Embarrassments | Page 2

thing?"
Corvick almost groaned. "Oh, you know, I don't put them back to back
that way; it's the infancy of art! But he gives me a pleasure so rare; the
sense of "--he mused a little--"something or other."
I wondered again. "The sense, pray, of what?"
"My dear man, that's just what I want you to say!"
Even before Corvick had banged the door I had begun, book in hand,
to prepare myself to say it. I sat up with Vereker half the night; Corvick
couldn't have done more than that. He was awfully clever--I stuck to
that, but he wasn't a bit the biggest of the lot. I didn't allude to the lot,
however; I flattered myself that I emerged on this occasion from the
infancy of art. "It's all right," they declared vividly at the office; and
when the number appeared I felt there was a basis on which I could
meet the great man; It gave me confidence for a day or two, and then
that confidence dropped. I had fancied him reading it with relish, but if
Corvick was not satisfied how could Vereker himself be? I reflected
indeed that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even than
the appetite of the scribe. Corvick at all events wrote me from Paris a
little ill-humouredly. Mrs. Erme was pulling round, and I hadn't at all
said what Vereker gave him the sense of.

II
The effect of my visit to Bridges was to turn me out for more profundity.
Hugh Vereker, as I saw him there, was of a contact so void of angles
that I blushed for the poverty of imagination involved in my small
precautions. If he was in spirits it was not because he had read my
review; in fact on the Sunday morning I felt sure he hadn't read it,
though The Middle had been out three days and bloomed, I assured
myself, in the stiff garden of periodicals which gave one of the ormolu

tables the air of a stand at a station. The impression he made on me
personally was such that I wished him to read it, and I corrected to this
end with a surreptitious hand what might be wanting in the careless
conspicuity of the sheet. I am afraid I even watched the result of my
manouvre, but up to luncheon I watched in vain.
When afterwards, in the course of our gregarious walk, I found myself
for half an hour, not perhaps without another manoeuvre, at the great
man's side, the result of his affability was a still livelier desire that he
should not remain in ignorance of the peculiar justice I had done him.
It was not that he seemed to thirst for justice; on the contrary I had not
yet caught in his talk the faintest grunt of a grudge--a note for which
my young experience had already given me an ear. Of late he had had
more recognition, and it was pleasant, as we used to say in The Middle,
to see that it drew him out. He wasn't of course popular, but I judged
one of the sources of his good humour to be precisely that his success
was independent of that. He had none the less become in a manner the
fashion; the critics at least had put on a spurt and caught up with him.
We had found out at last how clever he was, and he had had to make
the best of the loss of his mystery. I was strongly tempted, as I walked
beside him, to let him know how much of that unveiling was my act;
and there was a moment when I probably should have done so had not
one of the ladies of our party, snatching a place at his other elbow, just
then appealed to him in a spirit comparatively selfish. It was very
discouraging: I almost felt the liberty had been taken with myself.
I had had on my tongue's end, for my own part, a phrase or two about
the right word at the right time; but later on I was glad not to have
spoken, for when on our return we clustered at tea I perceived Lady
Jane, who had not been out with us, brandishing The Middle with her
longest arm. She had taken it up at her leisure; she was delighted with
what she had found, and I saw that, as a mistake in a man may often be
a felicity in a woman, she would practically do for me what I hadn't
been able to do for myself. "Some sweet little truths that needed to be
spoken," I heard her declare, thrusting the paper at rather a
bewildered couple by the fireplace. She grabbed it away