Whether they WERE or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.

There were other considerations, the first of which was that I already had two or three recruits in use, notably a young person with big feet, in alpaca, from Kilburn, who for a couple of years had come to me regularly for my illustrations and with whom I was still--perhaps ignobly--satisfied.

I frankly explained to my visitors how the case stood, but they had taken more precautions than I supposed.

They had reasoned out their opportunity, for Claude Rivet had told them of the projected EDITION DE LUXE of one of the writers of our day--the rarest of the novelists--who, long neglected by the multitudinous vulgar, and dearly prized by the attentive (need I mention Philip Vincent ?) had had the happy fortune of seeing, late in life, the dawn and then the full light of a higher criticism; an estimate in which on the part of the public there was something really of expiation.

The edition preparing, planned by a publisher of taste, was practically an act of high reparation; the woodcuts with which it was to be enriched were the homage of English art to one of the most independent representatives of English letters.