osed by an expert in closing doors,
one who had devoted his life to the perfection of detail in valetry.

_Fame_

He lay on the sofa at the foot of the bed, with all illumination
extinguished save one crimson-shaded light immediately above him. The
evening papers--white, green, rose, cream, and yellow--shared his couch.
He was about to glance at the obituaries; to glance at them in a
careless, condescending way, just to see the _sort_ of thing that
journalists had written of him. He knew the value of obituaries; he had
often smiled at them. He knew also the exceeding fatuity of art
criticism, which did not cause him even to smile, being simply a bore.
He recollected, further, that he was not the first man to read his own
obituary; the adventure had happened to others; and he could recall how,
on his having heard that owing to an error it had happened to the great
so-and-so, he, in his quality of philosopher, had instantly decided what
frame of mind the great so-and-so ought to have assumed for the perusal
of his biography. He carefully and deliberately adopted that frame of
mind now. He thought of Marcus Aurelius on the futility of fame; he
remembered his life-long attitude of gentle, tired scorn for the press;
he reflected with wise modesty that in art nothing counts but the work
itself, and that no quantity of inept chatter could possibly affect, for
good or evil, his value, such as it might be, to the world.

Then he began to open the papers.

The first glimpse of their contents made him jump. In fact, the physical
result of it was quite extraordinary. His temperature increased. His
heart became audible. His pulse quickened. And there was a tingling as
far off as his toes. He had felt, in a dim, unacknowledged way, that he
must be a pretty great painter. Of course his prices were notorious. And
he had guessed, though vaguely, that he was the object of widespread
curiosity. But he had never compared himself with Titanic figures on the
planet. It had always seemed to him that _his_ renown was different from
other renowns, less--somehow unreal and make-believe. He had never
imaginatively grasped, despite prices and public inquisitiveness, that
he too was one of the Titanic figures. He grasped it now. The aspect of
the papers brought it home to him with tremendous force.

Special large type! Titles stretching across two columns! Black borders
round the pages! "Death of England's greatest painter." "Sudden death