"Yes, certainly, if that is advisable."

"Oh, well, there's not much trouble about that. You can always minister
to a mind diseased by a morbid craving for notoriety if a paragraph in
a country newspaper will suffice. So this is part of what your
fashionable friends expect from you, Linn, in return for their
patronage?"

"It's nothing of the kind; she would do as much for me, if she knew how,
or if there were any occasion."

"Oh, well, it is no great thing," said Mangan, who was really a very
good-natured sort of person, despite his supercilious talk. "In fact,
you might do her ladyship a more substantial service than that."

"How?"

"I thought you knew Quirk--Octavius Quirk?"

"But you have always spoken so disparagingly of him!" the other
exclaimed.

"What has that to do with it?" Mangan asked; and then he continued, in
his indolent fashion: "Why, I thought you knew all about Quirk. Quirk
belongs to a band of literary weaklings, not any one of whom can do
anything worth speaking of; but they try their best to write up one
another; and sometimes they take it into their heads to help an
acquaintance--and then their cry is like that of a pack of beagles? you
would think the press of London, or a considerable section of it,