ttle piqued by her suggestion,
"Clarke is not the hero. What makes you think that he casts a spell on
everything I do?"

"Dear child," she replied, "I know him. He cannot fail to impress his
powerful personality upon all with whom he comes in contact, to the
injury of their intellectual independence. Moreover, he is so brilliant
and says everything so much better than anybody else, that by his very
splendor he discourages effort in others. At best his influence will
shape your development according to the tenets of his mind--curious,
subtle and corrupted. You will become mentally distorted, like one of
those hunchback Japanese trees, infinitely wrinkled and infinitely
grotesque, whose laws of growth are not determined by nature, but by the
diseased imagination of the East."

"I am no weakling," Ernest asserted, "and your picture of Clarke is
altogether out of perspective. His splendid successes are to me a source
of constant inspiration. We have some things in common, but I realise
that it is along entirely different lines that success will come to me.
He has never sought to influence me, in fact, I never received the
smallest suggestion from him." Here the Princess Marigold seemed to peer
at him through the veil of the past, but he waved her aside. "As for my
story," he continued, "you need not go so far out of your way to find
the leading character?"

"Who can it be?" Ethel remarked, with a merry twinkle, "You?"

"Ethel," he said sulkingly, "be serious. You know that it is you."

"I am immensely flattered," she replied. "Really, nothing pleases me
better than to be immortalised in print, since I have little hope
nowadays of perpetuating my name by virtue of pencil or brush. I have
been put into novels before and am consumed with curiosity to hear the
plot of yours."

"If you don't mind, I had rather not tell you just yet," Ernest said.
"It's going to be called Leontina--that's you. But all depends on the
treatment. You know it doesn't matter much what you say so long as you
say it well. That's what counts. At any rate, any indication of the plot
at this stage would be decidedly inadequate."

"I think you are right," she ventured. "By all means choose your own
time to tell me. Let's talk of something else. Have you written
anything since your delightful book of verse last spring? Surely now is
your singing season. By the time we are thirty the springs of pure lyric
passion are usually exhausted."

Ethel's inq