interviewers, the photographers, on the whole were far easier to deal with. In vain he endeavoured to cultivate a more knowing manner; he was ignorant of any practical method of achieving this desirable result. Frankly, he was appalled by the social obligations his new position had forced on him. Edwards had entertained him at dinner or late supper once or twice and at these gatherings, which lingered in his memory like so many painful major operations, he had encountered other writers, actors, and even a few people from the richer and more formal social world. These others in their turn began to burden him with invitations. He accepted these invitations—he did not know how to refuse them—and hesitated awkwardly in the corners of over-decorated drawing-rooms whence he was sought out and pawed over. Nevertheless, his unseemly deportment appeared to have no immediate deterrent effect on the quantity of invitations he received. The momentum of his fame was sufficient by now to carry him along by itself.
Under the rays of this unwelcome searchlight Ambrose became chronically uncomfortable and unhappy, sensations enhanced by his apparent inability to write. He was beginning, indeed, to believe that he had walked into an impasse from which there was
