Page:The Yellow Book - 05.djvu/27

 The Papers of Basil Fillimer

By H. D. Traill

name is Johnson, just plain John Johnson—nothing more subtle than that; and my individuality is, as they say, "in a concatenation accordingly." In other words, the character of my intellect is exactly what you would expect in a man of my name. This was well known to my old friend, schoolmate, and fellow-student at Oxford, the late Basil Fillimer; a man of the very subtlest mind that I should think has ever housed itself in human body since the brain of the last mediæval schoolman ceased to "distinguish." Yet Basil Fillimer must needs appoint me—me of all men in the world his literary executor, and charge me with the duty of making a selection from his papers and preparing them for publication. They include a series of "Analytic Studies," a diary extending over several years, and a three-volume novel turning on the question whether the hero before marrying the heroine was or was not bound to communicate to her the fact that he had once unjustly suspected her mother of circulating reports injurious to the reputation of his aunt.

Basil knew, I say—he must have known—that I was quite unable to follow him in these refined speculations. Hence I can only suppose that at the time when his will was drawn he had not yet discovered my psychological incompetence, and that after he The Yellow Book—Vol. V.