"Not at all, not at all," Callan interrupted, blandly. "I've known you and you've known me for a number of years."
A sudden picture danced before my eyes--the portrait of the Callan of the old days--the fawning, shady individual, with the seedy clothes, the furtive eyes and the obliging manners.
"Why, yes," I said; "but I don't see that that gives me any claim."
"The lapse of time," he said in his grand manner, "rivets what we may call the bands of association."
He paused to inscribe this sentence on the tablets of his memory. It would be dragged in--to form a purple patch--in his new serial.
"You see," he went on, "I've written a good deal of autobiographical matter and it would verge upon self-advertisement to do more. You know how much I dislike _that_. So I showed Fox your sketch in the _Kensington_."
"The Jenkins story?" I said. "How did you come to see it?"
"Then send me the _Kensington_," he answered. There was a touch of sourness in his tone, and I remembered that the _Kensington_ I had seen had been ballasted with seven goodly pages by Callan himself--seven unreadable packed pages of a serial.
"As I was saying," Callan began again, "you ought to know me very well, and I suppose you are acquainted with my books. As for the rest, I will give you what material you want."
"But, my dear Callan," I said, "I've never tried my hand at that sort of thing."
Callan silenced me with a wave of his hand.
"It struck both Fox and myself that your--your 'Jenkins' was just what was wanted," he said; "of course, that was a study of a kind of broken-down painter. But it was well done."
I bowed my head. Praise from Callan was best acknowledged in silence.
"You see, what we want, or rather what Fox wants," he explained, "is a kind of series of studies of celebrities _chez eux_. Of course, they are not broken down. But if you can treat them as you treated Jenkins --get them in their studies, surrounded by what in their case stands for the broken lay figures and the faded serge curtains--it will be exactly the thing. It will be a new line, or rather--what is a great deal better, mind you--an old line treated in a slightly, very slightly different way. That's what the public wants."
"Ah, yes," I said, "that's what the public wants. But all the same, it's been done time out of mind before. Why, I've seen photographs of you and your arm-chair and your pen-wiper and so on, half a score of times in the sixpenny magazines."