Oxford Street. May Fair never shone so fair to Arthur Pendennis
as it did to the returned American. The country never smiled its
velvet smile of trained and easy hostess as it did when he was so
lucky as to be asked on a country visit. He loved it all --
everything -- had always loved it! He felt almost attached to the
Royal Exchange. He thought he owned the St. James's Club. He
patronized the Legation.

The first shock came lightly, as though Nature were playing
tricks on her spoiled child, though she had thus far not exerted
herself to spoil him. Reeve refused the Gold Conspiracy. Adams
had become used to the idea that he was free of the Quarterlies,
and that his writing would be printed of course; but he was
stunned by the reason of refusal. Reeve said it would bring
half-a-dozen libel suits on him. One knew that the power of Erie
was almost as great in England as in America, but one was hardly
prepared to find it controlling the Quarterlies. The English
press professed to be shocked in 1870 by the Erie scandal, as it
had professed in 1860 to be shocked by the scandal of slavery,
but when invited to support those who were trying to abate these
scandals, the English press said it was afraid. To Adams, Reeve's
refusal seemed portentous. He and his brother and the North
American Review were running greater risks every day, and no one
thought of fear. That a notorious story, taken bodily from an
official document, should scare the Endinburgh Review into
silence for fear of Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, passed even Adams's
experience of English eccentricity, though it was large.

He gladly set down Reeve's refusal of the Gold Conspiracy to
respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript