Chapter 2

Her figure faded into the darkness, as pale things waver down into deep
water, and as soon as she disappeared my sense of humour returned. The
episode appeared more clearly, as a flirtation with an enigmatic, but
decidedly charming, chance travelling companion. The girl was a riddle,
and a riddle once guessed is a very trivial thing. She, too, would be a
very trivial thing when I had found a solution. It occurred to me that
she wished me to regard her as a symbol, perhaps, of the future--as a
type of those who are to inherit the earth, in fact. She had been
playing the fool with me, in her insolent modernity. She had wished me
to understand that I was old-fashioned; that the frame of mind of which
I and my fellows were the inheritors was over and done with. We were to
be compulsorily retired; to stand aside superannuated. It was obvious
that she was better equipped for the swiftness of life. She had a
something--not only quickness of wit, not only ruthless determination,
but a something quite different and quite indefinably more impressive.
Perhaps it was only the confidence of the superseder, the essential
quality that makes for the empire of the Occidental. But I was not a
negro--not even relatively a Hindoo. I was somebody, confound it, I was
somebody.

As an author, I had been so uniformly unsuccessful, so absolutely
unrecognised, that I had got into the way of regarding myself as ahead
of my time, as a worker for posterity. It was a habit of mind--the only
revenge that I could take upon despiteful Fate. This girl came to
confound me with the common herd--she declared herself to be that very
posterity for which I worked.

She was probably a member of some clique that called themselves Fourth
Dimensionists--just as there had been pre-Raphaelites. It was a matter
of cant allegory. I began to wonder how it was that I had never heard of
them. And how on earth had they come to hear of me!

"She must have read something of mine," I found myself musing: "the
Jenkins story perhaps. It must have been the Jenkins story; they gave
it a good place in their rotten magazine. She must have seen that it was
the real thing, and...." When one is an author one looks at things in
that way, you know.

By that time I was ready to knock at the door of the great Callan. I
seemed to be jerked into the commonplace medium of a great, great--oh,
an infinitely great--novelist's home life. I was led into a well-lit
drawing-room, welcomed by the great man's wife, gently propelled into a
bedroom, made myself tidy, descended and was introduced into the
sanctum, before my eyes had grown accustomed to the lamp-light. Callan
was seated upon his sofa surrounded by an admiring crowd of very local