s received with acclamation.
Carlyle and Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, G. F. Watts, E. B. Jones, Dickens,
Thackeray, they were hurried into the flames; Mr. Gladstone, John Bright,
and Cobden; there was a moment's discussion about George Meredith, but
Matthew Arnold and Emerson were given up cheerfully. At last came Walter
Pater.

"Not Walter Pater," murmured Philip.

Lawson stared at him for a moment with his green eyes and then nodded.

"You're quite right, Walter Pater is the only justification for Mona Lisa.
D'you know Cronshaw? He used to know Pater."

"Who's Cronshaw?" asked Philip.

"Cronshaw's a poet. He lives here. Let's go to the Lilas."

La Closerie des Lilas was a cafe to which they often went in the evening
after dinner, and here Cronshaw was invariably to be found between the
hours of nine at night and two in the morning. But Flanagan had had enough
of intellectual conversation for one evening, and when Lawson made his
suggestion, turned to Philip.

"Oh gee, let's go where there are girls," he said. "Come to the Gaite
Montparnasse, and we'll get ginny."

"I'd rather go and see Cronshaw and keep sober," laughed Philip.

XLII

There was a general disturbance. Flanagan and two or three more went on to
the music-hall, while Philip walked slowly with Clutton and Lawson to the
Closerie des Lilas.

"You must go to the Gaite Montparnasse," said Lawson to him. "It's one of
the loveliest things in Paris. I'm going to paint it one of these days."

Philip, influenced by Hayward, looked upon music-halls with scornful eyes,
but he had reached Paris at a time when their artistic possibilities were
just discovered. The peculiarities of lighting, the masses of dingy red
and tarnished gold, the heaviness of the shadows and the decorative lines,
offered a new theme; and half the studios in the Quarter contained
sketches made in one or other of the local theatres. Men of letters,
following in the painters' wake, conspired suddenly to find artistic value
in the turns; and red-nosed comedians were lauded to the skies for their
sense of character; fat female singers, who had bawled obscurely for
twenty years, were discovered to possess inimitable drollery; there were
those who found an aesthetic delight in performing dogs; while others
exhausted their vocabulary to extol the distinction of conjurers and
trick-cyclists. The crowd too, under another influence, was become an
object of sympathetic interest. With Hay