ocial set, an alien
club-life, a tradition of dining. We live in a true fairy land after
all, where the hoarded treasure turns to a heap of dry leaves. The
almighty dollar defeats itself, and finally buys nothing that a man
cares to have. The very highest pleasure that such an American's money
can purchase is exile, and to this rich man doubtless Europe is a
twice-told tale. Let us clap our empty pockets, dearest reader, and be
glad.

We can be as glad, apparently, and with the same reason as the poorly
dressed young man standing near beside the guard, whose face Basil and
Isabel chose to fancy that of a poet, and concerning whom, they romanced
that he was going home, wherever his home was, with the manuscript of
a rejected book in his pocket. They imagined him no great things of a
poet, to be sure, but his pensive face claimed delicate feeling for him,
and a graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured unconsciously caught
flavors of Tennyson and Browning in his verse, with a moderner tint from
Morris: for was it not a story out of mythology, with gods and heroes of
the nineteenth century, that he was now carrying back from New York
with him? Basil sketched from the colors of his own long-accepted
disappointments a moving little picture of this poor imagined poet's
adventures; with what kindness and unkindness he had been put to shame
by publishers, and how, descending from his high, hopes of a book, he
had tried to sell to the magazines some of the shorter pieces out of the
"And other Poems" which were to have filled up the volume. "He's going
back rather stunned and bewildered; but it's something to have tasted
the city, and its bitter may turn to sweet on his palate, at last, till
he finds himself longing for the tumult that he abhors now. Poor fellow!
one compassionate cut-throat of a publisher even asked him to lunch,
being struck, as we are, with something fine in his face. I hope he's
got somebody who believes in him, at home. Otherwise he'd be more
comfortable, for the present, if he went over the railing there."

So the play of which they were both actors and spectators went on about
them. Like all passages of life, it seemed now a grotesque mystery,
with a bluntly enforced moral, now a farce of the broadest, now a latent
tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy. All the elements, indeed,
of either were at work there, and this was but one brief scene of
the immense complex drama which was to proceed so vario