of
Derrydown, who may have been a proper blackguard! And that kink
should be now, no doubt, the lawful property of some ruffianly
cattle-houghing moonlighter, whose nose--which should have been
mine--is probably as straight as Barty's. For in Ireland are to be
found the handsomest and ugliest people in all Great Britain, and in
Great Britain the handsomest and ugliest people in the whole world.

Anyhow, I have known my place. I have not perpetuated that kink, and
with it, possibly, the base and cowardly instincts of which it was
meant to be the outward and visible sign--though it isn't in my
case--that my fellow-men might give me a wide berth.

Leah's girlish instinct was a right one when she said me nay that
afternoon by the Chelsea pier--for how could she see inside me, poor
child? How could Beauty guess the Beast was a Prince in disguise? It
was no fairy-tale!

Things have got mixed up; but they're all coming right, and all
through Barty Josselin.

And what vulgar pride and narrownesses and meannesses and vanities
and uglinesses of life, in mass and class and individual, are now
impossible!--and all through Barty Josselin and his quaint ironies
of pen and pencil, forever trembling between tears and laughter,
with never a cynical spark or a hint of bitterness.

How he has held his own against the world! how he has scourged its
wickedness and folly, this gigantic optimist, who never wrote a
single line in his own defence!

How quickly their laugh recoiled on those early laughers! and how
Barty alone laughed well because he laughed the last, and taught the
laughers to laugh on his side! People thought he was always
laughing. It was not so.

Part Ninth

"Cara deum soboles, magnum Jovis incrementum."

--Virgil.

The immense fame and success that Barty Josselin achieved were to
him a source of constant disquiet. He could take neither pride nor
pleasure in what seemed to him not his; he thought himself a fraud.

Yet only the mere skeleton of his work was built up for him by his
demon; all the beauty of form and color, all the grace of movement
and outer garb, are absolutely his own.

It has been noticed how few eminent men of letters were intimate
with the Josselins, though the best among them--except, of course,
Thomas Carlyle--have been so enthusiastic and outspoken in their
love and admiration of his work.

He was never at his ease in their soc