Presently, after laughter, snipping out of pages with scissors, and some unseemly language, Mr. Heeley began to write.
'Oh, he's shot up to six foot eight!' exclaimed Jack, interrupting the scribe.
'Snow!' observed the bearded man styled Clementina. 'He dies in the snow. Listen.' He read a passage from Henry's final scene, ending with 'His spirit had passed.' 'Chuck me the scissors, Jack.'
Mr. Heeley paused, looked up, and then drew his pen through what he had written.
'I say, boys,'he almost whispered, 'I'll praise it, eh? I'll take it seriously. It'll be simply delicious.'
'Oh, the chief won't notice it! It'll be just for us three, and a few at the club.'
Then there was hard scribbling, and pasting of extracts into blank spaces, and more laughter.
'"If an advance were possible,"' Clementina read, over Mr. Heeley's shoulder. 'You'll give the show away, you fool!'
'No, I shan't, Clemmy, my boy,' said Mr. Heeley judicially. 'They'll stand simply anything. I bet you what you like Onions Winter quotes that all over the place.'
And he handed the last sheet of the review to a messenger, and ran off to the editorial room to report that instructions had been executed. Jack and Clementina relighted their pipes with select bits of _A Question of Cubits_, and threw the remaining débris of the volume into the waste-paper basket. The hour was twenty minutes past midnight....
The great majority of the reviews were exceedingly favourable, and even where praise was diluted with blame, the blame was administered with respect, as a dentist might respectfully pain a prince in pulling his tooth out. The public had voted for Henry, and the press, organ of public opinion, displayed a wise discretion. The daring freshness of Henry's plot, his inventive power, his skill in 'creating atmosphere,' his gift for pathos, his unfailing wholesomeness, and his knack in the management of narrative, were noted and eulogized in dozens of articles. Nearly every reviewer prophesied brilliant success for him; several admitted frankly that his equipment revealed genius of the first rank. A mere handful of papers scorned him. Prominent among this handful was the _Whitehall Gazette_. The distinguished mouthpiece of the superior classes dealt with _A Question of Cubits_ at the foot of a column, in a brief paragraph headed 'Our Worst Fears realized.' The paragraph, which was nothing but a summary of the plot, concluded in these terms: 'So he expired, every inch of him, in the snow, a victim to the British Public's rapacious appetite for the sentimental.'