Her Faithful Knight — page 302: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

298 The Uses of Advertisement. lock, the key of which was never allowed to go out of his possession, in which he had carefully pasted all printed references to himself, either as the “Hon. Darcy Derrick,” under which name he had published several tiny volumes of erotic verse, characterized in one specially slashing no- tice as being “nastier than Swinburne and sillier than the poet Bunn ;” or as “Sergius Trevelyan,” actor in the Eng- lish provinces and the United States, the critics of which latter place declared him to be “the most weak-backed, inarticulate, expressionless and wooden apology for an alleged actor among all the incompetent dudes of good family annually foisted upon us by the played-out old country over the water; or as “Mr. Darcy,’ theatrical manager and author of what newspaper men concurred in pronouncing “one of the feeblest and worst plays pro- duced upon the English stage during the present century.” Far from being saddened or discouraged by these un- flattering references to his artistic capabilities, Darcy spent many hours of his leisure in reading them and gloat- ing over the censure so lavishly meted out to him. “Only the French understand art, and only the Irish possess humor,” he would say with a pitying smile. “And only a genius belonging to both nations, with an infusion of the Italian thrown in, can understand me!” Now that his name and station as the Hon. Darcy, brother to Lord Derrick, were made public, he looked for- ward to becoming speedily the hero of the hour by reason of his connection with the “Hammersmith Mystery.” It was probable that he would be interviewed, and that wood-cuts libeiling his features would appear in the even- ing papers. “T must get taken again,” he murmured to himself as he stretched his arms out of bed and helped himself to a tumbler of soda from the siphon by his side. “None of my photographs really do me justice. Women and girls GCoOmichbooksnco