was solace and necessity now. He no longer called it "la
sorciere glauque." He had shed away all his French phrases.
He had become a plain, unvarnished Preston man.

Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even
though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. I avoided
Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. John Lane had
published, by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a
pleasant little success of esteem. I was a--slight, but definite
--"personality." Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in
"The Saturday Review," Alfred Harmsworth was letting me do likewise
in "The Daily Mail." I was just what Soames wasn't. And he shamed my
gloss. Had I known that he really and firmly believed in the greatness of
what he as an artist had achieved, I might not have shunned him. No
man who hasn't lost his vanity can be held to have altogether failed.
Soames's dignity was an illusion of mine. One day, in the first week of
June, 1897, that illusion went. But on the evening of that day Soames
went, too.

I had been out most of the morning and, as it was too late to reach
home in time for luncheon, I sought the Vingtieme. This little
place--Restaurant du Vingtieme Siecle, to give it its full
title--had been discovered in '96 by the poets and prosaists, but had now
been more or less abandoned in favor of some later find. I don't think it
lived long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in
Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that
house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with her a
boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and
hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. The
Vingtieme was but a small whitewashed room, leading out into