"As the subscriber to a clipping bureau," I admitted, "I have noticed the fact rather unavoidably. Any likeness to Jurgen is the tiresome reworking of an exhausted vein: but any difference from Jurgen proves my exhausted abilities."
Again beneath his moustache his teeth showed. "So you remain, you see, the author of Jurgen."
"Scott," I replied, "wrote The Antiquary; and Thackeray wrote Henry Esmond; and Dickens wrote Our Mutual Friend: yet people even to-day continue to think of them as the authors, severally, of Ivanhoe and Vanity Fair and Pickwick Papers. So I suppose that nothing can be done about it."
Charteris regarded me for a lengthened while. "I see: you have become stoically reconciled to having posterity go on thinking of you, for century after century, as merely the author of Jurgen."
It may be that I flushed. "But, Charteris, I never said—"
And now his shoulders went up. "My dear man! as if you had to!"
§ 4
"Yet, in this epilogue at least," John Charteris went on, "you may, as it happens by rare good luck, hope to avoid the ephemeral—"
"Not utterly," I dissented. "In literary fields there are always so many May-flies about—But then, Charteris, I had thought to add footnotes which would explain all such allusions—"
"As may be incomprehensible to your readers of a few hundred years hence? I see. Such carefulness must be granted to display a kindly heart, in an illuminating blaze of self-complacency. But I was in train to suggest, my friend, that you might avoid the ephemeral by rather different methods."