Chapter 38

That he could write there was no question. For a young man of twenty-three, “Rust” was an extraordinary book, vivid and fresh as a cold May morning, naïvely crude in places, but perhaps all the more vivid because of its crudities. It had the tang of unripe fruit. It was audacious, and modern to its finger-tips. The Venerable, who had read novels for fifty years, and who had passed through William Black, Meredith and Hardy, Stanley Weyman and Anthony Hope, Mrs. Humphrey Ward and Joseph Conrad, to Wells and Bennett, …