ld me what recognition means to
gentlemen of the artistic callings. O, the happy boy!

But months afterward, rummaging at his home in a closet that is usually
kept locked, he discovered the picture, there hidden away. His wife
backed into a corner and made trembling confession. How could she submit
to see her dear's masterpiece ignored by the idiot public, and her dear
himself plunged into gloom thereby? She knew as well as he (for had
they not been married for years?) how the artistic instinct hungers
for recognition, and so with her savings she bought the great work
anonymously and stored it away in a closet. At first, I believe, the man
raved furiously, but by-and-by he was on his knees at the feet of this
little darling. You know who she was, Mary, but, bless me, I seem to be
praising you, and that was not the enterprise on which I set out. What
I intended to convey was that though you can now venture on small
extravagances, you seem to be going too fast. Look at it how one may,
this Barbara idea is undoubtedly a bad business.

How to be even with her? I cast about for a means, and on my lucky day I
did conceive my final triumph over Mary, at which I have scarcely as yet
dared to hint, lest by discovering it I should spoil my plot. For there
has been a plot all the time.

For long I had known that Mary contemplated the writing of a book, my
informant being David, who, because I have published a little volume
on Military tactics, and am preparing a larger one on the same subject
(which I shall never finish), likes to watch my methods of composition,
how I dip, and so on, his desire being to help her. He may have done
this on his own initiative, but it is also quite possible that in her
desperation she urged him to it; he certainly implied that she had
taken to book-writing because it must be easy if I could do it. She
also informed him (very inconsiderately), that I did not print my books
myself, and this lowered me in the eyes of David, for it was for the
printing he had admired me and boasted of me in the Gardens.

"I suppose you didn't make the boxes neither, nor yet the labels," he
said to me in the voice of one shorn of belief in everything.

I should say here that my literary labours are abstruse, the token
whereof is many rows of boxes nailed against my walls, each labelled
with a letter of the alphabet. When I take a note in A, I drop its into
the A box, and so on, much to the satisfaction of David, who l