"It's the book of the day."
"It's decidedly the cleverest thing of its sort I ever read."
"Have you read the review in the Athenæum?"
"And in the Saturday Review."
"They all praise it, even the Spectator."
"Who's the author? Whose initials are R. D.?"
"Why, don't you know? It's Major Rupert Devereux, the man who wrote that awfully clever article in the Fortnightly last month. He's an M.P., and a great man on committees. Sort of practical philanthropist."
I was standing in front of a bookshop leading out of the Strand amongst a little group of other passers-by, who had halted for a moment to turn over the volumes which were out on view, and this was the conversation which I heard being carried on almost at my elbow. I listened eagerly for more, but the speakers had passed on.
My Uncle Rupert was a great man, then, I thought, bitterly. Curse him! I was scarcely surprised, for there was in his pale face all the nervous force of imaginative intellect. What was it he had written? I wondered. I took up the Times, and glanced through its columns. Ah, there it was—a review two columns long—"Richard Strathdale, novelist," by R.D.
I glanced through the review; it was one long eulogy. A profound metaphysical romance! The most brilliant work of fiction of the age, and so on, and so on. I stopped at a bookseller's, and asked for "Richard Strathdale." They were sold out. I tried another with the same result—there had been a tremendous run on it, they told me. But at last, at a railway bookstall, I was just in time to purchase their last copy, and hurried back with it to my hotel.