"Well, really, Miss Witherup," said Miss Phipps-Phipps, "we don't know where he is, but we think—it is not my thought, but that of the corporation—we think you will find him playing golf at St. Andrews."
"Thank you," said I. "But, after all," I added, "it is not what the corporation thinks so much as what you as an individual think. Where do you believe I may find Mr. Lang?"
"Among the Immortals," was the answer, spoken with enthusiasm.
And believing that the lady was right, I ceased to look for Mr. Lang, for in the presence of immortals I always feel myself to be foolish.
Nevertheless, I am very glad to have seen the Lang Company at Woking, and I now understand many things that I never understood before.
[ZOLA]
To visit a series of foreign celebrities at home without including Émile Zola in the list would be very like refusing to listen to the lines of Hamlet in Bacon's immortal tragedy of that name. Furthermore, to call upon the justly famous novelist presupposes a visit to Paris, which is a delightful thing, even for a lady journalist. Hence it was that on leaving Woking, after my charming little glimpse into the home life of the Lang Manuscript-Manufacturing Company, I decided to take a run across the Channel and look up the Frenchman of the hour. The diversion had about it an air of adventure which made it pleasantly exciting. For ten hours after my arrival at Paris I did not dare ask where the novelist lived, for fear that I might be arrested and sent to Devil's Island with Captain Dreyfus, or forced to languish for a year or two at the Château d'If, near Marseilles, until the government could get a chance formally to inquire why I wished to know the abiding-place of M. Zola. There was added to this also some apprehension that even if I escaped the gendarmes the people themselves might rise up and string me to a lamp-post as a suitable answer to so treasonable a question.