Observation too was a kind of work and experience a kind of success; London dinners were all material and London ladies were fruitful toil.

"No one has the faintest conception of what I'm trying for," he said to me, "and not many have read three pages that I've written; but I must dine with them first--they'll find out why when they've time." It was rather rude justice perhaps; but the fatigue had the merit of being a new sort, while the phantasmagoric town was probably after all less of a battlefield than the haunted study.

He once told me that he had had no personal life to speak of since his fortieth year, but had had more than was good for him before.

London closed the parenthesis and exhibited him in relations; one of the most inevitable of these being that in which he found himself to Mrs.Weeks Wimbush, wife of the boundless brewer and proprietress of the universal menagerie.

In this establishment, as everybody knows, on occasions when the crush is great, the animals rub shoulders freely with the spectators and the lions sit down for whole evenings with the lambs.
It had been ominously clear to me from the first that in Neil Paraday this lady, who, as all the world agreed, was tremendous fun, considered that she had secured a prime attraction, a creature of almost heraldic oddity.