Two hours were gone. There ought to have been ten volumes got through, and not ten pages finished of a single one.
He hurled Fifine to the other end of the room, and took another work by the same poet. It was Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and the title looked promising. No doubt a light and pretty fairy story. Also the beginning reeled itself off with a fatal facility which allured the reader onwards.
When the clock struck six he was sitting among the volumes on the table, with Red Cotton Nightcap Country still in his hand. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching.
He looked about him wildly, and tried to collect his faculties. Then he arose and cursed Robert Browning. He cursed him eating, drinking, and sleeping. And then he took all his volumes, and disposing them carefully in the fire-place, he set light to them.
"I wish," he said, "that I could put the Poet there, too." I think he would have done it, this mild and gentle-hearted stranger, so strongly was his spirit moved to wrath.
He could not stay any longer in the room. It seemed to be haunted with ghosts of unintelligible sentences; things in familiar garb, which floated before his eyes and presented faces of inscrutable mystery. He seized his hat and fled.
He went straight to Jack Dunquerque's club, and found that hero in the reading-room.
"I have a favour to ask you," he began in a hurried and nervous manner. "If you have not yet asked Mr. Robert Browning to the little spread next week, don't."
"Certainly not, if you wish it. Why?"
"Because, sir, I have spent eight hours over his works."