Whenever since I've happened to have a glimpse of them they were
still blazing away--still missing it, I mean, deliciously. YOU
miss it, my dear fellow, with inimitable assurance; the fact of
your being awfully clever and your article's being awfully nice
doesn't make a hair's breadth of difference. It's quite with you
rising young men," Vereker laughed, "that I feel most what a
failure I am!"
I listened with keen interest; it grew keener as he talked. "YOU a
failure--heavens! What then may your 'little point' happen to be?"
"Have I got to TELL you, after all these years and labours?" There
was something in the friendly reproach of this--jocosely
exaggerated--that made me, as an ardent young seeker for truth,
blush to the roots of my hair. I'm as much in the dark as ever,
though I've grown used in a sense to my obtuseness; at that moment,
however, Vereker's happy accent made me appear to myself, and
probably to him, a rare dunce. I was on the point of exclaiming
"Ah yes, don't tell me: for my honour, for that of the craft,
don't!" when he went on in a manner that showed he had read my
thought and had his own idea of the probability of our some day
redeeming ourselves. "By my little point I mean--what shall I call
it?--the particular thing I've written my books most FOR.
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