Coffee and cigars were ordered, and Harding extolled the charm and grace of pastels.

Thompson said—­“I keep pastels for my hours of idleness—­cowardly hours, when I have no heart to struggle with nature, and may but smile and kiss my hand to her at a distance.  For dreaming I know nothing like pastel; it is the painter’s opium pipe....  Latour was the greatest pastellist of the eighteenth century, and he never attempted more than a drawing heightened with colour.  But how suggestive, how elegant, how well-bred!”

Then in reply to some flattery on the personality of his art, Thompson said, “It is strange, for I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine.  What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament—­temperament is the word—­I know nothing.  When I hear people talk about temperament, it always seem to me like the strong man in the fair, who straddles his legs, and asks some one to step upon the palm of his hand.”

Drake joined in the discussion, and the chatter that came from this enormous man was as small as his head, which sat like a pin’s-head above his shoulders.  Platt drifted from the obscene into the incomprehensible.  The room was fast emptying, and the waiter loitered, waiting to be paid.

“We must be getting off,” said Mike; “it is nearly eleven o’clock, and we have still the best part of the paper to read through.”

“Don’t be in such a damned hurry,” said Frank, authoritatively.

Harding bade them good-night at the door, and the editors walked down Fleet Street.  To pass up a rickety court to the printer’s, or to go through the stage-door to the stage, produced similar sensations in Mike.  The white-washed wall, the glare of the raw gas, the low monotonous voice of the reading-boy, like one studying a part, or perhaps like the murmur of the distant audience; the boy coming in asking for “copy” or proof, like the call-boy, with his “Curtain’s going up, gentlemen.”  Is there not analogy between the preparation of the paper that will be before the public in the morning, and the preparation of the play that will be before its eyes in the evening?

From the glass closet where they waited for the “pages,” they could see the compositors bending over the forms.  The light lay upon a red beard, a freckled neck, the crimson of the volutes of an ear.

In the glass closet there were three wooden chairs, a table, and an inkstand; on the shelf by the door a few books—­the London Directory, an English Dictionary, a French Dictionary—­the titles of the remaining books did not catch the eye.  As they waited, for no “pages” would be ready for them for some time, Mike glanced at stray numbers of two trade journals.  It seemed to him strange that the same compositors who set up these papers should set up the Pilgrim.