reston man.

Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even
though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I
avoided Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had
published, by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a
pleasant little success of esteem. I was a--slight, but
definite--"personality." Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my
heels in "The Saturday Review," Alfred Harmsworth was letting me do
likewise in "The Daily Mail." I was just what Soames wasn't. And he
shamed my gloss. Had I known that he really and firmly believed in the
greatness of what he as an artist had achieved, I might not have
shunned him. No man who hasn't lost his vanity can be held to have
altogether failed. Soames's dignity was an illusion of mine. One day,
in the first week of June, 1897, that illusion went. But on the
evening of that day Soames went, too.

I had been out most of the morning and, as it was too late to reach
home in time for luncheon, I sought the Vingtieme. This little
place--Restaurant du Vingtieme Siecle, to give it its full title--had
been discovered in '96 by the poets and prosaists, but had now been
more or less abandoned in favor of some later find. I don't think it
lived long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still
was, in Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite
to that house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl,
and with her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in
darkness and hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The
Vingtieme was but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street
at one end and into a kitchen at the other. The proprietor and cook
was a Frenchman, known to us as Monsieur Vingtieme; the waiters were
his two daughters, Rose and Berthe; and the food, according to faith,
was good. The tables were so narrow and were set so close together
that there was space for twelve of them, six jutting from each wall.

Only the two nearest to the door, as I went in, were occupied. On one
side sat a tall, flashy, rather Mephistophelian man whom I had seen
from time to time in the domino-room and elsewhere. On the other side
sat Soames. They made a queer contrast in that sunlit room, Soames
sitting haggard in that hat and cape, which nowhere at any season had I
seen him doff, and this other, this keenly vital man, at sight of whom
I mo