`Fungoids' was `selling splendidly.' He looked at me across his
glass of absinthe and asked if I had bought a copy. His
publisher had told him that three had been sold. I laughed, as at
a jest.

`You don't suppose I CARE, do you?' he said, with something
like a snarl. I disclaimed the notion. He added that he was not a
tradesman. I said mildly that I wasn't, either, and murmured
that an artist who gave truly new and great things to the world
had always to wait long for recognition. He said he cared not a
sou for recognition. I agreed that the act of creation was its own
reward.

His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded
myself as a nobody. But ah! hadn't both John Lane and Aubrey
Beardsley suggested that I should write an essay for the great
new venture that was afoot--`The Yellow Book'? And hadn't
Henry Harland, as editor, accepted my essay? And wasn't it to
be in the very first number? At Oxford I was still in statu
pupillari. In London I regarded myself as very much indeed a
graduate now--one whom no Soames could ruffle. Partly to
show off, partly in sheer good-will, I told Soames he ought to
contribute to `The Yellow Book.' He uttered from the throat a
sound of scorn for that publication.

Nevertheless, I did, a day or two later, tentatively ask Harland if
he knew anything of the work of a man called Enoch Soames.
Harland paused in the midst of his characteristic stride around
the room, threw up his hands towards the ceiling, and groaned
aloud: he had often met `that absurd creature' in Paris, and this