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my leg. Rather hellish, but I suppose it doesn’t seem so to him.”
    Lionel, tormented with a more profound and widely spread neuralgia than his employer’s, had by pressure of work been prevented from dwelling on it that day. Soon after his arrival Mornington had broken into the office to ask if he could have a set of proofs of Sir Giles Tumulty’s book on Vessels of Folklore . “I’ve got an Archdeacon coming to see me,” he said—“don’t bow—and an Archdeacon ought to be interested in folklore, don’t you think? I always used to feel that Archdeacons were a kind of surviving folklore themselves—they seem pre-Christian and almost prehistoric: a lingering and bi-sexual tradition. Besides, publicity, you know. Don’t Archdeacons charge? ‘Charge, Archdeacons, charge! On, Castra Parvulorum, on! were the last words of Mornington.’”
    â€œI wish they were!” Lionel said. “There are the proofs, on that shelf: take them and go! take them all.”
    â€œI don’t want them all. Business, business. We can’t have murders and Bank Holidays every day.”
    He routed out the proofs and departed; and when by the afternoon post an almost indecipherable postcard from Sir Giles asked for the removal of a short paragraph on page 218, Lionel did not think of making the alteration on the borrowed set. He marked the paragraph for deletion on the proofs he was about to return for Press, cursing Sir Giles a little for the correction—which, however, as it came at the end of a whole division of the book, would cause no serious inconvenience—and much more for his handwriting. A sentence beginning—he at last made out—“It has been suggested to me” immediately became totally illegible, and only recovered meaning towards the end, where the figures 218 rode like a monumental Pharaoh over the diminutive abbreviations which surrounded it. But the instruction was comprehensible, if the reason for it was not, and Lionel dispatched the proofs to the printer.
    When, later on, the Archdeacon arrived, Mornington greeted him with real and false warmth mingled. He liked the clergyman, but he disliked manuscripts, and a manuscript on the League of Nations promised him some hours’ boredom. For, in spite of his disclaimer, he knew he would have to skim the book at least, before he obtained further opinions, and the League of Nations lay almost in the nadir of all the despicable things in the world. It seemed to him so entire and immense a contradiction of aristocracy that it drove him into a positive hunger for mental authority imposed by force. He desired to see Plato and his like ruling with power, and remembered with longing the fierce inquisition of the Laws . However, he welcomed the Archdeacon without showing this, and settled down to chat about the book.
    â€œGood evening, Mr.—Archdeacon,” he said rapidly, suddenly remembering that he didn’t know the other’s name, and at the same moment that it would no doubt be on the manuscript and that he would look at it immediately. “Good of you to come. Come in and sit down.”
    The Archdeacon, with an agreeable smile, complied, and, as he laid the parcel on the desk, said: “I feel a little remorseful now, Mr. Mornington. Or I should if I didn’t realize that this is your business.”
    â€œThat,” Mornington said, laughing, “is a clear, cool, lucid, diabolical way of looking at it. If you could manage to feel a little remorse I should feel almost tender—an unusual feeling towards a manuscript.”
    â€œThe relation between an author and a publisher,” the Archdeacon remarked, “always seems to me to partake a little of the nature of a duel, an abstract, impersonal duel. There is no feeling about it——”
    â€œOh, isn’t there?” Mornington interjected. “Ask Persimmons; ask our