These two things would make a sensation!
He stood and gazed at himself. He took a hand-mirror and looked at himself from every point of view.
He wondered if a head like his could not be the front of one as great as Shakespeare—he wondered whether he looked like a man who could top the world.
It worried him.
He posed so as to see the back of his head and the side-face, to see which of the great men of the past he might be most like.... He could find no sign to guide his destiny. But his gloom was suddenly relieved. His conceit saved him.
He smiled a large smile.
It came to him with a rush that he was wholly original.
He lit a cigarette, posed himself in his gorgeous dressing-gown before the mirror again, and smirked upon a pleasant prospect.
He dreamed of exquisite sensations.
He saw himself sitting in the smartest drawing-rooms, holding himself with delightful insolence, giving voice to anarchistic destruction of all the moralities. Art for art’s sake would be nothing to this. He had once thought of going over to Rome—but every mediocrity went over to Rome nowadays; it had become positively banal—the extremity of commonplace. The very suburbs did it! People were not even barred for it. You went as to a dentist.... God! how he would frighten the editors—and the women!