Quince: A fool’s luck! He happened to hit the psychological moment. When he leaped into the lists with The Haunted Taxicab taxis had just come out, and at the same moment there was a mania for mystery stories. Take two popular motifs, mix recklessly, spice with sentiment and sauce with sensation—there you have the recipé of a best-seller. His book fluked into favour. His publishers put their weight behind it. In a month he found himself famous from Maine to Mexico. But he couldn’t do it again; no, not in a thousand years. What has he done since? Live on his name. Step cunningly in his tracks. Bah! I tell you Norman Dane’s an upstart, a faker; to the very heart of him a shallow, ignorant pretender....
Whatever else the poor chap might be was lost in the distance as the two men moved away. For a long time after they had gone I did not stir. The fluttering snow-butterflies seemed to have become great moths, that hovered in the radiance of the nearest arc-light and dashed to a watery doom. Pensively I gazed into that greenish glamour, pulling at a burnt-out cigarette.
At last I rose, and going to the book-case regarded the nine volumes of flamboyant isolation.
“An upstart,” I sighed softly; “a faker, a pretender....”
And to tell the truth I was sorely taken aback; for you see in my hours of industry I am a maker of books and my pen name is Norman Dane.
CHAPTER II
THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS
Whether or not a sense of humour is an attribute of the Divine, I am too ignorant of theology to conjecture; but I am sure that as a sustaining power amid the tribulations of life it is one of the blessedest of dispensations.
For a moment, I must confess, the words of Quince and Vaine stung me to resentment. Being one of these people who think in moving pictures, I had a gratifying vision in which I was clutching them savagely and knocking their heads together. Then the whole thing struck me on the funny side, and a little page boy, entering to turn on the lights, must have been amazed to hear me burst into sudden laughter.
So that presently, as Mr. Quince, having spilt some cigar ash over the still uncut leaves of Poems Plutonian, was arising to daintily dust the volume, I approached him with a bright and happy smile.
“Hullo, Quince,” I began, cheerily.