d in--I have to use the Boldero jargon--in the different
atmosphere. He expounded the qualities of his whisky--a present from old
man Jornicroft, a rare blend which just a few "merchantates" (Barbara's
word, he declared, was delicious) in Glasgow and Dundee and here and
there a one in the City of London were able to procure. In its flavour,
said he, lurked the mystery of strange and barbaric names. He showed me
a Bonington water colour which he had picked up for a song. On enquiry
as to the signification of a song as a unit of value, I learned that
since eminent tenors and divas had sung into gramophones, the standard
had appreciated.

"My dear man," he laughed, in answer to my protest. "I can afford it."

For the quarter of an hour that I spent with him in his own
drawing-room, he was quite the old Adrian. I drove to Paddington Station
under the influence of his urbanity. But in the train, and afterwards at
home, I was teased by vague apprehensions. Hitherto I had loosely and
playfully qualified his methods of work as lunatic, without a thought as
to the exact significance of the term. Now a horrible thought harassed
me. Had I been precise without knowing it?

Novelists may have their little idiosyncrasies, and the privacy of their
working hours deserves respect; but none I have ever heard of are such
fearful wildfowl as to need the precautions with which Adrian surrounded
himself. Why should he put himself under lock and key? Why should he not
allow human eye to fall, even from the distance prescribed by good
manners, upon his precious manuscript? Why need he use care so
scrupulous as not to expose even torn up bits of rough draft to the
ancillary publicity of a waste-paper basket? Soundness of mind did not
lie that way. The terms in which he alluded to his book were not those
of a sane man filled with the joy of his creation. None of us, not even
Doria, knew how the story was progressing. He had signed a contract with
an American editor for serialisation to begin in July. Here we were in
the middle of May, and not a page of manuscript had been delivered.
Doria told Barbara that the editor had been cabling frenziedly. How much
of the story was written? I recalled his wild talk at Easter about
putting into the novel the whole of human life. I had jested with him,
calling it a megalomaniac notion. But suppose, unwittingly, I had been
right? I thought of the ghastly name physicians give to the malady and
shivered.

S