ey often
met to say obvious things in American-French....

"You see boys, if Cintras had the stuff in him he would have turned out
something by this time. He's a bad poet--what, haven't you ever read any
of his verse?--and now he's gone daft on artistic prose. Artistic
rubbish! Who the devil cares for chiselled prose nowadays? In the days
when link-boys and sedan chairs helped home a jag they had the time to
speak good English. But now! Good Lord! With typewriters cutting your
phrases into angular fragments, with the very soil at your heels
saturated with slang, what hope in an age of hurry has a fellow to think
of the cadence? I honestly believe Stevenson was having fun when he
wrote that essay of his on the technical elements of style. It's a
puzzle picture and no more to be deciphered than a Bach fugue."

"When Bill Berkeley gets the flow on, he's worse than Cintras with his
variable vowels. Say, Bill, I think you're jealous of old Pop Cintras."
It was Sammy Hodson, a newspaper man, who spoke, and as he wrote on
space he was usually the cashier of the crowd....

Cherierre's is on University Place, and the spot where the artistic
set--Berkeley, Hodson, Pauch, the sculptor, and Cintras--happened to be
hanging about just then. The musician of the circle was a tall thin
young man named Merville. It was said that he had written a symphony;
and one night they all got drunk when the last movement was finished,
though not a soul had heard a note. Every one believed Merville would do
big things some day.

Cintras entered. He was hopelessly uninteresting looking and wore a
beard. Berkeley swore that if he shaved he would be sent to prison; but
Cintras pleaded economy, a delicate throat, also the fact that his nose
was stubby. But set him to talking about the beauties of English prose,
and his eyes blazed with a green fire. The conversation turned on good
things to drink; wine at twenty-five cents a litre was ordered, and the
chatter began....

"It seems to me, Berkeley," Cintras spoke, "that you modern fellows are
too much devoted to the color scheme. I remember when I was a boy,
Gautier set us crazy in Paris with his color sense. His pages glowed
with all the pigments of the palette; he vied with the jeweller in
introducing precious stones of the most ravishing brilliancy within the
walls of his paragraph; I sickened of all this splendor, this Ruskin
word-painting, and went in for cool grays, took up Baudelaire and
fina