old,' he added as he wrapped up the brown paper parcel. 'You will like
the book better than you think for.' 'Thank you, thank you,' I cried
after me, and hopped into a taxi, unsuspicious that I carried a
delightful evening under my arm. A comedy novel, written with
sprightliness and wit, I said, as I turned to the twentieth page, and it
needs hardly any editing. A mere re-tying of a few bows that the
effluxion of time has untied, or were never tied by the author, who, if
I remember right, used to be less careful of his literary appearance
than his prefacer, neglecting to examine his sentences, and to scan them
as often as one might expect from an admirer, not to say disciple, of
Walter Pater.

An engaging young man rose out of the pages of his book, one that Walter
Pater would admire (did admire), one that life, I added, seems to have
affected through his senses violently, and who was (may we say
therefore) a little over anxious to possess himself of a vocabulary
which would suffer him to tell all he saw, heard, smelt and touched.

Upon this sudden sympathy the book, of which I had read but twenty
pages, dropped on my knees, and I sat engulfed in a reverie of the
charming article I should have written about this book if it had come to
me for review. 'But it couldn't have come to me,' I reflected, 'for
myself and the young man that wrote it were not contemporaries.' It
would be true, however, to say that our lives overlapped; but when did
the author of the _Drama in Muslin_ disappear from literature? His next
book was _Confession of a Young Man_. It was followed by _Spring Days_;
he must have died in the last pages of that story, for we find no trace
of him in _Esther Waters_! And my thoughts, dropping away from the books
he had written, began to take pleasure in the ridiculous appearance that
the author of _A Drama in Muslin_ presented in the mirrors of Dublin