s the Venus di
Medici. If we are Frenchmen we adore our mother; if Englishmen we love
dogs and virtue. We grieve for the death of a near relative twelve
months; but for a second cousin, we sorrow only three. The good man has
his regulation excellencies to strive after, his regulation sins to
repent of. I knew a good man who was quite troubled because he was not
proud, and could not, therefore, with any reasonableness, pray for
humility. In society one must needs be cynical and mildly wicked: in
Bohemia orthodoxly unorthodox. I remember my mother expostulating with a
friend, an actress, who had left a devoted husband and eloped with a
disagreeable, ugly, little low comedian (I am speaking of long, long
ago).

[Illustration: "'YOU MUST BE MAD.'"]

"'You must be mad,' said my mother; 'what on earth induced you to take
such a step?'

"'My dear Emma,' replied the lady; 'what else was there for me? You know
I can't act. I had to do _something_ to show I was an artiste!'

"We are dressed up marionnettes. Our voice is the voice of the unseen
showman, Convention; our very movements of passion and pain are but in
answer to his jerk. A man resembles one of those gigantic bundles that
one sees in nursemaids' arms. It is very bulky and very long; it looks a
mass of delicate lace and rich fur and fine woven stuffs; and somewhere,
hidden out of sight among the finery, there is a tiny red bit of
bewildered humanity, with no voice but a foolish cry.

"There is but one story," he went on, after a long pause, uttering his
own thoughts aloud rather than speaking to me. "We sit at our desks and
think and think, and write and write, but the story is ever the same.
Men told it and men listened to it many years ago; we are telling it to
one another to-day; we shall be telling it to one another a thousand
years hence; and the story is: 'Once upon a time there lived a man and a
woman who loved him.' The little critic cries that it is not new, and
asks for something fresh, thinking--as children do--that there are
strange things in the world."

At that point, my notes end, and there is nothing in the book beyond.
Whether any of us thought any more of the novel, whether we ever met
again to discuss it, whether it were ever begun, whether it were ever
abandoned--I cannot say. There is a fairy story that I read many, many
years ago that has never ceased to haunt me. It told how a little boy
once climbed a rainbow. And at the end of the rainbow