ith anybody there, not even with Carolus-Duran when, splendidly
barbered, in gorgeous waistcoat, and with an air of casualness, the
_cher maitre et president_ strolled into the restaurant at the supreme
moment, carefully chosen, all the crowd there before him, their
breakfast ordered, their first pangs of hunger stilled, and their
attention and enthusiasm at liberty for the greeting he counted upon,
and got.

It may be that this scene of the older generation's triumph and the
power of officialism in art told on Beardsley's nerves, or it may be it
was simply because he was still young enough to believe nobody had ever
been young before, but certainly by evening he had worked himself up
into a fine frenzy of revolt. When we had got through our foolish game
of living statues, and had settled down to dinner in a little
restaurant, where a parrot's greeting of "_Apres vous, madame! Apres
vous, monsieur!_" had vouched for the excellence of its manners, and
where we could look across the river and see for ourselves how true were
the effects that Cazin used to paint and that seemed so false to those
who knew nothing of French twilight, and when Beardsley had finished his
first glass of very ordinary wine well watered, he let us know what he
thought about _les vieux_ and their stultifying observance of worn-out
laws and principles.

That started Bob Stevenson, who saw an argument and, for the sake of it,
became ponderously patriarchal, hoary with convention. In point of
years, it is true, he was older than any of us, but no matter what his
age according to the Family Bible he was to the end, and would have
been had he lived to be a hundred, the youngest in spirit of any company
into which he ever strayed or could stray. His way, however, was, as
Louis Stevenson described it, "to trans-migrate" himself into the
character or pose he assumed for the moment and no Heavy Father was ever
heavier than he that night at St. Cloud. He spoke with the air of
superior knowledge calculated to aggravate youth. With years, he assured
Beardsley, men learned to value law and order in art, as in the state,
at their worth; and, more and more inspired by his theme, as was his
way, he grew preposterously wise and irritating, and he talked himself
so successfully into every exasperating virtue of age that I could not
wonder at the fierceness with which Beardsley turned upon him and
denounced him roundly as conventional and academic and prejudiced and