h everyone he
met seemed to be affecting over this book of Holroyd's was that it
made an anticlimax only too possible when his own should see the
light.

Mark heard compliments and thanks with much the annoyance a practised
_raconteur_ must feel with the feeble listener who laughs heartily,
while the point of the story he is being told is still in perspective.

And soon he wished heartily that the halo he felt was burning round
his undeserving head could be moderated or put out, like a lamp--it
was such an inconvenience. He could never escape from Holroyd's book;
people _would_ talk to him about it.

Sooner or later, while talking to the most charming persons, just when
he was feeling himself conversationally at his very best, he would see
the symptoms he dreaded warning him that the one fatal topic was about
to be introduced, which seemed to have the effect of paralysing his
brain. He would struggle hard against it, making frantic efforts to
turn the subject, and doubling with infinite dexterity; but generally
his interlocutor was not to be put off, 'running cunning,' as it were,
like a greyhound dead to sporting instincts, and fixing him at once
with a 'Now, Mr. Ashburn, you really must allow me to express to you
some of the pleasure and instruction I have received from your book,'
and so on; and then Mark found himself forced to listen with ghastly
smiles of sham gratification to the praises of his rival, as he now
felt Holroyd was after all becoming, and had to discuss with the air
of a creator this book which he had never cared to understand, and
soon came cordially to detest.

If he had been the real author, all this would of course have been
delightful to him; it was all so kind and so evidently sincere for the
most part, that only a very priggish or cynical person could have
affected to undervalue it, and any other, even if he felt it
overstrained now and then, would have enjoyed it frankly while it
lasted, remembering that, in the nature of things, it could not last
very long.

But unfortunately, Mark had not written 'Illusion,' which made all the
difference. No author could have shrunk more sensitively in his inmost
soul than he did from the praise of his fellow-men, and his modesty
would have been more generally remarked had he not been wise enough to
perceive that modesty, in a man, is a virtue with a dangerous streak
of the ridiculous about it.

And so he braced himself to go through with it and pla