"What dialect is it he is talking in?" said Henry; "I don't remember to have heard it before."
The publisher smiled: "My dear fellow, you must be careful what you say. That is what we call 'the Oxford voice.'"
"How remarkable!" said Henry, his attention called off by a being with a face that half suggested a faun, and half suggested a flower,--a small, olive-skinned face crowned with purply black hair, that kept falling in an elflock over his forehead, and violet eyes set slant-wise. He was talking earnestly of fairies, in a beautiful Irish accent, and Henry liked him. The attraction seemed mutual, and Henry found himself drawn into a remarkable relation about a fairy-hill in Connemara, and fairy lights that for several nights had been seen glimmering about it; and how at last he--that is, the narrator--and a particularly hard-headed friend of his had kept watch one moonlit night, with the result that they had actually seen and talked with the queen of the fairies and learned many secrets of the ----. The narrator here made use of a long, unpronounceable Irish word, which Henry could not catch.
"I should have explained some of these phenomena to you," whispered the publisher presently, noticing that Henry looked a little bewildered. "This is a young Irish poet, who, in the intervals of his raising the devil, writes very beautiful lyrics that he may well have learned from the fairies. It is his method to seem mad on magic and such things. You will meet with many strange methods here to-night. Don't be alarmed if some one comes and talks to you about strange sins. You have come to London in the 'strange sins' period. I will explain afterwards."
He had hardly spoken when a pallid young man, with a preternatural length and narrowness of face, began to talk to him about the sins of the Borgias.
"I suppose you never committed a murder yourself?" he asked Henry, languidly.
"No," said Henry, catching the spirit of the foolishness; "no, not yet. I am keeping that--" implying that he was reserving so extreme a stimulant till all his other vices failed him.
Presently there entered a tall young man with a long, thin face, curtained on either side with enormous masses of black hair, like a slip of the young moon glimmering through a pine-wood.
At the same moment there entered, as if by design, his very antithesis: a short, firmly built, clerkly fellow, with a head like a billiard-ball in need of a shave, a big brown moustache, and enormous spectacles.
"That," said the publisher, referring to the moon-in-the-pine-wood young man, "is our young apostle of sentiment, our new man of feeling, the best-hated man we have; and the other is our young apostle of blood. He is all for muscle and brutality--and he makes all the money. It is one of our many fashions just now to sing 'Britain and Brutality.' But my impression is that our young man of feeling will have his day,--though he will have to wait for it. He would hasten it if he would cut his hair; but that, he says, he will never do. His hair, he says, is his battle-cry. Well, he enjoys himself--and loves a fight, though you mightn't think it to look at him."