Tanqueray warned Prothero of the horrors of premature renown. Prothero declared that he had none. Nobody knew his name.
"Good," said Tanqueray. "Celebrity's all very well at the end, when you've done the things you want to do. It's a bad beginning. It doesn't matter quite so much if you live in the country where nobody's likely to know you're celebrated till you're dead. But if you will live in London, your only chance is to remain obscure."
"There are in London at this moment," he continued, "about one thousand celebrated authors. There are, I imagine, about fifty distinct circles where they meet. Fifty distinct hells where they're bound to meet each other. Hells where they're driven round and round, meeting each other. Steaming hells where they sit stewing in each other's sweat——"
"Don't, George!" cried Nina.
"Loathsome hells, where they swarm and squirm and wriggle in and out of each other. Sanguinary, murderous hells, where they're all tearing at each other's throats. How can you hope, how can you possibly hope to do anything original, if you're constantly breathing that atmosphere? Horrid used-up air that authors—beasts!—have breathed over and over and over again."
"As if," said Nina, "we weren't authors."
"My dear Nina, nobody would think it of us. Nobody would have thought it of Jinny if she hadn't gone and got celebrated."
"You'll be celebrated yourself some day."
"I shall be dead," said he. "I shan't know anything about it."
At this point Prothero, with an exquisite vagueness, stated that he wanted to get work on a paper. He was not, he intimated, looking to his poems to keep him. On the contrary, he would have to keep them.