Failure, if it be a plain, unvarnished, complete failure, and even though it be a squalid failure, has always a certain dignity. 🔊 I avoided Soames because he made me feel rather vulgar. 🔊 John Lane had published, by this time, two little books of mine, and they had had a pleasant little success of esteem. 🔊 I was a—slight, but definite—"personality." 🔊 Frank Harris had engaged me to kick up my heels in The Saturday Review, Alfred Harmsworth was letting me do likewise in The Daily Mail. 🔊 I was just what Soames wasn't. 🔊 And he shamed my gloss. 🔊 Had I known that he really and firmly believed in the greatness of what he as an artist had achieved, I might not have shunned him. 🔊 No man who hasn't lost his vanity can be held to have altogether failed. 🔊 Soames's dignity was an illusion of mine. 🔊 One day, in the first week of June, 1897, that illusion went. 🔊 But on the evening of that day Soames went, too. 🔊

I had been out most of the morning and, as it was too late to reach home in time for luncheon, I sought the Vingtième. 🔊 This little place—Restaurant du Vingtième Siècle, to give it its full title—had been discovered in '96 by the poets and prosaists, but had now been more or less abandoned in favor of some later find. 🔊 I don't think it lived long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. 🔊 The Vingtième was but a small whitewashed room, leading out into the street at one end and into a kitchen at the other. 🔊 The proprietor and cook was a Frenchman, known to us as Monsieur Vingtième; the waiters were his two daughters, Rose and Berthe; and the food, according to faith, was good. 🔊 The tables were so narrow and were set so close together that there was space for twelve of them, six jutting from each wall. 🔊