at her house, and said, that, as old friends, we ought to meet
oftener. She has been seeing me any time these two years in town, and
never thought of inviting me before; but seeing Wenham talking to me,
and Monsieur Dubois, the French literary man, who had a dozen orders
on, and might have passed for a Marshal of France, she condescended to
invite me. The Claverings are to be there on the same evening. Won't
it be exciting to meet one's two flames at the same table?" "Two
flames!--two heaps of burnt-out cinders," Warrington said. "Are both
the beauties in this book?"

"Both or something like them," Pen said. "Leonora, who marries the
duke, is the Fotheringay. I drew the duke from Magnus Charters, with
whom I was at Oxbridge; it's a little like him; and Miss Amory is
Neaera. By gad, Warrington, I did love that first woman! I thought of
her as I walked home from Lady Whiston's in the moonlight; and the
whole early scenes came back to me as if they had been yesterday. And
when I got home I pulled out the story which I wrote about her and the
other three years ago: do you know, outrageous as it is, it has some
good stuff in it, and if Bungay won't publish it, I think Bacon will."

"That's the way of poets," said Warrington. "They fall in love, jilt,
or are jilted; they suffer, and they cry out that they suffer more
than any other mortals: and when they have experienced feelings
enough, they note them down in a book, and take the book to market.
All poets are humbugs, all literary men are humbugs; directly a man
begins to sell his feelings for money he's a humbug. If a poet gets a
pain in his side from too good a dinner, he bellows Ai, Ai, louder
than Prometheus."

"I suppose a poet has greater sensibility than another man," said Pen,