, or by the great
illusions of political experiment! Soon will come a great war, and
everybody will discover it has come either because people are Christians
or because they are not Christians. Nobody will think it is because each
man wants to interfere with the conduct of his neighbor. That woman in
Leppard Street who died in the peace of God, how much more was she a
Christian than me, who, without perceiving the beam in my own eye, have
trotted round operating on the motes of other people. And once I had to
make an effort to kiss her in fellowship. Rome! Rome! How parochial you
make my youth!"

The last exclamation was uttered aloud.

"Meditating upon the decline and fall of the Roman Empire?" said a
voice.

A man in a black cloak was speaking.

"No; I was thinking of the pettiness of youthful tragedies," said
Michael.

"There is only one tragedy for youth."

"And that is?"

"Age," said the stranger.

"And what is the tragedy of age?"

"There is no tragedy of age," said the stranger.

THE END

EPILOGICAL LETTER

TO

JOHN NICOLAS MAVROGORDATO

MY DEAR JOHN,

There is, I am inclined to think, a very obstinate shamelessness in
prolonging this book with a letter to you. For that reason I append it
thus as an epilogue: so that whoever wishes to read it will only have
himself to blame, since he will already, as I hope, have finished the
book.

You will remember that last year "Youth's Encounter," the first part of
Michael Fane's story, obtained a great advertisement through the action
of certain libraries. Whatever boom was thus effected will certainly be
drowned this year in the roar of cannon, and the doctrine of
compensation is in no danger of being disproved. I fancy, too, that the
realities of war will obtain me a pardon in "Sinister Street," the
second volume, for anything that might formerly have offended the
sensitive or affronted the simple.

Much more important than libraries and outraged puritans is the question
of the form of the English novel. There has lately been noticeable in
the press a continuous suggestion that the modern novel is thinly
disguised autobiography; and since the lives of most men are peculiarly
formless this suggestion has been amplified into an attack upon the form
of the novel. In my own case many critics have persisted in regarding
"Youth's Encounter" merely as an achievement of memory, and I have felt
sometimes that I ought to regard myself as a sort o