The stall-keeper glanced at his enthusiastic customer, and saw a sunburnt
face, eager as a boy's.

'Oh!' he said doubtfully, 'I don't know whether you will like it. It's
violently modern. Perhaps this,' and he suggested with an outstretched
forefinger a crimson volume explained by its ornamentation of a couple of
assegais bound together with a necklace of teeth. Drake laughed at the
application of the homoeopathic principle to the sale of books.

'No, I will take this,' he said, and, moving aside from the stall, stood
for a little turning the book over and over in his hands, feeling its
weight and looking incessantly at the title-page, wondering, you would
say, that the author had accomplished so much.

He had grounds for wonder, too. His thoughts went back across the last
ten years, and he remembered Mallinson's clamouring for a reputation; a
name--that had been the essential thing, no matter what the career in
which it was to be won. Work he had classified according to the
opportunities it afforded of public recognition; and his classification
varied from day to day. A _cause célèbre_ would suggest the Bar, a
published sermon the Church, a flaming poster persuade to the stage. In a
word, he had looked upon a profession as no more than a sounding-board.

It had always seemed to Drake that this fervid desire for fame, as a
thing apart in itself, not as a symbol of success won in a cherished
pursuit, argued some quality of weakness in the man, something unstable
which would make for failure. His surprise was increased by an inability
to recollect that Mallinson had ever considered literature as a means to
his end. Long sojourning in the wilderness, moreover, had given Drake an