old-fashioned and all that to youth is most odious and that to Bob, when
not playing a part, was most impossible. In harmony with his new _role_,
he showed himself a miracle of forbearance under Beardsley's reproaches
and sententious beyond endurance, actually called Beardsley young, his
cardinal offence, for the young hate nothing so much as to be reminded
of the youth for which the old envy them. Bob's almost every sentence
began with the unendurable "at my age," which irritated Beardsley the
more, while we roared at the farce of it in the mouth of one to whom
years never made or could make a particle of difference. He wound up by
the warning in soothing tones that Beardsley, in his turn burdened with
years, would understand, would be able to make allowances, as all must
as they grow older, or life would be an endless battle for the
individual as for the race. Beardsley, luckily for himself, did not live
to lose his illusions, and I fancy that to not one of us who listened to
their talk did it occur that we were in danger of losing ours with age,
so immortal does youth seem while it lasts.

The adventure of other afternoons worked out so surprisingly in
Harland's vein that he might have invented it for his books or we might
have borrowed it from them. The encounter with a peacock at a _cafe_ in
the _Bois_, to which he swept us off at the end of the hottest of those
hot May days, was one of many that he afterwards made use of. Had he
not, I might hesitate to recall it, knowing as I do that its wit must be
lost upon the younger generation of to-day who face life and work with a
severity, a solemnity, that alarms me. Their inability to take
themselves with gaiety is what makes the young men of the Twentieth
Century so hopelessly different from the young men of the
Eighteen-Nineties. Their high moral ideal and concern with social
problems would not permit them to see anything to laugh at in the
experiment of feeding a peacock on cake steeped in absinthe, but it
struck us, in our deplorable frivolity, as humorous at the time, our
consciences the less disturbed because the bird was led into temptation
in the manner of one to whom it was no new thing to yield. Harland, when
he wrote the story with the mock seriousness he was master of, suggested
that the crime was in its having been committed by an irreproachable
British author, the sober father of a family. More momentous to us,
accessories to the crime, was the fact that