red after a mile?" I asked.

"Tired to death, worn out," he said, laughing at his own laziness.

"Shall we get a boat and row across the bay?"

"How splendid! of course, let's do it," and we went down to the landing
stage. I had never seen the water so calm; half the bay was veiled by
the mountain, and opaque like unpolished steel; a little further out,
the water was a purple shield, emblazoned with shimmering silver. We
called a fisherman and explained what we wanted. When we got into the
boat, to my astonishment, Oscar began calling the fisher boy by his
name; evidently he knew him quite well. When we landed I went up from
the boat to the hotel, leaving Oscar and the boy together....

A fortnight taught me a good deal about Oscar at this time; he was
intensely indolent: quite content to kill time by the hour talking to
the fisher lads, or he would take a little carriage and drive to Cannes
and amuse himself at some wayside cafe.

He never cared to walk and I walked for miles daily, so that we spent
only one or at most two afternoons a week together, meeting so seldom
that nearly all our talks were significant. Several times contemporary
names came up and I was compelled to notice for the first time that
really he was contemptuous of almost everyone, and had a sharp word to
say about many who were supposed to be his friends. One day we spoke of
Ricketts and Shannon; I was saying that had Ricketts lived in Paris he
would have had a great reputation: many of his designs I thought
extraordinary, and his intellect was peculiarly French--_mordant_ even.
Oscar did not like to hear praise of anyone.

"Do you know my word for them, Frank? I like it. I call them 'Temper and
Temperament.'"

Was his punishment making him a little spiteful or was it the temptation
of the witty phrase?

"What do you think of Arthur Symons?" I asked.

"Oh, Frank, I said of him long ago that he was a sad example of an
Egoist who had no Ego."

"And what of your compatriot, George Moore? He's popular enough," I
continued.

"Popular, Frank, as if that counted. George Moore has conducted his
whole education in public. He had written two or three books before he
found out there was such a thing as English grammar. He at once
announced his discovery and so won the admiration of the illiterate. A
few years later he discovered that there was something architectural in
style, that sentences had to be built up into a paragraph, and
paragraphs int