lly reached Verlaine, whose music is the echo of music heard in
misty mediaeval parks while the peacock dragging by with its twilight
tail, utters shrill commentary on such moonshine. After that I reached
Chopin and found him too dangerous, too treacherous, too condensed, the
art too filled out; and so I finally landed in the arms of Wagner, and
I've been there ever since."

"Look here, Cintras, you're prose-mad and you've landed nowhere."
Berkeley lighted one of Hodson's cigarettes. "When a new, big fellow
comes along you follow him until you find out how he does the trick and
then you get bored. Don't you remember the day you rushed into my studio
and yelled, 'Newman is the only man who wrote prose in the nineteenth
century,' and then persisted in spouting long sentences from the
'Apologia'? First it was Arnold, then it was Edmund Burke." "It will
always be Burke," interrupted Cintras. "Then it was Maurice de Guerin,
and I suppose it will be Flaubert forever and ever." They all laughed.

"Yes, Billy, it will always be Gustave Flaubert, and I worship him more
and more every day. It took him forty years to write four books and
three stories, and, as Henry James says, he deliberately planned
masterpieces."

Hodson broke in: "You literary men make me tired. Why, if I turned out
copy at the rate of Slobsbert--what's his name?--I'd starve. What's all
the fuss about, anyhow? Write natural English and any one will
understand you"--"Ah, natural English, that's what one man writes in a
generation," sighed Cintras. "And when you want something great,"
continued the young man, "why, read a good 'thriller' about the great
Cemetery Syndicate, and how it robbed the dead for gold fillings in
teeth. The author just slings it out--and such words!"

"Yes, with a whitewash brush." Berkeley scowled.

"Why," pursued Hodson, unmoved, "why don't you get married, Cintras, and
work for your living? Then you'll have to write syndicate stuff and that
will knock the nonsense out of you. Or, fall in love and be miserable
like me." Hodson paused to drink.

"O triste, triste etait mon ame,
A cause, a cause d'une femme."

"That's Verlaine; Hoddy, my boy, when you grow up, quit newspapering and
become cultured, you may appreciate its meaning and beauty."

"When I am cultured I'll be a night city editor; that's my ideal," said
the youth, stoutly.

"Let's go over to Merville's room and make him play Chopin," suggested
Pauch, the sculp