He would have preferred the praise that had greeted it to have been less violent and more clearly defined.  Of all the criticisms, the only one that lingered in his mind was the curt comment, “The author had nothing to say, and he has said it.”  He thought it was unfair, but he had remembered it.  At the same time, in examining his own character, he could not find that masterfulness that seemed to him necessary in a great man.  But for the most part he was content to accept his new honours with a placid satisfaction, and to smile genially upon a world that was eager to credit him with qualities that possibly he did not possess.  For if his book was no longer read his fame as an author seemed to be established on a rock.  Society, with a larger S than that which he had hitherto adorned, was delighted to find after two notable failures that genius could still be presentable, and the author was rather more than that.  He was rich, he had that air of the distinguished army officer which falls so easily to those who occupy the pleasant position of sleeping partner in the City, and he had just the right shade of amused modesty with which to meet inquiries as to his literary intentions.  In a word, he was an author of whom any country—­even France, that prolific parent of presentable authors—­would have been proud.  Even his wife, who had thought it an excellent joke that her husband should have written a book, had to take him seriously as an author when she found that their social position was steadily improving.  With feminine tact she gave him a fountain-pen on his birthday, from which he was meant to conclude that she believed in his mission as an artist.

Meanwhile, with the world at his feet, the author spent an appreciable part of his time in visiting the second-hand bookshops and buying copies of his book absurdly cheap.  He carried these waifs home and stored them in an attic secretly, for he would have found it hard to explain his motives to the intellectually childless.  In the first flush of authorship he had sent a number of presentation copies of his book to writers whom he admired, and he noticed without bitterness that some of these volumes with their neatly turned inscriptions were coming back to him through this channel.  At all the second-hand bookshops he saw long-haired young men looking over the books without buying them, and he thought these must be authors, but he was too shy to speak to them, though he had a great longing to know other writers.  He wanted to ask them questions concerning their methods of work, for he was having trouble with his second book.  He had read an article in which the writer said that the great fault of modern fiction was that authors were more concerned to produce good chapters than to produce good books.  It seemed to him that in his first book he had only aimed at good sentences, but he knew no one with whom he could discuss such matters.