No: I am not doing well at present—not my best. Oh, I know it, and I loathe it. All my life is a pose. Somehow or other I have taken the pose, or stolid stupids force me into the pose, of strange recondite haughty genius, very subtile, very learned, inaccessible,—everything that's foolish. God, You know what a sham I am: how silly this is: how very little I know really. Don't I know it too? Don't I always tell them? Then they say that I'm modest—me—ha!—modest!
Here's the truth, by my One Hope of Salvation. I am frightened of all men, known and unknown; and of women I go in violent terror: though I always do say superb and hard things to the one, and all pretty gentle soft things to the other, while writing pitilessly of them both:—for I'm frightened of them, frightened; and I want to avoid them; and to keep them off me. Therefore I pose. And, therefore also, I provide an image which they can worship, like, or loathe, as it pleases, or displeases, or strikes awe—and they generally loathe it. All the time, while they manifest their feelings, I look on like a child at Punch and Judy.
Oh, it's wrong, very wrong, wrong altogether. But what can I do? God, tell me, clearly unmistakeably and distinctly tell me, tell me what I must do—and make me do it."
He got out of bed: took his rosary from his trousers' pocket; and returned. During the fifth meditation on the Finding of The Lord in the Temple, he fell asleep.
"Dr. Courtleigh and Dr. Talacryn?" he repeated as a query, in the tone of one to whom Beelzebub and the Archangel Periel have been announced at eleven o'clock on the morning of a working day.
"Yes," the maid replied. "Clergymen. One is that bishop who came before."
"The bishop who came before! And——What's the other like?"
"Oh, quite old and feeble—rather stoutish—but he's been a fine handsome man in his day. He wears a red necktie under his collar."