But I was wrong. The tale, a veritable conte drolatique, was as keen and strong as a Maupassant. I had no choice but to take it at a draught, smacking my lips after. Then I put the paper softly down and looked across at him. His harmless features were set in a sort of hypnotic smile, his hat was tilted over his eyes, and he was making constant mouthfuls of the large silver knob of his stick. My eyes travelled to and fro between this figure and the figures of print that were he. What possible connexion could there be between the two? I thought of Buffon writing in lace ruffles, and all at once recognized a virtue in immaculate shirt-cuffs, and decided to consult some fashionable hosier about raising my price per thousand words. In the meantime my respect for Sweeting was born.
“So,” I said, “you are somebody after all?”
“Am I?” he answered, grinning bucolic. “Glad you’ve found it out.”
“Why,” I said, “honestly there’s genius in this story; but nothing to what you’ve shown in concealing that you had any. There must be much more to come out of the same bin.”
He flushed and laughed and wriggled, as I walked over and sat beside him.
“O, I dare say!” he said. “Hope so, anyhow.”
“Not a doubt. What made you think of it, now?”
“O! I thought of it,” he said; and, after all, there was no better reply to an idiotic question. I was beginning humbly to appraise intellectual self-sufficiency at its value, and to appreciate the hundred disguises of reason.
I saw a good deal of Sweeting, on his own initiative, after this. He would visit me in my rooms, and discuss—none too sapiently, I may have thought in other circumstances, and with the most ingenuous admiration for his own abilities—the values of certain characters as portrayed by him in a brilliant series, “The Love-Letters of a Nonconformist,” which had immediately followed in the “Argonaut” “The Fool of the Family,” and was taking the town by storm. Thus, “What d’ee think of that old Lupin, last number,” he would chuckle, “with his calling virtue an ‘emu,’ don’tcherknow?”
“Ha, yes!” I would correct him, with a nervous laugh. “ ‘Anæmia’ was the word. You meant it, of course.”