They had known each other about six months when he proposed to her, and she wouldn\'t have him. He went on proposing at ridiculously short intervals, but it wasn\'t a bit of good. Wrackham wouldn\'t give his consent, and it seemed Antigone wouldn\'t marry anybody without it. He said Burton was too poor, and Antigone too young; but the real reason was that Burton\'s proposal came as a shock to his vanity. I told you how coolly he had appropriated the young man\'s ardent and irrepressible devotion; he had looked on him as a disciple, a passionate pilgrim to his shrine; and the truth, the disillusionment, was more than he could stand. He\'d never had a disciple or a pilgrim of Burton\'s quality. He could ignore and disparage Burton\'s brilliance when it suited his own purpose, and when it suited his own purpose he thrust Burton and his brilliance down your throat. Thus he never said a word about Burton\'s novels except that he once went out of his way to tell me that he hadn\'t read them (I believe he was afraid to). Antigone must have noticed that, and she must have understood the meaning of it. I know she never spoke to him about anything that Burton did. She must have felt he couldn\'t bear it. Anyhow, he wasn\'t going to recognize Burton\'s existence as a novelist; it was as if he thought his silence could extinguish him. But he knew all about Burton\'s critical work; there was his splendid "Essay on Ford Lankester"; he couldn\'t ignore or disparage that, and he didn\'t want to. He had had his eye on him from the first as a young man, an exceptionally brilliant young man who might be useful to him.

And so, though he wouldn\'t let the brilliant young [Pg 192] man marry his daughter, he wasn\'t going to lose sight of him; and Burton continued his passionate pilgrimages to Wildweather Hall.

I didn\'t see Wrackham for a long time, but I heard of him; I heard all I wanted, for Burton was by no means so tender to him as he used to be. And I heard of poor Antigone. I gathered that she wasn\'t happy, that she was losing some of her splendor and vitality. In all Burton\'s pictures of her you could see her droop.

This went on for nearly three years, and by that time Burton, as you know, had made a name for himself that couldn\'t be ignored. He was also making a modest, a rather painfully modest income. And one evening he burst into my rooms and told me it was all right. Antigone had come round. Wrackham hadn\'t, but that didn\'t matter. Antigone had said she didn\'t care. They might have to wait a bit, but that didn\'t matter either. The great thing was that she had accepted him, that she had had the courage to oppose her father. You see, they scored because, as long as Wrackham had his eye on Burton, he didn\'t forbid him the house.

I went down with him soon after that by Wrackham\'s invitation. I\'m not sure that he hadn\'t his eye on me; he had his eye on everybody in those days when, you know, his vogue, his tremendous vogue, was just perceptibly on the decline.

I found him changed, rather pitiably changed, and in low spirits. "They"—the terrible, profane young men—had been "going for him" again, as he called it.

Of course when they really went for him he was all right. He could get over it by saying that they did it out of sheer malevolence, that they were jealous of his success, that a writer cannot be great without making enemies, and that perhaps he wouldn\'t have known [Pg 193] how great he was if he hadn\'t made any. But they didn\'t give him much opportunity. They were too clever for that. They knew exactly how to flick him on the raw. It wasn\'t by the things they said so much as by the things they deliberately didn\'t say; and they could get at him any time, easily, by praising other people.

Of course none of it did any violence to the supreme illusion. He was happy. I think he liked writing his dreadful books. (There must have been something soothing in the act with its level, facile fluency.) I know he enjoyed bringing them out. He gloated over the announcements. He drew a voluptuous pleasure from his proofs. He lived from one day of publication to the other; there wasn\'t a detail of the whole dreary business that he would have missed. It all nourished the illusion. I don\'t suppose he ever had a shadow of misgiving as to his power. What he worried about was his............