nal. The joy of Paris to one who understands is the
exquisite refinement, the unsurpassed culture, of its abysmal
wickedness."

"The devil!" Guy exclaimed. "Have you found out all that for yourself?"

Henri was slightly annoyed. He was always annoyed when he was not taken
seriously.

"I have had the advantage," he said, "of many friendships with men
whose names you would scarcely know, but who directed the intellectual
tendencies of the younger generation of Parisians. People call us
decadents--I suppose, because we prefer intellectual progression to
physical activity. I am afraid, dear friend, that you would never be one
of us."

"I am quite sure of it," Guy answered.

"You will not even drink absinthe," Henri continued, helping himself
from a little carafe which stood between them, "absolutely the most
artistic of all drinks. You prefer a thing you call a pipe to my
choicest cigarettes, and you have upon your cheeks a color of which a
ploughboy should be ashamed."

Guy laughed good-humoredly.

"Well, I can't help being sunburnt!" he declared. Henri sighed
delicately.

"Ah, it is not only that," he said. "I wish so much that I could make
you understand. You positively cultivate good health, take cold baths
and walks and exercises to preserve it."

"Why the dickens shouldn't I?"

Henri half closed his eyes. He was a dutiful nephew, but he felt that
another month with this clodhopper of an English boy would mean the
snapping of his finely strung nerves.

"My friend," he began gently, "we in Paris of the set to whom I belong
do not consider good health to be a state which makes for intellectual
progression. Good health means the triumph of the physical side of man
over the nervous. The healthy animal sleeps and eats too much. He does
not know the stimulus of pain. His normal condition is unaspiring--not
to say bovine. The first essential, therefore, of life, according to
our tenets, is to get rid of superfluous health."

Guy did not trust himself to speak this time. He only stared at his
companion, who seemed pleased to have evoked his interest.

"Directly the body is weakened," Henri continued, "the brain begins to
act. With the indisposition for physical effort comes activity of the
imagination. Cigarettes, drugs, our friend here," he continued, patting
the carafe, "late nights, _la belle passion_--all these--all these----"

He broke off in the middle of his sentence. Simultaneously he abandoned
his c