“But that’s the very thing, my dear fellow!” Lionel Moore cried, as he was getting on his white silk stockings.  “The very thing!  She wants attention drawn to the book.  She doesn’t want to be passed over.  She wants to have the name of the book and the name of the author brought before the public—­”

“Her real name?”

“Yes, certainly, if that is advisable.”

“Oh, well, there’s not much trouble about that.  You can always minister to a mind diseased by a morbid craving for notoriety if a paragraph in a country newspaper will suffice.  So this is part of what your fashionable friends expect from you, Linn, in return for their patronage?”

“It’s nothing of the kind; she would do as much for me, if she knew how, or if there were any occasion.”

“Oh, well, it is no great thing,” said Mangan, who was really a very good-natured sort of person, despite his supercilious talk.  “In fact, you might do her ladyship a more substantial service than that.”

“How?”

“I thought you knew Quirk—­Octavius Quirk?”

“But you have always spoken so disparagingly of him!” the other exclaimed.

“What has that to do with it?” Mangan asked; and then he continued, in his indolent fashion:  “Why, I thought you knew all about Quirk.  Quirk belongs to a band of literary weaklings, not any one of whom can do anything worth speaking of; but they try their best to write up one another; and sometimes they take it into their heads to help an acquaintance—­and then their cry is like that of a pack of beagles? you would think the press of London, or a considerable section of it, had but one voice.  Why don’t you take Lady Arthur’s—­Lady Constance’s—­what’s her name?—­why don’t you take her book to the noble association of log-rollers?  I presume the novel is trash; they’ll welcome it all the more.  She is a woman—­she is not to be feared; she hasn’t as yet committed the crime of being successful—­she isn’t to be envied and anonymously attacked.  That’s the ticket for you, Linn.  They mayn’t convince the public that Lady What’s-her-name is a wonderful person; but they will convince her that she is; and what more does she want?”

“I don’t understand you, Maurice!” the young baritone cried, almost angrily.  “Again and again you’ve spoken of Octavius Quirk as if he were beneath contempt.”

“What has that to do with it?” the other repeated, placidly.  “As an independent writer, Quirk is quite beneath contempt—­quite.  There is no backbone in his writing at all, and he knows his own weakness; and he thinks he can conceal it by the use of furious adjectives.  He is always in a frantic rush and flurry, that produces no impression on anybody.  A whirlwind of feathers, that’s about it.  He goes out into the highway and brandishes a double-handed sword—­in order to sweep off the head of a buttercup.  And I suppose he expects the public to believe that his wild language, all about nothing, means strength; just as he hopes