much consideration indeed, that he was prepared to be perfectly
human; but he had added that he was not prepared for an abuse of this
admission. The thing in the world I think I least felt myself was an
abuse, even though (as I had never mentioned to my friendly editor) I
too had my project for a bigger reverberation. I daresay I trusted mine
more than I trusted Limbert's; at all events the golden mean in which
in the special case he saw his salvation as an editor was something I
should be most sure of if I were to exhibit it myself. I exhibited it
month after month in the form of a monstrous levity, only praying heaven
that my editor might now not tell me, as he had so often told me, that
my result was awfully good. I knew what that would signify--it would
signify, sketchily speaking, disaster. What he did tell me heartily was
that it was just what his game required: his new line had brought with
it an earnest assumption--earnest save when we privately laughed about
it--of the locutions proper to real bold enterprise. If I tried to keep
him in the dark even as he kept Mr. Bousefield there was nothing to
show that I was not tolerably successful: each case therefore presented
a promising analogy for the other. He never noticed my descent, and it
was accordingly possible that Mr. Bousefield would never notice his.

But would nobody notice it at all?--that was a question that added
a prospective zest to one's possession of a critical sense. So much
depended upon it that I was rather relieved than otherwise not to know
the answer too soon. I waited in fact a year--the year for which Limbert
had cannily engaged on trial with Mr. Bousefield; the year as to which
through the same sharpened shrewdness it had been conveyed in the
agreement between them that Mr. Bousefield was not to intermeddle. It
had been Limbert's general prayer that we would during this period let
him quite alone. His terror of my direct rays was a droll, dreadful
force that always operated: he explained it by the fact that I
understood him too well, expressed too much of his intention, saved him
too little from himself. The less he was saved the more he didn't sell:
I literally interpreted, and that was simply fatal.

I held my breath accordingly; I did more--I closed my eyes, I guarded my
treacherous ears. He induced several of us to do that (of such devotions
we were capable) so that not even glancing at the thing from month to
month, and having nothing