s mind in a whirl and gave it up. Afterward, when he thought it over,
he laughed at himself; for Strathcona's ideas were not serious things,
having relationship to truth--they were epigrams put together to dazzle
the hearer, studies in paradox, with as much relation to life as
fireworks. He took the sum-total of the moral experience of the human
race, and turned it upside down and jumbled it about, and used it as
bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. And the hearers would gasp, and
whisper, "Diabolical!"

The motto of this "school" of poets was that there was neither good nor
evil, but that all things were "interesting." After listening to
Strathcona for half an hour, one felt like hiding his head, and denying
that he had ever thought of having any virtue; in a world where all
things were uncertain, it was presumptuous even to pretend to know what
virtue was. One could only be what one was; and did not that mean that
one must do as one pleased?

You could feel a shudder run through the company at his audacity. And
the worst of it was that you could not dismiss it with a laugh; for the
boy was really a poet--he had fire and passion, the gift of melodious
ecstacy. He was only twenty, and in his brief meteor flight he had run
the gamut of all experience; he had familiarized himself with all human
achievement--past, present, and future. There was nothing any one could
mention that he did not perfectly comprehend: the raptures of the
saints, the consecration of the martyrs--yes, he had known them;
likewise he had touched the depths of depravity, he had been lost in
the innermost passages of the caverns of hell. And all this had been
interesting--in its time; now he was sighing for new worlds of
experience--say for unrequited love, which should drive him to madness.

It was at this point that Montague dropped out of the race, and took to
studying from the outside the mechanism of this young poet's
conversation. Strathcona flouted the idea of a moral sense; but in
reality he was quite dependent upon it--his recipe for making epigrams
was to take what other people's moral sense made them respect, and
identify it with something which their moral sense made them abhor.
Thus, for instance, the tale which he told about one of the members of
his set, who was a relative of a bishop. The great man had occasion to
rebuke him for his profligate ways, declaring in the course of his
lecture that he was living off the reputation of his father