were watching his
every movement, as if to follow his thoughts into the innermost
labyrinth of the mind. It seemed to Ernest, under the spell of this
passing fancy, as though each vase, each picture, each curio in the
room, was reflected in Clarke's work. In a long-queued, porcelain
Chinese mandarin he distinctly recognised a quaint quatrain in one of
Clarke's most marvellous poems. And he could have sworn that the grin of
the Hindu monkey-god on the writing-table reappeared in the weird rhythm
of two stanzas whose grotesque cadence had haunted him for years.

At last Clarke broke the silence. "You like my studio?" he asked.

The simple question brought Ernest back to reality.

"Like it? Why, it's stunning. It set up in me the queerest train of
thought."

"I, too, have been in a whimsical mood to-night. Fancy, unlike genius,
is an infectious disease."

"What is the peculiar form it assumed in your case?"

"I have been wondering whether all the things that environ us day by day
are, in a measure, fashioning our thought-life. I sometimes think that
even my little mandarin and this monkey-idol which, by the way, I
brought from India, are exerting a mysterious but none the less real
influence upon my work."

"Great God!" Ernest replied, "I have had the identical thought!"

"How very strange!" Clarke exclaimed, with seeming surprise.

"It is said tritely but truly, that great minds travel the same roads,"
Ernest observed, inwardly pleased.

"No," the older man subtly remarked, "but they reach the same
conclusion by a different route."

"And you attach serious importance to our fancy?"

"Why not?"

Clarke was gazing abstractedly at the bust of Balzac.

"A man's genius is commensurate with his ability of absorbing from life
the elements essential to his artistic completion. Balzac possessed this
power in a remarkable degree. But, strange to say, it was evil that
attracted him most. He absorbed it as a sponge absorbs water; perhaps
because there was so little of it in his own make-up. He must have
purified the atmosphere around him for miles, by bringing all the evil
that was floating in the air or slumbering in men's souls to the point
of his pen.

"And he"--his eyes were resting on Shakespeare's features as a man might
look upon the face of a brother--"he, too, was such a nature. In fact,
he was the most perfect type of the artist. Nothing escaped his mind.
From life and from books he drew his material, eac