Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/245

 with big eyes gazing at their greatness while he felt their degrees sticking out like halos.

The feature of this particular club smoker was a paper upon "The Decline of the Novel," by a rather immature alumnus of the university, who was now a complacent young professor of literature, with incipient side-whiskers and a pseudo-English accent which tripped and fell over "idea" and "law," which, he thought, ended in "r." He was the author of two anæmic novels which teemed with literary allusions, French phrases, and preternaturally precocious conversations. They bespoke an easy familiarity with various streets and scenes of the European capitals—or else with Baedeker—went skin-deep into life, and were greatly admired by a certain type of female, to whom they furnished an illusion of literature and did no more harm than playing an æolian.

The lecture was symmetrically composed and gracefully delivered, with many fine periods, filled with plump literary words—just as his text-book says they ought to be written. He spoke of "determining influ-