there now. `No absinthe there,' he muttered. It was the sort of
thing that in the old days he would have said for effect; but it
carried conviction now. Absinthe, erst but a point in the
`personality' he had striven so hard to build up, was solace and
necessity now. He no longer called it `la sorciere glauque.' He
had shed away all his French phrases. He had become a plain,
unvarnished, Preston man.

Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even
though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I
avoided Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John
Lane had published, by this time, two little books of mine, and
they had had a pleasant little success of esteem. I was a--slight
but definite--`personality.' Frank Harris had engaged me to
kick up my heels in The Saturday Review, Alfred Harmsworth
was letting me do likewise in The Daily Mail. I was just what
Soames wasn't. And he shamed my gloss. Had I known that he
really and firmly believed in the greatness of what he as an artist
had achieved, I might not have shunned him. No man who
hasn't lost his vanity can be held to have altogether failed.
Soames' dignity was an illusion of mine. One day in the first
week of June, 1897, that illusion went. But on the evening of
that day Soames went too.

I had been out most of the morning, and, as it was too late to
reach home in time for luncheon, I sought `the Vingtieme.' This
little place--Restaurant du Vingtieme Siecle, to give it its full
title--had been discovered in '96 by the poets and prosaists, but
had now been more or less abandoned in favour of some later
find. I don't think it lived long enough to justify its name; but at