drop out of him.

"Sovietski no good!"

He paused for a moment, set the machinery working again, and delivered
five more at the pithead.

"I spit me of Sovietski!"

There was a painful sensation. The lot of a popular idol is in many
ways an enviable one, but it has the drawback of uncertainty. Here
today and gone tomorrow. Until this moment Raymond Parsloe Devine's
stock had stood at something considerably over par in Wood Hills
intellectual circles, but now there was a rapid slump. Hitherto he had
been greatly admired for being influenced by Sovietski, but it appeared
now that this was not a good thing to be. It was evidently a rotten
thing to be. The law could not touch you for being influenced by
Sovietski, but there is an ethical as well as a legal code, and this it
was obvious that Raymond Parsloe Devine had transgressed. Women drew
away from him slightly, holding their skirts. Men looked at him
censoriously. Adeline Smethurst started violently, and dropped a
tea-cup. And Cuthbert Banks, doing his popular imitation of a sardine
in his corner, felt for the first time that life held something of
sunshine.

Raymond Parsloe Devine was plainly shaken, but he made an adroit
attempt to recover his lost prestige.

"When I say I have been influenced by Sovietski, I mean, of course,
that I was once under his spell. A young writer commits many follies. I