'Do you feel disposed for a turn along the lanes, Mr Milvain?'

'By all means.--There's my mother at the window; will you come in
for a moment?'

With a step of quite unusual sprightliness Mr Yule entered the
house. He could talk of but one subject, and Mrs Milvain had to
listen to a laboured account of the blunder just committed by The
Study. It was Alfred's Yule's characteristic that he could do
nothing lighthandedly. He seemed always to converse with effort;
he took a seat with stiff ungainliness; he walked with a
stumbling or sprawling gait.

When he and Jasper set out for their ramble, his loquacity was in
strong contrast with the taciturn mood he had exhibited yesterday
and the day before. He fell upon the general aspects of
contemporary literature.

'. . . The evil of the time is the multiplication of ephemerides.
Hence a demand for essays, descriptive articles, fragments of
criticism, out of all proportion to the supply of even tolerable
work. The men who have an aptitude for turning out this kind of
thing in vast quantities are enlisted by every new periodical,
with the result that their productions are ultimately watered
down into worthlessness. . . . Well now, there's Fadge. Years ago
some of Fadge's work was not without a certain--a certain
conditional promise of--of comparative merit; but now his
writing, in my opinion, is altogether beneath consideration; how
Rackett could be so benighted as to give him The Study--