ibald, looking at him with unconcealed
anxiety. It was evident it was a question he had been wanting to ask.
Morgan hesitated a moment, though his answer was ready.

"After that I see no reason why I should not follow along the same
lines. I shall be on the high road to build up a career for myself,
and I have a feeling that I shall eventually branch off into
journalism, where all the knowledge and experience I shall have gained
will be of use to me."

"Tell me, Morgan," said Archibald. "Have you abandoned your first
ambition entirely?"

Morgan leaned forward towards the fire and rested his head on his
hands. For a moment he seemed lost in meditation, and then at last
spoke slowly.

"There are times," he said, "when poetry still beats in my blood, when
melody comes to me hauntingly. Often, as I sit here brooding, there
surges up a full flood of I know not what, save that it is exquisitely
beautiful. And, as I walk through these long, grey streets, lined with
flaring market-stalls and massed thick with people, I seem to feel a
great throb, a living heart-beat, that speaks to me of humanity; and
what these bustling streets hold of humanness, of the warmth and
energy of life, comes to me like a flowing tide. The pain, too, I
feel; for there are odd, pathetic episodes. One catches sight of faces
pinched, starved, unrebellious, large-eyed children of six a-marketing
shrewdly with slender purses; and now and then a figure detaches
itself from the crowd and speaks a whole history. If there is much
pain and privation, much foulness and wickedness, there is also much
of the joy of life, of the ecstacy of overflowing animal spirits.
There are plague-spots, there are besotted critical jeerers at the
wayside with an aggressive sense of superiority to all unlike
themselves; there are half-grown lads and girls boisterously
foul-mouthed. But probe beneath the large, vigorous unrestraint, the
rollicking vagabondage of the streets, and you will find the
far-spread, steady--if colourless--respectability of the industrial
family. And at moments something grand, rugged, and passionate, a
roaring harmonic discord, seems to sweep though the reeking grime,
through the swarming boisterousness, through the magnificent
brutality, through the utterance of putrid tongues, through the grey,
lamp-lit atmospheres, as though man and his activities were but the
swirled symbols of a music played in high Heaven. And as I stand
listening, terrified