THAT this hope was to be frustrated¹ Bernald learned from Howland Wade²’s own lips, the day before the two young men were to meet at Portchester.

“I can’t really, my dear fellow,” the Interpreter lisped, passing a polished hand over the faded smoothness of his face. “Oh, an authentic³ engagement, I assure you: otherwise, to oblige old Bob I’d submit cheerfully to looking over his foundling’s literature. But I’m pledged this week to the Pellerin Society of Kenosha: I had a hand in founding it, and for two years now they’ve been patiently waiting for a word from me — the Fiat⁴ Lux, so to speak. You see it’s a ministry⁵, Bernald — I assure you, I look upon my calling quite religiously.”

As Bernald listened, his disappointment gradually changed to relief. Howland, on trial, always turned out to be too insufferable, and the pleasure of watching his antics was invariably lost in the impulse to put a sanguinary end to them.

“If he’d only keep his beastly pink hands off Pellerin,” Bernald groaned⁶, thinking of the thick manuscript condemned⁷ to perpetual incarceration⁸ in his own desk by the publication of Howland’s “definitive” work on the great man. One couldn’t, after Howland Wade, expose one’s self to the derision of writing about Pellerin: the eagerness with which Wade’s book had been devoured⁹ proved, not that the public had enough appetite for another, but simply that, for a stomach so undiscriminating, anything better than Wade had given it would be too good. And Bernald, in the confidence that his own work was open to this objection, had stoically locked it up. Yet if he had resigned his

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