paused in the midst of his characteristic stride around the room, threw up
his hands toward the ceiling, and groaned aloud: he had often met "that
absurd creature" in Paris, and this very morning had received some
poems in manuscript from him.

"Has he NO talent?" I asked.

"He has an income. He's all right." Harland was the most joyous
of men and most generous of critics, and he hated to talk of anything
about which he couldn't be enthusiastic. So I dropped the subject of
Soames. The news that Soames had an income did take the edge off
solicitude. I learned afterward that he was the son of an unsuccessful and
deceased bookseller in Preston, but had inherited an annuity of three
hundred pounds from a married aunt, and had no surviving relatives of
any kind. Materially, then, he was "all right." But there was still a
spiritual pathos about him, sharpened for me now by the possibility that
even the praises of "The Preston Telegraph" might not have been
forthcoming had he not been the son of a Preston man He had a sort of
weak doggedness which I could not but admire. Neither he nor his work
received the slightest encouragement; but he persisted in behaving as a
personage: always he kept his dingy little flag flying. Wherever
congregated the jeunes feroces of the arts, in whatever
Soho restaurant they had just discovered, in whatever music-hall they
were most frequently, there was Soames in the midst of them, or, rather,
on the fringe of them, a dim, but inevitable, figure. He never sought to
propitiate his fellow-writers, never bated a jot of his arrogance about his
own work or of his contempt for theirs. To the painters he was
respectful, even humble; but for the poets and prosaists of "The Yellow
Book" and later of "The Savoy" he had never a word but of scorn. He
wasn't resented. It didn't occur to anybody that he or his Catholic