"And it's lined
with so many nice little mirrors in Louis XVI frames, that you can
hardly blame the frog if he imagines that his importance, like his
reflections, extends to the ends of the earth, in that multiplied
glitter of gilt."

Brantome began to laugh, then turned serious.

"You must be desperate," he commented.

"That is your fault. I've always had a longing for what I find in
these rooms; but that longing isn't backed up by any capacity. When
one of these friends of yours has suffered a loss, his art still
remains. And maybe it becomes a richer art because of his loss."

She sighed, her pale brown cheek resting against her black-gloved hand,
her black fur collar framing her neck on which the strand of pearls was
less lustrous than the teeth between her parted lips.

His leonine old visage grew soft as he looked at her, and under his
white mustaches of a Viking there appeared a sad smile, as if he were
thinking that things might have been different with him, had she, with
this beauty and these predilections, been young when he had been young.

"Oh, no, you must not stop coming here," he protested gently. "It's
only right that these poor fellows should have their glimpses of a
composite of all the beautiful muses--who, as you'll remember, were not
themselves practitioners in the arts, but the inspirers of artists.
Isn't there, for women, besides the joys of personal accomplishment,
another satisfaction, which one might call vicarious?"

She gave him again her bitter, listless smile.

"You believe that stuff about women's inspiration?"

"But why not, good heavens! When it is a fact of life----"

He bade her consider the great music written by men. Almost invariably
one found in its depths a longing for synthesis with some ideal beauty,
produced by thoughts of some idealized woman. Or else, by woman in the
abstract--that obsession which, ever since the days of Dante and the
troubadours, had attained a nearly religious quality, against whose
pressure even the modern materialist struggled in vain. Yes, ever
since that fatal twelfth century it was woman, the goddess, the
Beatrice-form beckoning on the staircase of Paradise, who attracted
upward the dazzled gaze of man, and who seemed, by an unearthly
smile--with which man himself had possibly endowed her--to promise a
mystical salvation and a sort of celestial bliss.

"But at times, as I say," he concluded, with a shrug, "some lucky
artist is su