eward of all disinterested
action. One learns to accept it as a matter of course. And you see Paul
Destournelle----"

"Oh, Destournelle!" Richard exclaimed.

"You have read him?"

"Every one has read him."

"And what do you think of him?"

"That his technique is as amazingly clever as his thought is amazingly
rotten."

"I know--I know," she said eagerly. "And that is just what induced me
to do all I could for him. If one could cut the canker away, give him
backbone and decency, while retaining that wonderful technique, one
would have a second and a greater Theophile Gautier."

Richard was looking full at her. His face had more colour, more
animation, than usual.

"If--yes--if," he returned. "But that same _if_ bulks mighty big to my
mind."

"I know," she repeated. "Yet it seemed to me worth the attempt. And
then, you understand,--who better?--that if one's own affairs are not
conspicuously happy, one has all the more longing the affairs of others
should be crowned with success. And this winter specially, among the
sordid miseries, disgraces, deprivations, of the siege, one was liable
to take refuge in an over-exalted altruism. It was difficult in so mad
a world not to indulge in personal eccentricity--to the neglect of due
worship of the great goddess Conventionality. With death in visible
form at every street corner, one's sense of humour, let alone one's
higher faculties, rebelled against the futility of such worship. So
many detestable sights and sounds were perpetually presented to
one--not to mention broth of abominable things daily for dinner--that
one turned, with thanksgiving, to beautiful form in art, to perfectly
felicitous words and phrases. The meaning of them mattered but little
just then. They freed one from the tyranny of more or less disgusting
fact. They satisfied eye and ear. One asked nothing more just
then--luckily, you will say, since the animal Destournelle has very
surely nothing more to give."

In speaking, Helen pushed her chair back, turning it sideways to the
table. Her speech was alive with varied and telling inflections. Her
smallest gesture had in it something descriptive and eloquent.

"And so I fell to encouraging the animal," she continued, almost
plaintively, yet with a note of veiled laughter in her voice.
"Reversing the order of Circe--Naples inclines one to classic
illustration, sometimes a little hackneyed--by the way, speaking of
Naples, look at the glory of it all