They laughed at this idea of Pauline's, and soon it was time for Guy to go. He thought luxuriously as he walked up the drive how large a measure of good news he would bring back with him from London.
Guy was surprized to be kept waiting when he enquired for Mr. Worrall at three o'clock on the following afternoon. All the way up in the train he had thought so much about him and so kindlily that it seemed he must the very moment he entered the dusty Georgian antechamber shake his publisher warmly by the hand. He had pictured him really as looking out for his coming, almost as vividly indeed in his prefiguration of the scene as to behold Mr. Worrall's face pressed tight against a pane and thence disappearing to greet him from the step.
It was a shock to be invited to wait, and he repeated his name to the indifferent clerk a little insistently.
"Mr. Worrall will see you in a minute," the clerk repeated.
Guy looked at the few objects of interest in the outer office, at the original drawings of wrappers and frontispieces, at the signed photograph of a moderately distinguished poet of the 'nineties, at a depressing accumulation of still unsold volumes. The window was grimy, and the raindrops seemed from inside to smear it as tears smudge the face of a dirty child. The clerk pored over a ledger, and from the grey afternoon the cries of the porters in Covent Garden came drearily in. At last a bell sounded, and the clerk invited him 'to step this way,' lifting the counter and pointing up a narrow staircase beyond a glass door. Guy went up and at last entered Mr. Worrall's private office.
The publisher was a short fat man with a bald and curiously conical head, reminding Guy very much of a dentist in his manner. The poet sat down and immediately caught in his first survey Mr. William Worrall's caricature by Max Beerbohm. As a result of this observation Guy throughout the interview could only perceive Mr. Worrall as the caricaturist had perceived him, and like a shape in a dream his head all the time grew more and more conical, until it seemed as if it would soon bore a hole in the festooned ceiling.
"Well, Mr. Hazlewood," said the publisher referring as he spoke to Guy's card with what Guy thought was a rather unnecessary implication of oblivion. "Well, Mr. Hazlewood, my reader reports very favourably on your poems, and there seems no reason why I should not publish them."
Guy bowed.
"No reason at all," Mr. Worrall continued. Then making a gothic arch with his fingers and looking up at the ceiling, he added:
"Though, of course, there will be a risk. However, my reader's opinion was certainly favourable."