hastened away to hide himself and be
alone with his misery.

He was earnest and eager to-night in his praise of Waymark's book,
which he had just read in manuscript.

"It is horrible," he exclaimed; "often hideous and revolting to me; but
I feel its absolute truth. Such a book will do more good than half a
dozen religious societies."

"If only people can be got to read it. Yet I care nothing for that
aspect of the thing. Is it artistically strong? Is it good as a
picture? There was a time when I might have written in this way with a
declared social object. That is all gone by. I have no longer a spark
of social enthusiasm. Art is all I now care for, and as art I wish my
work to be judged."

"One would have thought," said Julian, "that increased knowledge of
these fearful things would have had just the opposite effect."

"Yes," exclaimed the other, with the smile which always prefaced some
piece of self-dissection, "and so it would in the case of a man born to
be a radical. I often amuse myself with taking to pieces my former
self. I was not a conscious hypocrite in those days of violent
radicalism, working-man's-club lecturing, and the like; the fault was
that I understood myself as yet so imperfectly. That zeal on behalf of
the suffering masses was nothing more nor less than disguised zeal on
behalf of my own starved passions. I was poor and desperate, life had
no pleasures, the future seemed hopeless, yet I was overflowing with
vehement desires, every nerve in me was a hunger which cried to be
appeased. I identified myself with the poor and ignorant; I did not
make their cause my own, but my own cause theirs. I raved for freedom
because I was myself in the bondage of unsatisfiable longing."

"Well," he went on, after regarding his listener with still the same
smile, "I have come out of all that, in proportion as my artistic
self-consciousness has developed. For one thing, I am not so miserable
as I was then, personally; then again, I have found my vocation. You
know pretty well the phases I have passed through. Upon ranting
radicalism followed a period of philosophical study. My philosophy, I
have come to see, was worth nothing; what philosophy is worth anything?
It had its use for myself, however; it made me by degrees
self-conscious, and brought me to see that in art alone I could find
full satisfaction."

"Yet," urged Julian, "the old direction still shows itself in your
choice of subjects. Granting that