The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in Public Opinion, which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come too late. If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else. A---- regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told him of "P.O.'s" eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I am secretly very nettled too because E---- treated the whole matter very indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper's critique, and tho' she volunteered to buy several copies to send to friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed out of her mind. Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his photo into the picture papers--a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully refused. (And so did I.) But what a queer woman!... [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with wormwood and gall.]