dear Grinton, a coming man."

Mr. Edward Grinton shook hands with the coming man, who was never in a
more retiring mood.

"I read the _Watchman_," he said, "and like it, but I wish it wouldn't
worry about my literary style. The only test of merit in novels, Mr.
Charles, is sales. Ask at any bookseller if his customers care a straw
for literary style. They want a story, and I give 'em what they--Ah,
Tredgold! Still slogging at that play?" and Mr. Grinton turned abruptly
to another member who had two plays running at London theatres, and, in
Grinton's phrase, "made pots of money."

This Grinton no longer holds the bookstalls in the palm of his hand. His
star has set; but at that time his stories sold enormously, and earned
him a large income. They were common trash, concerned chiefly with
mysterious murders, and each had a startling picture on the cover, which
the publisher alleged was the chief cause of their success. He had curly
hair. That was the only thing about him Henry noticed.

In turn he was next introduced to Henry Davies, the editor of the
_Morning Sun_, the great Radical daily--a man who stuttered strangely,
and had difficulty in saying that he was p--p--pleased to m--m--meet Mr.
Ch--Ch--Charles; Mr. Frederick Fleming, the well-known dramatic critic
of the _Daily Journal_; and other cele