combine, to club together, and set Brooksmith up on his own
account, she replied a trifle disappointingly: "Do you mean in a
public-house?" I looked at her in a way that I think Brooksmith
himself would have approved, and then I answered: "Yes, the Offord
Arms." What I had meant of course was that for the love of art
itself we ought to look to it that such a peculiar faculty and so
much acquired experience shouldn't be wasted. I really think that
if we had caused a few black-edged cards to be struck off and
circulated--"Mr. Brooksmith will continue to receive on the old
premises from four to seven; business carried on as usual during
the alterations"--the greater number of us would have rallied.

Several times he took me upstairs--always by his own proposal--and
our dear old friend, in bed (in a curious flowered and brocaded
casaque which made him, especially as his head was tied up in a
handkerchief to match, look, to my imagination, like the dying
Voltaire) held for ten minutes a sadly shrunken little salon. I
felt indeed each time as if I were attending the last coucher of
some social sovereign. He was royally whimsical about his
sufferings and not at all concerned--quite as if the Constitution
provided for the case about his successor. He glided over OUR
sufferings charmingly, and none of his jokes--it was a gallant
abstention, some of them would have been so easy--were at our
expense. Now and again, I confess, there was one at Brooksmith's,
but so pathetically sociable as to make the excellent man look at
me in a way that seemed to say: "Do exchange a glance with me, or
I shan't be able to stand it." What he wasn't able to stand was
not what Mr. Offord said about him, but what he wasn't able to say
in return. His idea of conversation for himself was giving you the
convenience of speaking to him; and when he went to "see" Lady