ore, with any reasonableness, pray for humility. In society one
must needs be cynical and mildly wicked: in Bohemia, orthodoxly
unorthodox. I remember my mother expostulating with a friend, an
actress, who had left a devoted husband and eloped with a disagreeable,
ugly, little low comedian (I am speaking of long, long ago).

"'You must be mad,' said my mother; 'what on earth induced you to take
such a step?'

"'My dear Emma,' replied the lady; 'what else was there for me? You know
I can't act. I had to do _something_ to show I was 'an artiste!'

"We are dressed-up marionettes. Our voice is the voice of the unseen
showman, Convention; our very movements of passion and pain are but in
answer to his jerk. A man resembles one of those gigantic bundles that
one sees in nursemaids' arms. It is very bulky and very long; it looks a
mass of delicate lace and rich fur and fine woven stuffs; and somewhere,
hidden out of sight among the finery, there is a tiny red bit of
bewildered humanity, with no voice but a foolish cry.

"There is but one story," he went on, after a long pause, uttering his
own thoughts aloud rather than speaking to me. "We sit at our desks and
think and think, and write and write, but the story is ever the same. Men
told it and men listened to it many years ago; we are telling it to one
another to-day; we shall be telling it to one another a thousand years
hence; and the story is: 'Once upon a time there lived a man, and a woman
who loved him.' The little critic cries that it is not new, and asks for
something fresh, thinking--as children do--that there are strange things
in the world."

* * * * *

At that point my notes end, and there is nothing in the book beyond.
Whether any of us thought any more of the novel, whether we ever met
again to discuss it, whether it were ever begun, whether it were ever
abandoned--I cannot say. There is a fairy story that I read many, many
years ago that has never ceased to haunt me. It told how a little boy
once climbed a rainbow. And at the end of the rainbow, just behind the
clouds, he found a wondrous city. Its houses were of gold, and its
streets were paved with silver, and the light that shone upon it was as
the light that lies upon the sleeping world at dawn. In this city there
were palaces so beautiful that merely to look upon them satisfied all
desires; temples so perfect that they who once knelt therein were
cleansed of sin. And all the men who d