,
not being of coarse enough fibre to be measured by the rude
emotion-weighing machine of Lombroso, are therefore adjudged of less
delicacy than man's. What fools your scientific men be!"

Mrs. Vibert was a bit pedantic, but she could talk to the point when
aroused.

"You discredit the idea of compressing an epic into a sonnet, a sonata
into a prelude; well, I've attempted something of the sort, and even if
you laugh I'll stick to my argument. I've attempted to tell the
biological history of the cosmos in a single page.... I begin with the
unicellular protozoa and finally reach humanity; and to give it dramatic
interest I trace a germ-cell from eternity until the now, and you shall
hear its history this moment." She stopped for breath, and I wondered if
Mrs. Somerville or George Eliot had ever talked in this astounding
fashion. I was certain that she must have read Iamblichus and Porphyry.
Arthur on his couch groaned.

"Mock if you please," Ellenora's strong face flushed, "but women will
yet touch the rim of finer issues. Paul Goddard, who is a critic I
respect, told me I had struck the right note of modernity in my prose
poem." I winced at the "note of modernity," and could not help seeing
the color mount to Arthur's brow when the man's name was mentioned.

"And pray who is Mr. Paul Goddard?" I asked while Mrs. Vibert was absent
in search of her manuscript. Arthur replied indifferently, "Oh, a rich
young man who went to Bayreuth last summer and poses as a Wagnerite ever
since! He also plays the piano!"

Arthur's tone was sarcastic; he did not like Paul Goddard and his
critical attentions to his wife. The poor lad looked so disheartened, so
crushed by the rigid intellectual atmosphere about him, that I put no
further question and was glad when Mrs. Vibert returned with her prose
poem.

She read it to us and it was called

FRUSTRATE

O the misty plaint of the Unconceived! O crystal
incuriousness of the monad! The faint swarming toward the
light and the rending of the sphere of hope, frustrate,
inutile. I am the seed called Life; I am he, I am she. We
walk, swim, totter, and blend. Through the ages I lay in the
vast basin of Time; I am called by Fate into the Now. On
pulsing terraces, under a moon blood-red, I dreamed of the
mighty confluence. About me were my kinsfolk. Full of dumb
pain we pleasured our centuries with anticipation; we
watched a