swollen arm and the difficulty of keeping it out of the water. He dined at half-past seven on some soup, and haricot-beans with butter, and a baked apple. Meanwhile he counted the split infinitives in the day's Pall Mall Gazette. When he was adolescent, an Oxford tutor had said of him that he possessed a critical faculty of no mean order. At the time, he had not understood the saying[Pg 13] perfectly: but he cultivated the faculty. He taught himself in a very bitter school, the arts of selection and discrimination, and the art of annihilating rubbish. To this perhaps was due his complete psychical detachment from other men. He trod upon so many worms. And few things are more exasperating than a man of whom it truly may be said "A chiel's amang ye takin' notes." After dinner, he returned to his attic with his cup and the coffee-pot: and resumed his task. In time, he forgot the pain of his arm: he even forgot the usual terrified anticipation of the late postman's knock, such was his faculty for concentration. He smoked cigarettes and sipped black coffee now and then, oblivious of Flavio who returned from a walk about eleven and promptly went to sleep on the foot of the bed. A little after midnight, he reached the end of the book: turned back and examined the last chapter again; and put it down.

[Pg 13]

"Yes," he said, "she's a dear good woman. Her book—well—her book is cheap, awkward, vulgar,—but it's good. It's unpalteringly ugly and simple and good. Evidently it's best to be good. It pays.... Anyhow it's bound to pay in the long run."

He pushed Flavio's chair to the wall near the door: by its side he placed the wash-stand from the left of his armchair. He disposed the armchair also against the wall, leaving a cleared space of garret-coloured drugget between the dead fire and the bed. This was his gymnasium.

"If a book like that pays," he reflected, "it must be that there's a lot of people who care for books about the Good. Why not do one of that sort instead of casting folk-lore and history before publishers who turn and rend you? The pity is that the Good should be so dreadfully dowdy. Evidently το καλονk and το ἁγαφον are just as distinct as they were in the days of the Broad-browed One. Sophisms again! Why can't you be honest and simple instead of subtile and complex? You're just like your own[Pg 14] cat ambuscading a ping-pong ball as strategically and as scrupulously as though it were a mouse. For goodness' sake don't try to deceive yourself. It's all very well to pose before the world: but there's no one here to see you now. Strip, man, strip stark. You perfectly know that 

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