ating
in space--those were all that gave assurance of life; for when this
solitary returned into his well-chosen solitude he seemed to shed all
that was of the earth earthy, and to become a kind of spectre in a
dream.

Having finished his cigarette, Paul withdrew into the conservatory, his
sleeping room, half doll's house and half bower, where the ivy had crept
over the top of the casement and covered his ceiling with a web of
leaves. Shortly he was reposing upon his pillow, over which his
holy-water font--a large crimson heart of crystal with flames of
burnished gold, set upon a tablet of white marble--seemed almost to
pulsate in the exquisite half-lights of approaching dawn.

It may not have been manly, or even masculine, for him thus literally to
curtain his sleep, like a faun, with ivy; it may not have been orthodox
for him to admit to his Valhalla some of the false Gods, and to honor
them after a fashion; the one true God was duly adored, and all his
saints appealed to in filial faith. That was his nature and past
changing; if he could not look upon God as a Jealous God visiting His
judgments with fanatical justice upon the witted and half-witted, it was
because his was a nature which had never been warped by the various
social moral and religious influences brought to bear upon it.

He may have lacked judgment, in the eyes of the world, but he had never
suffered seriously in consequence. It may not have been wise for him to
fondly nourish tastes and tendencies that were usually quite beyond his
means; but he did it, and doing it afforded him the greatest pleasure in
life.

You will pardon him all this; every one did sooner or later, even those
who discountenanced similar weaknesses or affectations--or whatever you
are pleased to call them--in anyone else, soon found an excuse for
overlooking them in his case.

He was not, thank heaven, all things to all men; all things to a few, he
may have been--yea, even more than all else to some, so long as the
spell lasted; to the majority, however, he was probably nothing, and
less than nothing. And what of that? If he did little good in the world,
he certainly did less evil, and, as he lay in his bed, under a white
counterpane upon which the dawning light, sifting through the vines that
curtained the glazed front of his sleeping room, fell in a mottled
Japanese pattern, and while the ivy that covered the Gothic ceiling
trailed long tendrils of the palest and most deli