ars older than himself.

She was part of a liberal education, and she was very kind to him
because she liked his really beautiful violin playing. When she told
him, at the beginning of his senior year, that she was going to marry
one of the assistant professors, he added another illustration to his
theory that "all girls are like that," and plunged into a violent
course of study for honours and a fellowship. But it was too late. He
graduated with a fourth group and a firm conviction that college is a
failure.

Then he went to New York, with his violin and with a dozen poems and
half-a-dozen short stories in his trunk, resolved to storm the
magazines or to get a place in one of the great orchestras--he was not
quite sure which of the two short paths to fame it would be.

It was neither. He sold two sonnets and a story which brought him in
$47.50. For a few months he saw life in the Great White Way and other
paths, and found them very dusty. It would not be true to say that
there was no amusement in it. There were times when it was
excessively merry. And for the little _Caffe Fiammella_, where the
fat, bald-headed proprietor used to introduce him as "_l'illustrissimo
violinista Signore Ricardo Sciafero_," and where the mixed audience
welcomed his music with delight, he had a sincere affection, in spite
of the ineradicable smell of garlic. There was a girl there who was
the living image of Raphael's _Fornarina_, until she began to talk.

But in all the life that he thus confusedly saw, there was not a
single hour to which he could have said with Faust, "Oh, stay, thou
art so fair!" For behind it all, there was that inward, unconscious
standard of beauty and happiness--the summer which he could not have
forgotten if he would, and would not have forgotten if he could. It
did not console or comfort him at all. It only kept him from being
contented--which, after all, would have been the worst thing in the
world for him at the present stage of his education.

So when the remnant of his patrimony had shrunk to a couple of hundred
dollars, he burned his poems and stories, for which he had conceived a
strong disgust, and took passage on a small French steam-ship for
Bordeaux, to make the "grand tour" of Europe. His violin made him the
most popular person on the ship. He had a facile talent and a good
memory, which enabled him to play almost any kind of music; and when
he could not remember he could improvise. The second offic