xteen-penny Chianti, ran on from that
without any further inquiry as to my trouble.

His utterances roved wide and loose.

"The reality of life, my dear Ponderevo," I remember him saying very
impressively and punctuating with the nut-crackers as he spoke, "is
Chromatic Conflict ... and Form. Get hold of that and let all these
other questions go. The Socialist will tell you one sort of colour and
shape is right, the Individualist another. What does it all amount
to? What DOES it all amount to? NOTHING! I have no advice to give
anyone,--except to avoid regrets. Be yourself, seek after such beautiful
things as your own sense determines to be beautiful. And don't mind
the headache in the morning.... For what, after all, is a morning,
Ponderevo? It isn't like the upper part of a day!"

He paused impressively.

"What Rot!" I cried, after a confused attempt to apprehend him.

"Isn't it! And it's my bedrock wisdom in the matter! Take it or
leave it, my dear George; take it or leave it."... He put down the
nut-crackers out of my reach and lugged a greasy-looking note-book from
his pocket. "I'm going to steal this mustard pot," he said.

I made noises of remonstrance.

"Only as a matter of design. I've got to do an old beast's tomb.

"Wholesale grocer. I'll put it on his corners,--four mustard pots. I dare
say he'd be glad of a mustard plaster now to cool him, poor devil, where
he is. But anyhow,--here goes!"

V

It came to me in the small hours that the real moral touchstone for
this great doubting of mind was Marion. I lay composing statements of
my problem and imagined myself delivering them to her--and she,
goddess-like and beautiful; giving her fine, simply-worded judgment.

"You see, it's just to give one's self over to the Capitalistic System,"
I imagined myself saying in good Socialist jargon; "it's surrendering
all one's beliefs. We MAY succeed, we MAY grow rich, but where would the
satisfaction be?"

Then she would say, "No! That wouldn't be right."

"But the alternative is to wait!"

Then suddenly she would become a goddess. She would turn upon me frankly
and nobly, with shining eyes, with arms held out. "No," she would say,
"we love one another. Nothing ignoble shall ever touch us. We love one
another. Why wait to tell each other that, dear? What does it matter
that we are poor and may keep poor?"

But indeed the conversation didn't go at all in that direction. At the
sight of her my nocturnal eloqu