ere only some poor devil who was alone in the world,"
went on Ingram without heeding his remark, "I could take you in hand
and make something of you, for you've quite brains enough. Poor devils
are generally more reasonable in their views than you, even when
they're geniuses. You simply keep on wearing out your heart day after
day. Why? For fame? What is it worth? Well, I won't answer the
question--I deal quite enough in platitudes."

"You don't understand, Ingram. What do you really know of me?"

"Well, if I don't know you by this time, you must be an uncommonly
deep person--or perhaps I am an uncommonly shallow one."

Morgan Druce did not answer. His last remark had been more of a
reflection than an interrogation. What did Ingram really know of him,
he asked himself again, despite the five years of the indefinable
relation between them? Admitting that the man beneath the cynic was
kindly and sympathetic, yet he could not but be aware that Ingram's
treason to the aspirations of his youth had destroyed the finer edge
of feeling. His vision did not respond to subtler vibrations; his
judgment was broad and coarse.

Such was Morgan's intuition about Robert Ingram. He believed the man
to be sincere with him and he trusted him. And yet, as he looked up
now and saw Ingram, relapsed into his luxurious arm chair, blowing
rings of smoke, he seemed to detect something in his expression that
filled him with a vague distrust about the genuineness of his
professed interest in him. There was a sort of swagger in his whole
posture, a slickness about his well-dressed, well-fed body, and a
self-satisfaction in his somewhat burly face, nay, even in the manner
his fat fingers held his fat cigar, that set Morgan wondering for the
first time whether Ingram's attitude to literature did not in truth
sum up the whole man; whether that popular novelist and dramatist
could really have a place in his heart for anything that was of
unimportance to his own personal existence--for a poor devil of a
poetaster, for instance.

It was one of those sudden doubts that are created by a chance glimpse
from an accidental new point of view; and Morgan thrust it from him as
absurd and unjust. It could have no foundation, else why had Ingram
responded to his appeal at the beginning? Why had he tolerated his
calls all these years? Why were they talking together in that room
now?

He had often been puzzled about this relation between them, though, as
with