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viii I suppose it is credible that at that age (whatever it may have been) abnormal reticence should go hand in hand with appalling candour. We must have talked; otherwise how should I have known that Batget (since become wealthy as a lard importer) made a practice of rising an hour before he need each day, solely to avoid encountering a rejected manuscript at the domestic breakfast table? I must have talked; otherwise how should Melwish have known anything of these callow aspirations?

Melwish was the enigma of our genial gatherings. Middle-aged, successful and clear-cut, he appeared to find some interest in the society of the young, the impecunious and the half-baked. We knew that he was a prolific fiction writer; indeed it was unusual to pick up a magazine of a sort that did not contain one of his unsophisticated little love stories; and we wondered how on earth he did it—not in the writing but the marketing thereof. So simple, so sheerly artless was he both in matter and in manner as to give rise to the occasional heresy that there really must be something in them after all or no one would accept his stuff. But on the whole we classed it as pretty hopeless tripe, although we did not fail to congratulate Melwish whenever the occasion fitly offered. Our own efforts lay in the direction of originality and something better than the editors were used to: Lang's How to Fail in Literature had obviously reached us then, but Leonard Merrick's Cynthia certainly had not. Melwish took it all quietly and easily; he was essentially a listener and gave nothing in return—except a rescuing donation when the state of the society’s funds urgently required it.

How it came about I have long ago forgotten, but one night I found myself walking with Melwish down the Strand. Possibly I had been speaking of his work; more