very trivial thing when I had found a solution. It occurred to me that
she wished me to regard her as a symbol, perhaps, of the future--as a
type of those who are to inherit the earth, in fact. She had been
playing the fool with me, in her insolent modernity. She had wished me
to understand that I was old-fashioned; that the frame of mind of which
I and my fellows were the inheritors was over and done with. We were to
be compulsorily retired; to stand aside superannuated. It was obvious
that she was better equipped for the swiftness of life. She had a
something--not only quickness of wit, not only ruthless determination,
but a something quite different and quite indefinably more impressive.
Perhaps it was only the confidence of the superseder, the essential
quality that makes for the empire of the Occidental. But I was not a
negro--not even relatively a Hindoo. I was somebody, confound it, I was
somebody.

As an author, I had been so uniformly unsuccessful, so absolutely
unrecognised, that I had got into the way of regarding myself as ahead
of my time, as a worker for posterity. It was a habit of mind--the only
revenge that I could take upon despiteful Fate. This girl came to
confound me with the common herd--she declared herself to be that very
posterity for which I worked.

She was probably a member of some clique that called themselves Fourth
Dimensionists--just as there had been pre-Raphaelites. It was a matter
of cant allegory. I began to wonder how it was that I had never heard of
them. And how on earth had they come to hear of me!

"She must have read something of mine," I found myself musing: "the
Jenkins story perhaps. It must have been the Jenkins story; they gave
it a good place in their rotten magazine. She must have seen that it was