erence, but as I choose. I choose
to have my fling at the world, and to take it without disguise. Tell me
when you have read it.'

'I am your man,' cried Ralston, catching at the paper.

'I don't know whether I have done well or ill in doing it,' said Paul. 'I
suppose there never was a writer who didn't hawk the secret of his soul
about the streets--if he had a secret and a soul.'

'More of this hereafter,' Ralston said, and bore away the manuscript
that night.

There had been little need to spur Paul to courage on this matter. The
wiser thing might have been to counsel him to moderation. He had set his
back to his corner already.

But just hereabouts a small thing happened which had, as small things
will, an undue influence upon his mind. There was loose on Fleet Street
at this time an extraordinary devil of a man of genius whose appropriate
real name was Wild-blood.

He had dropped that too characteristic patronymic, and had renamed
himself, with a touch of mocking cynicism which only those who knew
him understood, Wilder. What scholarship was possible for six- or
seven-and-twenty was his. That he was more or less crazed with much
learning and more drink was generally understood of him. Men of small
originality and some memory said of Wilder that he could knock a slang
song into Greek iambics in five minutes. His most fervent admirers were,
perhaps, poor judges of Greek iambics. Fleet Street may at one time have
been familiar with that kind of thing, but is not nowadays. But Wilder's
reputation soared on higher voices than those of the journalistic
crowd, and he was, beyond dispute, a person of genius--one of those odd
distorted bundles of broken nerve who help to establish the theory that
fine thinking, a noble vocabulary, deep scholarship, and foolish living
are neighbours and hard to separate.

With this very queer fish Paul had established a certain intimacy. The
man, as a matter of course, was periodically hard up, and he had come
to the stage when it was here five shillings and there half a crown as
a charge for the charm of his society with the most casual of
acquaintances. He made his breakfast on a salt-spoonful of cayenne and a
glass of brandy, and he passed from intellectual godhood to a hiccuping
imbecility in a breath. At from four to five in the afternoon he carried
his lofty head and a prematurely pimpled countenance into some unwatched
obscurity. He habitually emerged from this hiding-place wit