was I who had kindled the unholy flame; it
was I who had put into her head that she had the means of making
money. She appeared never to have thought of that; she had been living
wastefully for years, in a house five times too big for her, on a
footing that I could explain only by the presumption that, excessive as
it was, the space she enjoyed cost her next to nothing and that small
as were her revenues they left her, for Venice, an appreciable margin. I
had descended on her one day and taught her to calculate, and my
almost extravagant comedy on the subject of the garden had presented me
irresistibly in the light of a victim. Like all persons who achieve the
miracle of changing their point of view when they are old she had been
intensely converted; she had seized my hint with a desperate, tremulous
clutch.

I invited myself to go and get one of the chairs that stood, at a
distance, against the wall (she had given herself no concern as to
whether I should sit or stand); and while I placed it near her I
began, gaily, "Oh, dear madam, what an imagination you have, what an
intellectual sweep! I am a poor devil of a man of letters who lives
from day to day. How can I take palaces by the year? My existence is
precarious. I don't know whether six months hence I shall have bread to
put in my mouth. I have treated myself for once; it has been an immense
luxury. But when it comes to going on--!"

"Are your rooms too dear? If they are you can have more for the same
money," Juliana responded. "We can arrange, we can combinare, as they
say here."

"Well yes, since you ask me, they are too dear," I said. "Evidently you
suppose me richer than I am."

She looked at me in her barricaded way. "If you write books don't you
sell them?"

"Do you mean don't people buy them? A little--not so much as I could
wish. Writing books, unless one be a great genius--and even then!--is
the last road to fortune. I think there is no more money to be made by
literature."

"Perhaps you don't choose good subjects. What do you write about?" Miss
Bordereau inquired.

"About the books of other people. I'm a critic, an historian, in a small
way." I wondered what she was coming to.

"And what other people, now?"

"Oh, better ones than myself: the great writers mainly--the great
philosophers and poets of the past; those who are dead and gone and
can't speak for themselves."

"And what do you say about them?"

"I say they sometimes attached thems