s engrossing. Again and
again I would take the fan-stump from my pocket, examining it on the
palm of my hand, or between finger and thumb, hoping to read the mystery
it had been mixed up in, so that I might reveal that mystery to the
world. To the world, yes; nothing less than that. I was determined to
make a story of what I had seen--a conte in the manner of great Guy de
Maupassant. Now and again, in the course of the past year or so, it had
occurred to me that I might be a writer. But I had not felt the impulse
to sit down and write something. I did feel that impulse now. It would
indeed have been an irresistible impulse if I had known just what to
write.

I felt I might know at any moment, and had but to give my mind to it.
Maupassant was an impeccable artist, but I think the secret of the hold
he had on the young men of my day was not so much that we discerned
his cunning as that we delighted in the simplicity which his cunning
achieved. I had read a great number of his short stories, but none that
had made me feel as though I, if I were a writer, mightn't have written
it myself. Maupassant had an European reputation. It was pleasing, it
was soothing and gratifying, to feel that one could at any time win
an equal fame if one chose to set pen to paper. And now, suddenly, the
spring had been touched in me, the time was come. I was grateful for the
fluke by which I had witnessed on the terrace that evocative scene. I
looked forward to reading the MS. of 'The Fan'--to-morrow, at latest. I
was not wildly ambitious. I was not inordinately vain. I knew I couldn't
ever, with the best will in the world, write like Mr. George Meredith.
Those wondrous works of his, seething with wit, with poetry and
philosophy and what not, never had beguiled me with the sense that I
might do something similar. I had full consciousness of not being
a philosopher, of not being a poet, and of not being a wit. Well,
Maupassant was none of these things. He was just an observer, like me.
Of course he was a good deal older than I, and had observed a good deal
more. But it seemed to me that he was not my superior in knowledge of
life. I knew all about life through him.

Dimly, the initial paragraph of my tale floated in my mind. I--not
exactly I myself, but rather that impersonal je familiar to me through
Maupassant--was to be sitting at that table, with a bock before me, just
as I had sat. Four or five short sentences would give the whole scene.
O