Chapter 1

"There are several objections to it, but I'll take it if you'll alter
it," Mr. Locket's rather curt note had said; and there was no waste
of words in the postscript in which he had added: "If you'll come in
and see me, I'll show you what I mean." This communication had
reached Jersey Villas by the first post, and Peter Baron had scarcely
swallowed his leathery muffin before he got into motion to obey the
editorial behest. He knew that such precipitation looked eager, and
he had no desire to look eager--it was not in his interest; but how
could he maintain a godlike calm, principled though he was in favour
of it, the first time one of the great magazines had accepted, even
with a cruel reservation, a specimen of his ardent young genius?

It was not till, like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, he began
to be aware of the great roar of the "underground," that, in his
third-class carriage, the cruelty of the reservation penetrated, with
the taste of acrid smoke, to his inner sense. It was really
degrading to be eager in the face of having to "alter." Peter Baron
tried to figure to himself at that moment that he was not flying to
betray the extremity of his need, but hurrying to fight for some of
those passages of superior boldness which were exactly what the
conductor of the "Promiscuous Review" would be sure to be down upon.
He made believe--as if to the greasy fellow-passenger opposite--that
he felt indignant; but he saw that to the small round eye of this
still more downtrodden brother he represented selfish success. He
would have liked to linger in the conception that he had been
"approached" by the Promiscuous; but whatever might be thought in the
office of that periodical of some of his flights of fancy, there was
no want of vividness in his occasional suspicion that he passed there
for a familiar bore. The only thing that was clearly flattering was
the fact that the Promiscuous rarely published fiction. He should
therefore be associated with a deviation from a solemn habit, and
that would more than make up to him for a phrase in one of Mr.
Locket's inexorable earlier notes, a phrase which still rankled,
about his showing no symptom of the faculty really creative. "You
don't seem able to keep a character together," this pitiless monitor
had somewhere else remarked. Peter Baron, as he sat in his corner
while the train stopped, considered, in the befogged gaslight, the
bookstall standard of literature and asked himself whose character
had fallen to pieces now. Tormenting indeed had always seemed to him
such a fate as to have the creative head without the creative hand.

It should be mentioned, however, that before he started on his