“D’you know, Anthony,” he said—“sometimes I suspect I am too successful—too easily successful—and I have a horror of becoming commonplace.”
His eyes followed the other as he slouched carelessly back to the throne and flung himself upon it.
“Pooh! Nonsense, Paul.” He searched aimlessly amongst the empty plates again: “That’s all cant. Look at me. I’m as empty as a bubble—but it’s just as difficult to write sparkling prose on an empty stomach as to be a poetic alderman.”
Pangbutt gazed down at his own shining boots complacently:
“I have not forgotten what personal discomfort was, in the old Paris days. I detested it. I determined from the first to be rid of it.... Where are you living?”
The man that sat on the throne shrugged his shoulders, gazing at vacancy sadly:
“In a very shabby corner of Bohemia, Paul, where, in the streets, every vagrant wind makes whirlpools of stray papers—that shuffle by—like the damned restless whispering ghosts of rejected poems—or other stammerings that are the inky outpourings of broken literary careers.... Not at all the sort of place that you would like, old boy.... But, Paul”—he looked round the room—“you muttered something—about—a chicken—just now——”
Paul laughed—a little embarrassedly; and rang the bell:
“You’d like to take off your overcoat?” he asked.
Anthony laughed drily: