JAMES HUNEKER (continued 2)

VI

On East 58th Street there once stood Peter Buckel's brewery. Opposite was, still is, Terrace Garden. A theatre now occupies the old brewery ground. Young people who preferred serious converse to the glitter and bang of the big Garden across the street went to Buckel's. A wooden terrace with a roof was pleasant to sit upon when the weather was warm. A huge tree grew in the middle of this esplanade and the owner had artfully made it serve as a decoration. Under its spreading foliage people supped and smoked. The town was then younger, less crowded by "undesirable citizens"—the phrase is of Theodore Roosevelt's making—and life more mellow, because less puritanical. An evening in middle May saw a group around the tree-table as it was called; the most coveted spot on the terrace. There were Ulick Invern and Alfred Stone. Next to him sat a tall thin young man addressed by his companions as Milton. He did not wear a clerical garb but the cut of him was unquestionably priestly. His harmonious features, extremely blond hair, prominent eye-balls, gray in color, denoted refinement of mind and body. He was not in the least priggish and gave himself no sacerdotal airs. If he had done so he would soon have been lonely. Ulick and Alfred were too easy-going to endure superior pretensions in anyone; besides, they had known Milton before he went to the Jesuits, and Ulick sincerely sorrowed when ill-health fostered by strenuous study had sent his friend temporarily back into the world he despised. He recognized that Milton had a genuine vocation.

"That was a nice hot picnic," ejaculated Stone, mopping his brow as he dipped his nose into a long beaker of beer. "Never again," chimed in Ulick. Milton became nervous. "Where have you chaps been this hot afternoon?" "You wouldn't call this hot after Hoboken," cut in Stone. "Hotter than the hinges of hell," added Ulick as he emptied his lemonade glass. "I feel like a regular tosspot this evening," he continued. "We must have swilled a bathtub of liquid this afternoon over at Meyer's in Hoboken, eh, Alfred?" "You didn't, old herring-gut," was the rather surly retort;—"but I did. Why people of reputed sanity cross the Hudson on a sweltering day to wave handkerchiefs at their friends on out-bound steamers has always puzzled me. Now, why should we have given ourselves the bother to say farewell to Easter Brandès on a crowded dock, when we could just as well have wished her bon-voyage the night before at the Maison Felicé"—"Has Miss Brandès sailed to Europe?" inquired Milton, not without interest in his voice. "Yes, she goes to Berlin, to Lilli Lehmann, thence to emerge a full-fledged prima-donna and Wagner interpreter, et patiti et patita! I can't for the life of me see why she didn't stay under Madame Ash's wing a couple of seasons more. Mind you, I grant her talent. She is positively brilliant, but she needs steadying. Her voice, her delivery, her extraordinary memory—she already has fifteen rôles completely memorized, mastered—these are but a hint of what the future may bring forth; nevertheless, she is too young for Lehmann and—Oh, what's the use? Women don't think with their heads, they think with their matrix. They are too damned emotional. They are the sexual sex.... Putting an idea in their heads is like placing a razor in the hands of a child...."

"And men, I presume, think with their cortex," interposed the cool voice of Ulick. Milton deprecatingly lifted a white hand. "I can't say I admire the turn our talk is taking. Alfred is too literal, too fond of physiological details. I want to hear more of the art of Miss Brandès...." "And less about her coda—there's a musical term for you," cried Stone. All three young men laughed. At times Alfred could be amusingly immodest. "Well, she has gone to Germany despite your advice," declared Ulick. "She is a stubborn creature and I'm quite sure she has done the right thing. That young woman has a head of her own and instinct prompts her in the right direction. She may not always think with her head, yet she has managed to land on both feet. Think of it boys, Easter has only been here about six months. Behold! she goes to Berlin where she will be under the protection of the greatest living Wagner singer. How did she do it? Magnetism? Beauty? Talent? All three I fancy. And she is penniless. She told me so. Yet she dresses well, and someone must be putting up for her expenses while she is abroad".... "Oh Ulick! Thou art an ass," sang Stone in his most derisive manner. "Has she a banker? Yes, she is lucky, she has two. Paul Godard is one—" "It's a lie!" shouted Ulick, who was at once in a fighting mood. "And the other," continued Stone, unmoved, "is the young woman who is to play chaperone to her innocence while she remains abroad. I know, Frida Ash told me everything, and between you and me and this fat old tree, I think Madame Frida is glad to lose both of her pupils. They sat rather heavily on her betimes."

"Allie Wentworth is all right," returned the mollified Invern, "but I fail to see where Master Godard comes in. He is rich, to be sure, but as mean as sour-owl dirt...." "The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung." Stone sneeringly quoted. Silence ensued. Then Milton spoke with his gentlest intonations: "I wonder why it is that so soon as a young woman sings or goes on the stage, mud-slinging is in order?" After that query the party broke up. Stone, as usual, was bored. Ulick felt that too much had been said of the girl he bade adieu a few hours before, radiant with happiness on the upper deck of the steamship, her arms holding a perfect sheaf of blush-roses. She had been cordial. She had kissed him on the cheek, whispering, "You dear old Jewel," and then Allie plucked at her sleeve, the whistle roared and that was the last he saw of Easter Brandès. He shook hands with Milton. Stone, as he languidly sauntered away said as a parting shot, over his shoulder: "I suppose you know the rumour 'round town that Paul Godard has been her banker? His name is on the passenger-list too. Gay bird, Paul. Ta! Ta!" Ulick went home in a sad humour.

THE FOURTH GATE

At the fourth gate, the warder stripped her; he took off the jewels that adorn her breast....

I

Ulick Invern always declared that he was a New-Yorker born. This was a mild exaggeration; his mother—she had been a Bartlett before her marriage—was bred in the metropolis, but both her sons, Oswald, the elder, and Ulick, were born in Paris, where their father was Secretary at the American Legation. Needless to add, that under the American flag, they were registered as Americans. The elder Invern was the second son of a needy Irish peer, whose heir had retrieved the fallen fortunes of the family, an ancient one in Kerry, by marrying the only child of a wealthy Dublin iron-monger. Ulick's father through influence was sent to Washington where he served a few years in the British Embassy. But his marriage to Madge Bartlett, beautiful, brilliant girl, rich in her own right, caused a change of plans and her husband not only resigned his post, but in due course of time became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He entered the New York banking house of his father-in-law, who was not particularly impressed by his daughter's husband nor his capacity as a business man.

The elder Bartlett saw clearly. Handsome, like all the Inverns, Ulick Sr. became a pony-polo player of international renown; henceforward Wall Street and the bank only saw him when he dropped in to negotiate a domestic loan. No one could dislike this big, easy-going, young, blue-eyed Celt; even his father-in-law succumbed—after intervals of frigidity—to his personal charm. His wife adored him and wept over his gaming debts. He was a loose fish. Wine, women, and the wheel well nigh disrupted her family life. Paris offered him an escape from what he called the puritanism of New York—where, fancy! one's club shut down on you at 2 a.m.—and thus it happened that Ulick Invern, Jr., first saw the light in the French capital. With his brother, two years his senior, he received French training: The Ecole Normale, private tutors, ending with the Sorbonne. Oswald's painting talent soon manifested itself, and after eighteen the Paris of the Americans knew him no longer. He went to live on the Left Bank, in the Impasse du Maine, where, at his studio, he led the free, happy life of a monied artist. He had plenty of money, thanks to his indulgent mother, who, from time to time visited him, and, while he was on good terms with his brother, they didn't have much in common except their love for the Mater. They worshipped her. Their father they admired, but with well-defined reservations. He was a nee'r-do-well to the last, and died an aristocratic drunkard, leaving a malodorous memory, many mistresses and a cloud of debts. His widow never mentioned his name—that is, unless someone spoke disparagingly of him; then she betrayed resentment. The old chap was good form, but a charming black-guard, all the same—that was the verdict of his children, who speedily forgot him.

But his influence persisted beyond the grave, though the opposite of what might have been expected. Ulick told people who wondered over his abstinence that his father had drunk and smoked enough for a dozen families. So he let liquour and tobacco alone; besides, Oswald kept up the family tradition—a thirsty one. Following the mother's death, which occurred a few years after her husband's—there was heart malady in the history of the Bartletts—the two young men found themselves with a comfortable income, though not too rich. They saw little of one another. Tolerant as he was Ulick couldn't endure the sporting artistic crowd of the Latin Quarter atelier, and Oswald, on his side, found his brother a trifle pedantic, doctrinaire, even utopian. Wisely they kept asunder. A Frenchman in externals and by culture Ulick knew the men and women of the early nineties who made Paris a city of artistic and intellectual light. He was too young to have remembered Flaubert, but he visited Edmond de Goncourt at Auteuil and there encountered the group that had forsworn Zola and Naturalism. He admired the polished style of Edmond De Goncourt, a true aristocrat of letters; admired his Japonisme, his bibelots, pictures, and all that went to make the ensemble of that House Beautiful. A point of distain had begin to pierce the speech of the superb old gentleman, who confided to the sympathetic American youth that the younger generation didn't even knock at his door, that he and his dear dead brother, the illustrious Jules, had given those budding litterateurs a new opera-glass through which to view contemporary life. It was true. Dandys in their prose style, the De Goncourts had fashioned for themselves a personal vision and speech, feverish, staccato, intense. Their chief preoccupation was art, the pictorial, the tangible arts. No better book about artistic life has been written than Manette Salomon. And Madame Gervaisais is less an odyssey of a weak woman's soul, than an evocation of modern Rome. Alone, Edmond had written those exquisite notations of a girl's awakening consciousness to be found in the pages of Chérie. Ulick felt that he would not long tarry in that finely-filed, but chilly literature.

He had encountered at one of the reunions in the famous Concourt grenier, Henry James and also Joris-Karel Huysmans, whose names in baptism were Charles Marie-George. For this misanthropic writer he had shown such a preference that he attracted the attention of his idol and was invited to call upon him at his home in the rue de Sèvres on the rive gauche. A friendship began which greatly influenced the development of the younger man's character. His father had been what is facetiously called a "hickory" Catholic. He went to church when the spirit moved him. Yet, Irish-like, he never let the lustral week preceding Easter pass without confessing and communicating, usually going to the Trinity church on the boulevard Malsherbes, where he found a friend in a little Irish priest long stationed there for the convenience and edification of English-speaking residents. But Ulick's mother had been a High Church Episcopalian, and while she was not a fervent church woman she had consented to the baptism of her sons in the Roman Catholic religion. It is not so far away from my faith, she had told her fashionable English friends when they remonstrated with her over this backsliding from the principles of the Church of England. She, too, lacked true moral fibre though her association with her characterless husband may have been the chief contributing cause.

Ulick, however, was not of the temperament religious. He believed, of course, in a deity, an immanent deity; his was a pleasing sort of personal pantheism. Oswald was become a Manichean, a devil-worshipper. He did not repudiate the authority of the Church. But, then, Oswald drank absinthe, and long before that artists' apotheosis, he had hitched his artistic wagon to the saturnine canvases of Paul Cézanne. Ulick, on the contrary, never indulged in parti-pris. He was born, if such a thing were possible, with an indifferent temperament concerning any particular religion. All gods were divine to him, from the fetish of a South-Sea islander to the sublime doctrine of transubstantiation. He would have agreed with Baudelaire that it is neither permissible nor prudent to mock at any idol. A deity may have once made its abode in the wood or stone. Not cynical, Ulick was never convinced that any act of his could alter the inflexible law of causality. He had absorbed from Taine his deterministic leaning, luckily tempered by a sensible toleration. Whatever God is, he certainly can't exist outside of my brain-cells, argued Ulick. Each man creates a god after his own image. If I stop thinking of my particular deity-concept then he ceases to exist—for me; and that is the history of every god, every religion. All the rest is theology. Mother Church with her magnificent ceremonial, her liturgy, music, painting, sculpture, above all, architecture—for him, Gothic—appealed to his imagination, historic and aesthetic. Ulick was principally aesthetic; morals played a minor rôle in his existence.

But M. Huysmans had traversed the seven dolorous stations of his own crucified spirit and he at once made a searching examination into the conscience of his youthful admirer. He related, not without a certain muted pride, the advice of Barbey d'Aurevilly, the same advice Barbey had given Charles Baudelaire: that either the author of Là-Bas must prostrate himself at the feet of Jesus crucified, or else blow out his brains. "C'est fait," added Huysmans. It was shortly after the epoch of En route that he told Ulick of his conversion, not an unexpected one to those who knew the umbrageous, slender writer. Had it not been for the curiously beautiful literature it produced the various states of soul of M. Huysmans would not have riveted the fancy of Invern. The mordant epithet, picturesque phrase, the lenten rhythms of this multicolored prose, its sharp, savoury imagery—Huysmans' spiritual landscapes are painted with the gusto of a hungry man at a banquet where the plates are composed by a chef of genius—all these and the vision of a profoundly pessimistic soul, attracted him to Huysmans as to no other modern writer. Only to Petronius Arbiter among earlier penmen would he accord an equal value. Also to St. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis. He did not apologize for this versatility in tastes.

Huysmans prodded his conscience to such good effect that he accompanied the master to St. Sulpice, and also went with him when he made the rounds of the bookstalls along the Left Bank of the Seine. It was during one of these fascinating excursions in pursuit of ancient Latin hymnal literature that Ulick was presented to Remy de Gourmont, another of his favorite writers. A second friendship began, that long outlived the death of Huysmans. Maurice Barrès and his deification of the ego, was to be the third and principal étape in his moral development. There was one thing, nevertheless, that M. Huysmans could not persuade him to do; to make peace with his church. Urged to the confessional, there to cleanse his soul, to the communion-table to assuage his thirst for the infinite, Ulick would reply with a shoulder-shrug. The truth was that his sceptical analytical mind and his passion for women kept him from taking the final leap-off into piety and purity. My friend, Huysmans would insist, it is so easy! But if I relapse, as I am sure to do? would query Ulick. Then, he was assured that there was always further grace for the sinner. The waters of purification were always on tap. He could lave himself weekly—and begin over again; even the very next day. It's too easy, and it elevates religion to the dignity of a Turkish-bath, Ulick retorted. M. Huysmans, in turn, shrugged his shoulders, and the evening would end in tobacco smoke and furious discussions about art and literature.

And what evenings of ambrosia they were, mingled with the venom of the Master's critiques! He spared no one. He called Monseigneur d'Hulot, a bellicose booby, that same erudite and amiable churchman, who later wrote so discriminatingly of his bitter-tongued friend. An arsenal of opinions passed into the possession of the neophyte. But even at that early age, the formative period, his general culture was wider, more generous than the Master's. Ulick had been a student from the precocious age of seven when he was discovered by his nurse reading La Fontaine's Fables and Pickwick Papers. This bi-lingual training had produced admirable results. He knew two literatures thoroughly; in addition to a fair acquaintance with German and Italian. His mother had insisted on a German university and he selected Jena because of its propinquity to Weimar. Those four years in Germany had been the white stones in his studious career. There he had learned and loved Bach and Beethoven; there he learned to know Goethe, the greatest among moderns—he detested Bismarck and the hard positivism of the Prussian pan-Germanists; Heine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were to come later. His reactions to the system, or lack of system in the case of Nietzsche, was like a crisis in a dangerous fever. He alternated between languour and exaltation. Schopenhauer cooled off his naturally buoyant temperament, but Nietzsche gave him ecstasy as if poured from an overflowing goblet.

He went twice weekly to Weimar there to study pianoforte and theory with a pupil of Franz Liszt. The drowsy old town on the Ilm, once the Athens of Germany, laid his imagination under a spell. He wandered through the deserted gardens on long summer afternoons, Faust in hand, or he would go to Liszt's house in the woods, hardly a quarter hour's stroll from the garden-house of Goethe, and ponder the extraordinary activities of poet and pianist. In this same Weimar Goethe had led an active, practical life, he, the pagan hedonist, accused by the ignorant of day-dreaming, of being a butterfly voluptuary. He was the real political ruler and administrator of Saxe-Weimar. Liszt, after a life that was Caesarian in its triumphs, had calmly entered into his hermitage, where he taught, prayed and composed. And this is the end of every man's desire, thought the young man, who greatly aspired, though not for the prizes of the market-place. Yonder, at Jena, in Dr. Bingswanger's sanitorium, was hidden the poet-philosopher Nietzsche whose melodious thunder-words had stirred to the core the self-satisfied materialism of his native land. But he was wounded, his eagle wings of rhapsody and rage were broken; they no longer supported him in his flights through the vasty firmament of ideas. Later he was to come to his last asylum in Upper Weimar there to be soothed and watched over by his devoted sister Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. For Ulick he was a living presence, though the soul was absent from his body at Jena. Zarathustra and Faust, and the exquisite art of Frédéric Chopin were henceforth to be the three guiding stars in his constellation of thinkers and artists. Indeed, it was the difficulty of finding a suitable interpreter of Chopin that drove him back to Paris. His Weimar teacher believed in the motto: Aut Lizst, aut nihil! Ulick preferred the Pole to the Hungarian: besides, a teutonized Chopin was inconceivable.

II

One phrase of Huysmans he remembered: without personality, no talent. If I can't achieve a personality I shall never become a writer, thought Ulick. That's what this sweeping dictum means: but how to achieve a personality? He was forced to smile over the crudeness of his question. Either you have it or you haven't—personality. He had wished to ask M. Huysmans the road to perfection, but he put off doing so for he knew in advance the answer: Holy Mother the Church. Then one day he received a card inscribed: "Changement de domicile: J.-K. Huysmans. Maison Notre-Dame à Ligugé (Vienne)" and he felt that he would never again see his friend. Nor did he. Huysmans, become a saint, rather an acrimonious saint, had severed all earthly ties. Henceforth, till the day of his cruel death, he was with God.

Music, already a passion with Ulick, began to dominate his life. He lost interest in various absurd or depraved "movements" that floated on the surface of artistic and literary life in Paris like greasy scum on clear soup. He changed his apartment and went out on the northern line, to Villiers-le-Bel, where in a rented maisonette, he could patrol the keyboard five or six hours daily without disturbing his neighbors. He had mastered technical difficulties years before, it was the higher reaches of interpretation he sought. He played Bach and Beethoven with a fervour that was religious. For him, as for Hans von Billow, the Well-Tempered Clavichord and the Sonatas were the Old and New Testaments of music. Chopin came third in this immortal trio of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Chopin, whose Preludes and Studies contain the past, present and future of the pianoforte. Even at this period Ulick saw clearly into the classic genius of the Polish tone-poet. Schumann ran a close second to Chopin in his affections. The glowing heart of romance, of great still forests, tangled underwoods, secret, sudden little lakes, clear and shining in the mystic daylight, their waters washed at dusk by the silver of a tender young moon; lover's vows in the dense darkness, sighs over their hapless fate—all passion and mystery, shy, hesitating, are in his music. He, not Chopin, is the real Romantic. Brahms and the moderns were not neglected. The elusive genius of Claude Debussy was then new. Ulick admired him. He loved certain phases of Brahms; not Dr. Johannes Brahms, the ponderous philosopher, but Brahms, the romantic, the follower in the trail of Schumann. There are pages in the pianoforte music that evoke grey days when the soul in its reverse aspirations recoils on itself, half articulate, divinely stammering, to express sensations that had lain buried in its convulutions since the birth of the monad. Brahms, too, is a mystic. His music sometimes registers moods recondite, moods that transcend normal psychic experiences. After Mendelssohn, and his crystalline shallowness, the utterances of Brahms are seemingly prophetic; a prophet who does not comprehend his own speech, though the fiery coal has touched his lips into eloquence. But the Forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, with the Beethoven sonatas were the daily musical sustenance, the bread of life, for Ulick. They quite filled his emotional and intellectual cravings.

He didn't neglect the other arts. A brief stay in the atelier of Gérôme, later with Bonnat, failed to convince him that he had a painting hand. His eye was well-trained, not only by constant study and adventuring among the masterpieces in the Louvre, but also by sketching outdoors. The theatre was a thrice-told tale for him, his parents had been lovers of the drama, and Paris had everything to gratify his versatile tastes. In all the tohu-bohu of his activities, he did not lose sight of his chiefest ambition; to become a writer, one with an individual note. Playing the pianoforte was all very well; he knew that he had a friend for his old age; but the main business of his life was writing, and if he recognized his dilettante viewpoint he was assured that at some time this smattering of the Seven Arts—Jack of all, master of none—would prove useful in his avocation of criticism, for critic he had elected to become. Criticism was the best way to practice his scales in public and acquire a supple, steady touch on his intellectual instrument. In due time his own books would follow.

He wrote French as if it were his native tongue, as in a sense it was. English was always spoken in the Invern household; that had been a wise rule of a seldom wise father. Also French or Italian, not often German—because Ulick never met in Paris any of his old Jena associates; but, preferably French. Yet, when he essayed several flights, chiefly critical, he recognized that his was the Anglo-Saxon mind. He thought in French, the purity of which in diction could not be challenged; nevertheless, the fundamental structure of his thought was English. His French essays, which he showed to that most unselfish of professional egotists, most optimistic of pessimists, Remy de Gourmont, were soon touched on their sore spot.

"You are, my dear young friend, an Englishman, more than that, an Irishman, still more than that, an American, and, having known that beautiful lady, your dear mother, I may add, A New York American. You write well in our tongue, though not so well as Arthur Symons, anyhow, better than Oscar Wilde—who hasn't mastered our syntax—but, but—it's not vital, individual, your style. I overhear too many echoes of Flaubert, Goncourt, above all, Huysmans. That won't do. You have so saturated yourself with the ideas and methods of these masters that you have left no room for the growth of your own personality. Jeune homme, écoutez!"—and the kindly eyes peering through the big bowed glasses pierced to the inner consciousness of his listener—"Take the advice of an old doctor of vocables. Have you written much in English? No? I thought not. That is a virgin-field for you. Go home, go back to New York, you are deracinated in Paris, as my brilliant friend, Maurice Barrès puts it—what, haven't you read Barrès? Begin at once with that novel of national energy, Les Déracinés—and of a cosmopolite, detestable, person—pardon!—as detestable as the dilettante attitude. Perhaps the unexpected clash with a comparatively new language, new characters, and new environment may strike a personal spark from your little grind-stone in New York. Otherwise, Monsieur Ulick, you will become a replica of your brother Oswald, with whom I occasionally collaborate in a bock at the Café François-Premier; you will become a second-rate Parisian, writing excellent, colorless prose, the standardized prose of the college professor. The world over my dear chap, college professors are alike—the Eternal Sophomore, coprolites of the ideal. No, I repeat, don't expect to get your head above the turbid stream. Return to your native heath and astonish the Yanks, as your beloved Mark Twain says—there's a Yankee genius for you, racy, original, and one who should stand four-square with Emerson, Poe and Thoreau. But, then, you have no school of critique in America, so I suppose Mark Twain will be put in his true niche a half century hence. But do you love your country?" suddenly asked the master. Cornered, Ulick blurted out: "Certainly, I am an American, though born in Paris. Besides, I love baseball and mince pie."

"Bon, true American arts," said the writer and benevolently dismissed his ardent neophyte with the shining brow.

III

The toypond near the east driveway floated many miniature boats that Saturday afternoon in May. The golden-crested synagogue on the Avenue, a phallic emblem for the eyes of the initiated, stood massive, erect, well within view. Pretty children played sailors; at intervals their exigent nurses rescued them from a watery grave. The girl, straight to virginal primness, swinging a scarlet parasol, went on slow gliding feet around the basin. In her jade-colored eyes there was the sweet faint passion of a June morning; she evoked June rather than May, a late, not an early spring-tide. She was in gold and black and wore a wide-brimmed hat of black straw. Her eyes were not large, nor yet luminous; smothered fire would have been the verdict of a portraitist. Jewelled eyes, they were, but jewels that had the muffled radiance of a topaz. Introspective her glance, sympathetic and not without a nuance of melancholy. A young thing not over eighteen, tender but suspicious, proud and dependent on those she loved, Mona went into the park every day to escape the oppressive happiness of her home. She lived with her parents. Her brother was away ten months during the year at college. She had not many friends of her age and sex because she was the companion of her father and mother. She adored them. They were adorable; the mother like an old English painting of the eighteenth century; the father, a scholar, a futile fumbler in the misty mid-region of metaphysic; but as gentle as a gentle woman, for all women are not so. At times Mona fled, so deep was her love for them. She stood in the clear soft afternoon light, more brune than blonde, yet suggesting not twilight but dawn. Her Celtic name modulated with her character—a character, fluid, receptive, sceptical, above all, pagan in its worship of sun, moon, stars, and fair tempting nature. Her tiny beaked nose sniffed the candid air crammed with May odors. She was happy. Not a masculine shadow had projected itself across the snowy field of her virgin soul.

"By Jove! that's an interesting girl, I'll wager!" exclaimed Ulick Invern to his companion, who replied: "Come over and I'll introduce you. She is my sister Mona."

IV

They strolled to the Casino. With his accustomed flair for character Ulick recognized in the girl something out of the usual run of Americans. The charmless Yankee woman he had encountered to his discomfiture from the moment his steamer left Havre. She was the "life of the smoking-room"—on the French line ladies are permitted to invade the ship's fumoir—and he soon avoided that type. But he found her on the docks at New York and she fairly swarmed over the hotel, did this same aggressive, conceited, too well-dressed female. In Paris he had seen little of his ci-devant countrymen. He never visited the office of his father, and the recurrent advent of fresh consuls and their wives at the Embassy left him unmoved. His ideal of the American woman was the figure of his mother: exquisitely tactful, and of a veiled charm. And he enjoyed in Henry James the portraiture of the refined, if somewhat anaemic order, of lovely spinsters. But the raw native who gadded about Paris, confidently criticizing everything and everybody— those women were repugnant to his sensibility. Daisy Miller was a reticent aristocrat in comparison.

Perhaps it was the Old-World texture of her manner, perhaps it was a brief sight of the exalted soul that peeped out of her timid eyes, perhaps—! but what reason can a young man or a young woman give for their first fugitive predilections? Ulick met Mona and liked her; Mona saw Ulick and liked him. As Paul Bourget would have said, they then and there "amalgamated their sublimes," which simply meant that they were two birds limed by nascent love. The sublimities and the mingling might come later.

But this youthful couple did not pin down their sensations to an artistic formula. They chatted, laughed, walked, and when the Casino was arrived at they sat on the Terrace and Ulick told them that the spot made him homesick for Paris; Paris, his patrie psychique. Mona incredulously smiled yet wondered; how could anyone prefer Paris to New York? She had never been in Paris. Ulick lightly reproached Milton for having kept such a sister locked up, as if in a gaol. Thereat, the theological student chuckled. Mona was free as a swallow. She preferred the company of her parents to that of the frivolous chits of her own social circle. Ulick had known that the Miltons were well-to-do people who lived without ostentation, a rapidly vanishing species of New Yorkers. Again he looked at Mona, again their gaze collided. Her eyes shone. They are the eyes of a rare soul, he commented to himself. And how different the expression from the calm, objective gaze of Easter. Toujours Easter!

"There comes Paul Godard! Lord! with that creature Blanche in his car. Don't stare, Mona, please," begged her brother. "Don't be stupid," she answered, "you dear old priest. I'll look. The woman won't hurt me." Mona measured the handsome, bold dancer, over-dressed, bejewelled and resplendent in a picture hat, who majestically moved up the terrace followed by Paul and the maître-d'hôtel. Paul pretended not to see Ulick, and Ulick turned the other way. He wasn't interested in Paul or his concubines, though he still recalled with a sullen rage the caddish behaviour of Godard the night he made Easter half-drunk; that, and the inglorious hat episode he could never forgive nor forget. "So he didn't sail, after all," he muttered. But if he was indifferent, the young girl was not. "Is that the rich Mr. Godard I read of in the newspapers?" she asked Ulick who couldn't repress a slight shudder of disappointment. "She reads the newspapers like any other American virgin, and she speaks of money! Hopeless, all these dove-eyed maidens, with their profiles of a hawk; a sweet, domesticated hawk, a hawk all the same, ready to swoop down—" "Oh let's go home brother," broke in Mona, irrelevantly. She had sensitively noticed the inattention of her new friend and she was wounded without giving herself any reason for her slight feeling of resentment. They went away. Ulick accompanied them to the gate at 72nd Street. Mona gave him a wan smile at parting. Milton, as usual, was unaffectedly hearty. He was fond of Ulick and had made a vow to save his soul from the eternal bonfire. She seemed to like me at first, said Ulick after he left them, though she didn't invite me to call. Oh Lord, I wonder what mischief Easter Brandès is up to at this minute? Her name revived odious memories. Again that Paul Godard. To the devil with the exasperated poodle. Ulick went to the Utopian Club.

V

Mona Milton was what the French, with their feeling for nuance, would call "fausse-maigre"; she gave an impression of slenderness which her solidly-built figure contradicted. She was partial to draperies and that, perhaps, created the illusion of diaphaneity. Her health was excellent. Not even at the time when women are 'minions of the moon' did she relapse into that forlorn flabbiness noticeable even to the ordinary obtuse male. Her mother had reared her in the old-fashioned way and had put the fear of God in her heart (read: human respect for the polite conventions of a rapidly disintegrating social hierarchy). But her father, who called himself agnostic, had quietly pooh-poohed his wife's solicitousness regarding the little virtues. Hedges to be vaulted if needs must, he told his daughter, the chief companion of his long tramps through Central Park, when it was a green, delightful retreat from the city's menacing encroachment. Truth is stranger than morals, he also said. Mona loved the park. Every day saw her reading or walking through the less-footed by-ways. For her, mornings were mysteries. She would sit in the sun for hours, a book in her lap, her eyes dreaming. Her sub-conscious life was struggling for self-recognition. Her ego was transformed after puberty announced itself. She was an orchestra of cells; the multiplicity of her egos astonished, yet did not distress her. She accepted the new stream of consciousness in her that had burst its barriers and painted over her imagination a fresher, more beautiful world. Of physiology and psychology she had more than the rudiments. Sex did not puzzle her, only its cabined seclusion from the general current of daily life. Her mother had been frank with her since she had reached the age of curiousness; in turn Mona was frank with her father. She asked him questions that she would not ask her mother and he answered them unhesitatingly. He believed that insincerity cloaked a multitude of stupidities. One day when she was hardly sixteen she said: "Papa, why do I love dolls so much?" "The maternal instinct," he had replied. "Oh, yes, anybody knows that, but why am I different from other girls?" "Different, my dear?" "Yes, different. I haven't one friend who loves dolls. They are fond of dogs but laugh at me when I dress and undress my darling doll. Lydia Fuller says I'll be married at eighteen and have twins at nineteen—maybe sooner," added Mona, pensively. The old man only shook his head and resumed his Schopenhauer.

The rearing of the girl, withal superficial, covered a wide variety of authors and subjects. She knew French fiction so well that she couldn't become interested in the hypocritical half-way house of English-writing novelists. What's the use of writing about life, she complained to her mother, and leave life out of the story? The scabrous element in Gallic light literature amused her, but she preferred Flaubert to Paul de Kock, Balzac to Zola. Memoirs enchained her fancy. The utterances and actions of real men and women appealed. Casanova, who has left the world its most frank and complete autobiography, was for Mona as is romance to other girls of her age; Casanova, Benvenuto Cellini and the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Rabelais she dismissed and for Benjamin Constant and Stendhal she only entertained mild respect. She admired the electric energy of Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Môle, but they left her cold. As for the pessimists, Senacour, Amiel and them that confide to diaries, their pen dipped in their own salty tears, she spoke contemptuously. Weaklings, all. What if they did write charmingly? She longed for virility; that spelled charm for her. The more violent pages in the Old Testament, Shakespeare and Faust; but she held the revelation of the New Testament in moderate esteem. Too much oriental fatalism. Too much turning the "other cheek," to please her. The person of Christ seemed apochryphal. Such a man couldn't exist twenty-four hours without being killed on our murder-loving planet. Notwithstanding all these contradictions in her undeveloped character, Mona was far from being an "advanced" young woman; indeed, her classmates at college had voted her desperately old-fashioned; worse—a womanly woman. Secretly she wished that her soul could be like a jungle at night, filled with the cries of monstrous sins. But it wasn't.

She continued to love her doll, not that she disliked cats and dogs and birds, only that the doll, the simulacrum of the future child, touched her to her innermost fibres. She had the brother-cult, yet she loved no one, except her father, so much as the absurdly big French doll, the last of a long line dating back to her babyhood, that slept with her every night. The old folks were at first amused, then edified by this stubborn reaction to a profound instinct. In time they became accustomed to seeing a staring wax effigy on the pillow of their daughter's couch, attired in a neat nightdress and lace cap. Ah, well! had said the father, it is a premonitory symptom, yet she is happier now, dear child, than she will be with her future husband. Considering her self-effacing nature, the reply of his wife was rather tart: "If you read less Schopenhauer you wouldn't be so prejudiced against my sex. To hear you talk one might suppose that your married life had been a vale of tears." To which the old man humbly and affectionately replied: "Instead of a bed of roses, as it is," and surprised his spouse by warmly kissing her.

They didn't forbid Mona the company of young men but she made no attempt to meet anyone. Her brother was away most of the time at the seminary and his friends were theological students, neuter persons she evaded rather than despised. Voluntary eunuchs, enemies of the very source of life, she felt uncomfortable in their presence, as she would have been embarrassed if a hermaphrodite had been pointed out to her. The unnatural was merely a mediaeval idea, but the anti-natural was to be feared and avoided. She did not say this to her brother, who in her eyes was a saint, but she said as much to her father who sympathised with her. Another confusion in her mind was the degrading of the major instinct of life—after hunger; Reproduction. If, as the Bible says, fornication is a rank sin, why do a few words mumbled over a man and woman by a clergyman or magistrate make it less a sin? It's the same vile act isn't it, even in marriage? Her mother was more shocked at her expression than at the idea which prompted it—an idea as old as the hills. "But Mona, people don't think such things, much less speak them." "They do mother. There isn't a girl in the world who hasn't had this same thought, though she may keep it in the secret cabinet of her mind." Her mother shook her head but didn't dare speak of sin, or redemption or the holy sacrament of matrimony instituted by the Church to bless the most animal of the functions, to lend it dignity, to create a safeguard for the children, not to mention the fact that this sacrament screens the shock and doubts and hesitations of pure-minded girls, to whom physical union with a man would be otherwise repulsive. No, this "theological bric-à-brac" as Mr. Milton called the tenets of religion, his wife had been forbidden to speak of to her children. Her son was to her a surprise, like a swan hatched from a brood of ducklings, and now Mona was beginning to disquiet her. A good girl, a loving dutiful daughter—nevertheless, disquieting because of her absolutely natural attitude toward forbidden themes, so natural that she often embarrassed her mother.

"Mother," she had abruptly exclaimed about this time, "Mother, I wonder why brother is so inclined to piety. He should have been the girl, I the boy. Mother—I am beginning to believe that something was wrong in your marriage—" "Oh!" ejaculated the unhappy woman, who didn't know what terrible speech would follow: "I firmly believe, you dear old fraidcat Mother, that papa has never been unfaithful to you since you two darling old sillies were married." Mrs. Milton refused to unbend during an entire evening.

VI

After Ulick had given his hat and stick to the garderobe he walked through the café to the dining room on the University Place side. Martin's was his favourite rendezvous. The cuisine, the cellar, the service, were the best in town. Ulick lived at the Maison Felicé, but liked a change of menu and venue. He was known at Martin's and was soon taken to a window table when, astonished, he noted his immediate neighbor. She held out her hand: "Such coincidences do occur, outside of novels," she said. He sank into a seat facing her. "May I?" he begged. She nodded. Mona was fond of good things to eat. At home if the cook had served stewed potato-peelings her parents would have meekly swallowed them. They had little appetite for food or drink, none at all for the finer shades of cookery for the gentle art of the gourmet. Mona went daily into the kitchen and conspired in company with the cook; therefore, she occasionally ate something that had flavour. But when she was hard-pressed by artistic hunger, as she called it, she walked down the Avenue to 9th Street, there turned eastward and reached Martin's, always in a famished condition.

"You haven't ordered, have you, Miss Milton?" asked Ulick. She shook her head, negatively. He beckoned to the captain of the dining-room and after some whispering a waiter was instructed. No wine was commanded, neither drank wine. Vichy Celestins and wonderful coffee with cream made their appearance in company with French rolls and butter, followed by a variation on the theme of eggs—oeufs à la Martin—then a filet de sole au gratin—and a Chateaubriand steak with a Salade Russe—good heavens, mused the girl, he has a master-palate. It was true. Ulick, despite his fondness for mince pie and Philadelphia scrapple, could not endure the national cuisine. We are barbarians compared with the French, he openly asserted, who know how to eat, drink and think.

"And now my dear Miss Milton, I shall apologise for my rudeness. I never asked you if you expected anyone, but took for granted that my company would be agreeable. I ask your pardon. How are you, and how is your very good brother? Dear old Milt." She was all animation.

"I'm glad you like Milt. I adore him. What a pity he is going to be a priest." Ulick looked surprised. She coloured. "I mean," she pursued, "he should have picked out a more liberal profession."

"Religion is so narrowing,"—"Religion is an ensemble of scruples that impede the faculty of reason," he interrupted in sing-song tones. "Who said that?" she quickly asked. "I think the learned Professor Salomon Reinach." "You are right but your quotation is incorrect." For the third time that morning he was surprised. A blue-stocking, a theologian in petticoats; perhaps an agnostic. Yet she didn't seem "modern" or of the over-cultured type. "What Reinach wrote is this: 'Religion is a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties.'" She pronounced this little speech as if such definitions were the daily bread of her discourse. "Aren't those eggs delicious?" he asked. He was nettled. He wished to change the tide of conversation. She assented and smiled at him with such a mischievous smile, both a challenge and a conciliation, that he laughed. She laughed, and she extended her hand to him. He took it. The incident became a memory.

Her hands were not small; shapely and capable, they were white and carefully tended. He had made a study of the hand. Why shouldn't he? A pianist, a writer, who hated the type-machine, believing that only with the pen, the stylus, could a man create prose and poetry; all the rest is commercial. Yet the hands of Mona were not what he called the hands of an artist. Their forms were largely-moulded, the fingers, charged with character; the tips were not spatula-shaped. His curiosity was aroused. They awaited the fish. "Let me look at the palm of your left hand," he pleaded. She showed it without coquetry. He noted the deeply graven and long life-line, but the abnormal development of the Venus-hill caused him to ejaculate: "Dio mio! you must have an affectionate disposition." She said without a suspicion of mock-modesty: "I love children," and then they attacked the sole. He couldn't help admiring her forthright manner. A candid girl. Therefore a good girl. And how interesting. She thought: If he doesn't like my plain speaking he isn't the man for me. Love me, love my doll, she whimsically concluded. If the secrets of a maiden's and youth's souls could be spilled on the table, as salt is sometimes spilled, many a marriage made in heaven or hell would never be consummated. For ten minutes their teeth were busy.

She didn't smoke because in those days ladies were not supposed to know the taste of cigarettes. There are minor drawbacks in every age. She saw his long, nervous fingers with their suggestion of finesse, of power, saw the oval face and the clear-cut features—his profile made her dream of the profiles of decadent emperors of the Lower Empire; saw that his nose and brow modulated in the Napoleonic way, a common enough trait throughout the Midi of France; saw his sensual lips, and simply loved the kindly glance of his heavily-lidded blue eyes; blue of a penetrating, celestial intensity. His vitality was concentrated in his eyes, which were always speculative, seldom tender. Ulick, thou art a jewel! she murmured, and thereafter to herself named him Jewel. (As had Easter, before her).

He saw, what he had with clairvoyance called an interesting girl. He didn't say pretty or beautiful; sympathetic, would be a more truthful ascription. His experienced glance roved over her face and figure. He measured, as would an architect, the latent powers of strength and resistance in her muscular conformation. Not a skinny bird, anyhow, he said with a sigh of relief. He is undressing me now, she thought. If he were, it was not in a salacious spirit. Voluptuary as he was, Ulick didn't feel a spark of erotic emotion for his companion. His admiration for her was sexually disinterested. She hasn't the pull of sex like Easter, yet I don't know—she is not awakened.

"Sir critic, when you have made all the specifications, registered the shortcomings, won't you please say something? I'm dying to hear about myself. Milt has told me of your ambitions. I wonder, though, that you should have left Paris for this noisy Tophet of a New York." It was his turn to color. The damned girl seemed to know exactly the nature of the stew simmering in his mental laboratory. But no young man of spirit needs a second invitation to talk about himself, his ways, his days, his mighty ambitions. He broke loose and at once she was swirled along on the swift crest of his eloquence.

He told her of his family, of his Parisian life, of his distinguished friends, of Jena, Weimar, Liszt and Nietzsche. He explained why he had selected New York as the best vantage-ground, the best waiting spot from which to wage war with his future public. He spoke of his music. He spoke of his physical strength. She interrupted to inquire why he, Paris-born, neither smoked nor drank. Surely not because of puritanical reasons. He violently demurred; then in an indiscreet burst of confidence he related the reason why Goethe didn't use tobacco; he didn't mince words; she understood, but didn't blush, as another girl might have done. Tobacco, he ingenuously declared, attenuates the virile quality of a man, wine is also dangerous no matter what the poets sing. Yes, but what will-power is yours, she commented. He expanded his chest and straightway stared into her eager eyes. Then it was, for the first time since they met, each looked another way. They had both seen things not set down every day on the human slate. She felt positively uncomfortable, and he said to himself: Steady old chap is the mot d'ordre. She is Milt's sister!

"I write about the stage because I can no longer endure listening to music. I tried my hand at musical criticism when I first landed. Now, as the curtain goes up at the opera, I have a queer feeling in the pit of my stomach. I call it aesthetic nausea. To hear over and over again the same old arias, the same bad singing, and then the stale phrases that we are compelled to write after each performance—phew! What a waste of time, what a re-chewing of banal ideas. And then, the receptive frame of mind; always listening to other men's ideas, or the lack of them. Again I say—what a sheer waste of time for any one who wishes to be individual, to create, no matter how slight the performance." He paused for lack of wind. "Go on," she urged. "The theatres are pretty bad, but at least you are dealing with actuality. Once in a while a play comes along by Ibsen, and then you are in contact with the stuff of life. Music is technical, emotional as it may be; but just try to write of it in terms of emotion and your pathos is soon bathos. Pictures are easier to handle because they resemble something in the world. Music does not. It is dug out of our subliminal self, brought to the surface of our consciousness by the composer's art—self-explorer is a truer title than composer, who as a matter of fact decomposes his soul-states, distils his most precious essence into tone. But I fear I bore you—Miss Mona." "Go on," she commanded.

"Well there isn't much further to go on, I am glad for your sake. I soon abandoned music, which I love all the better for not being forced to write about it. I felt strange at the opera house, I didn't become closely acquainted with my colleagues, so I was glad when the "Clarion" gave me the berth of dramatic critic. Now I can fight every day with erudite William Winter—Lord! how that little man can write English— over the Ibsen problem. Wagner is accepted here, yet a more original thinker, Henrik Ibsen, is slighted, is even called immoral, he the most moral of dramatists. Let's go for a ride," he exclaimed, "a beautiful day wasted over sterile aesthetics. What do you say—Miss Mona?" (That's twice he called me Mona!) She consented. The prospect of a trip through the park sitting next to this lively young man pleased her. "We shan't take a cab. I like a hansom better. Don't you love the good old English hansom with the slightly shabby but always sympathetic driver wearing a battered silk hat tipped on the side of his disreputable skull? Besides Miss Mona—a hansom is Cupid's chariot. Let's go." When Ulick started in earnest he was irresistible. He hailed a hansom. They hopped in. To the park!

VII

"Haven't I been rather discursive?" he had asked of her. "I don't think so," she had curtly contradicted. Forsooth, she didn't think that he had been discursive. She was rather disappointed. The brilliant verbal fireworks she had been taught by her brother to expect from Ulick had fizzled—she thought. It was only that night, after she had put Dolly to sleep, that she assembled her memories of the afternoon and then she realized the conversation might be truthfully described as discursive; fragmentary would be a better word. He is nice, she ruminated. Now you dear naughty dolly don't you pretend to be asleep when I see one of your eyes watching me ... little sneak, I believe you are jealous.... Oh! he is so nice Dolly.... She buried her face in the cool bed linen—There! I'll whip you for your mean jealousy—I'm fond of Ulick—my great Jewel of a man.... Dolly's head was lost under a pillow. Mona fell into a dreamless slumber.... She said nothing next morning to her mother about the impromptu luncheon and casually remarked that she would go for a walk in the afternoon, not far, she added. She didn't think it necessary to tell that she was going to the Metropolitan Museum, a few blocks away, there to meet Ulick Invern, who had promised to show her Manet's "Boy with a Sword" and to describe the personality of the painter, with whom he had been acquainted in Paris. It was to be a glorious afternoon devoted entirely to art. Ulick was so artistic and she so ignorant....

VIII

The modulation into an easy-going friendship was not difficult for these young people. An autumn without parallel, in its days of mellowness mingled with invigourating frosts, passed on rapid pinions. They did not bid Old Time to pause in his flight; the rhythms of their ardent blood were too insistent. They ceased to reason. Their affective life ruled. In the case of Ulick there was a throw-back to his Anglo-Saxon origins. His Parisian training and aptitudes melted in the gentle heat of new experiences. I am an American, after all, he often told himself, therefore sentimental, and sentimentality and sensuality are never far asunder. She, on the contrary, is a cerebrale, neither tepid nor tempestuous. Yet those moments when she seems on the verge of hysteria—I mean, when she goes off on those gales of laughter. She is oversexed, no doubt about that. She would rather discuss sex-problems than eat. A curious combination. So is her brother. He, too, likes to talk on forbidden subjects. People who have no outlet for their emotions are bound to brood over them and to unbosom themselves without realizing it. Steady, Ulick, steady! I'm not in love or I shouldn't be analyzing my feelings. Is she a trifle smitten? That way lies self-conceit. But she does like to be in my company, and I prefer hers to any woman's—yes, even to Easter's who never gave anyone a chance to breathe, so busy was she with herself. What egotists these mortals be! Puck should have said. I wonder what Easter is doing now? That wonderment had become a leading motive with him of late. He bitterly reflected that since the dramatic, the fatal, day in New Hampshire, she had not permitted him the slightest familiarity. She had kissed him on the steamer the day of her departure, but then she had kissed Tom, Dick and Harry with equal readiness, though she hadn't whispered to them: "You dear old Jewel." The memory of her voice, low, mysterious, tender, still fired his blood. I'm afraid I'm a sensual man. Be virtuous and you'll be bilious! He pondered the wise adage. Is physical love only a matter of hygiene? he asked himself. Tumescence; detumescence, as Havelock Ellis says. It's high time I went out on the trail after a few scalps. I'm getting a bit stale.

IX

That winter they met nearly every day. But she didn't invite him to call at her home. He couldn't ask a reason for this strange omission. My intentions are perfectly honourable. I've told her I wouldn't marry the best woman even though she were the last of her sex on the globe. I've also told her that a man should never live under the same roof with his mistress; in that case what would be the difference between marriage and concubinage; one would be as stupid as the other. Poor Emma Bovary found out from experience that men and women bound by any bond live in the land of platitudes. I told her—heaven forgive my candor!—that I changed mistresses every three months, that the instant I found myself falling in love with one I got a new one. Boasts by a boaster. What is it that interests nice girls in irregular lives? I wonder. The inside of a brothel is not so interesting as an abatoir, where as Huysmans used to say—love is slain at a stroke, and the stroke usually costs the man a twenty-franc piece. But these girls don't realize the crudeness of such lives. Mystery. That's the attraction. The unknown. Silly, miserable women who go to bed the same night with a half dozen men—is that romantic! Demi-vierges, Marcel Prévost called the American girls, for some reason best known to himself. Yet I've met respectable married women who went to Paris crazy to see the sights, that is, certain sights. The puberty of adultery? Maxim's soon bored them. From the organized obscenities of Montmartre they went to the "peep-holes" only to see another show staged for imbeciles with a filthy curiosity. What is it? Mona, dear decent child, agrees with me that promiscuous married life is the most deadly blow of all to romance. She simply won't recognize evil as evil, only as vulgarity—worse, as stupidity. I absolutely agree with her in that matter.

But it was not such plain sailing for Mona through this unfamiliar and uncharted land of emotion. She had a hard time with that temperament of hers. I'm glad they give it such a name as temperament, she said. Robert Louis Stevenson calls love a mixture of pruriency and curiosity, which suggests a horrid itch. Young men have an easier time than girls, who must sit and sizzle while down in some sub-cellar of their being they hear the faint growlings of the untamed animal. Once unleashed it jumps all barriers, and then—well, then, the fat's in the fire. Mona shivered, a pleasing shiver of anticipation. Why not bravely go to her parents and confess that she loved Ulick? He was a presentable young man, of social standing, with abundant means—evidently; for outside of his critical work he seems to do little except to spend money, not a negligible quantity, with her—and, finally, he was liked, and liked very much by Milt. Some perverse devil lurking in the depths of her being bade her stay silent. Was it romance, sloppy, slimy sentimentality, after all? She couldn't say. She only knew that she wanted to keep her secret, that she didn't wish to marry, that she loved to be near the big, good-hearted young chap with the blue eyes; yes, why not tell the truth—she was wild to be loved by him. Everything. A young woman brought up in the practice of all the proprieties—save church going—by a mother who idolized her! Nevertheless, she was ready to throw her bonnet over the windmill like the veriest street slut. Where her maidenly reserve! She had none when self-confessing. Ulick had said to her, I think you were brought up on the wrong kind of reading. Do you force me to stick to Hannah More or Self-Help? she had impertinently demanded. You might do worse. Bernard Shaw is poor nourishment for a girl with too much imagination, he retorted. Wrong again, she said, I've absolutely no imagination. I'm only enthusiastic. And you have said that without enthusiasms life would be unsupportable.

Thus far the outward expression of their mutual affection had been conventional. They went to picture exhibitions, the horse-show at the Garden saw them many times, and also opera and theatre matinées; but, strictly speaking, they were never alone. He always left her at her house door. There were no twilit corridors, darkened vestibules, no sudden corners in entries where they might embrace. He did smuggle her hand into his at the theatre when the lights were lowered; during entr'actes they were a well-bred couple. Opportunity, which is the thief of virtue—sometimes—hadn't appeared on the scene. Occasionally, when walking after a copious luncheon, she would complain of enervation and her eyes would swim with mystic languour. He, fearing that she might think him virtuous, boasted of laborious nights of vice. She seemed to believe him and secretly applauded his conduct. No wonder young men can bob up with such smug faces when they call on nice girls. Oh, yes, they are quite virtuous. No fear of their misbehaving themselves. Their other "lady" friends have made them safe—housebroken, she added with a smile over the phrase. I believe grim law causes more suffering than license. When she communicated this original idea to Ulick he frankly asked her:

"See here, Mona, do you ever expect to have a child?" "I'm crazy for one, for two"—and she related the story of Dolly. He was at once sympathetic, slightly to her surprise. "It reminds me," he said, "of two French friends of mine. Married, but no children, though they were much desired. For several years they played at parenthood, they pretended they had a boy and a girl, very young, very troublesome, but beloved by them. They played this strange little comedy for several years. They never went out in the daytime without the "children." They held long conversations with them. They reproved, praised, admired, caressed them. At night when they visited the theatre or had a dinner they left their precious imaginary offspring in the care of an equally shadowy nurse, burdening her with all manner of instructions. And now comes the funny part of my story. A real child was born, a few years later, a second followed, and for all I know they may have had half a dozen since then. But those children of flesh and blood were not treated with the same sort of love the dream-children had received"—"Dream-children?" she repeated her eyes insistently seeking his, "what a pretty expression. Did you make it up?" "Certainly not. Haven't you read Charles Lamb's description of his dream-children, the children he never fathered—only dreamed of?" She didn't thank him for his explanation, but mused. "I should like to have some dream-children." "How many, five or six?" "No, two would be enough, a boy and a girl. I have already a real child, didn't I tell you?" He pretended to be shocked. "A real baby you have?" "Yes, my Dolly. She's a troublesome charge. If I could only have two dream-children"—"Who is to be the father?" "You," she replied, and her naive gravity impressed Ulick. "Won't you be the father of our twins?" Her voice was low, pleading, almost intense. They were sitting in the park on an April afternoon. He caught one of her wrists. "By God," he exclaimed, "if I could only believe you meant it." "I do mean it, dear Ulick. We shall never marry yet we may have children —dream-children, symbols of our friendship." "And what in the world do you mean by saying that we shall never marry?" His accent was one of astonishment and no little pique. She gazed demurely at her well-shaped hands.

"Didn't you say that you had to change mistresses every three months? And what about the obscene promiscuity of married life!" He went into a bad humour at once and impatiently answered: "Yes, I did say it and you know enough of life to know it was all brag. I've no mistresses—" "What! no mistresses, not one?" she blankly inquired. He didn't turn a hair. "Not one. I love only one woman in the world now. It's Mona Milton. I needn't tell her that." "No," she replied without affectation. "We do care for each other. Yet, Jewel, why harp on marriage?" He endeavoured not to show his surprise. To atavism, and to the Bartlett side of his ancestry, must be set down the reason for this surprise, and a faint, though well-defined, feeling of dissent. Really, a young girl should not say such things to a young man no matter how modern, how advanced she is; no matter if she is fond of him; and the curious part of the thing is that Mona does not boast being advanced or modern, nor, indeed, anything but a real girl.

She noted his confusion and helped him over the stile of perplexity. "Ulick, let's have dream-twins."

"I'll assume all the responsibility, all the cares, only let's have them—now." He glanced superstitiously about him as if he feared her speech would be overheard. And her home not ten minutes away! She divined the cause of his embarrassment and grasping his hand in her soothing clasp she asked with the naiveté of a childish mother: "What shall we call them, our darlings?" "That's important," he declared, humouring her. "Let me see. The boy? I have it. Shamus. My full name in baptism is Ulick Shamus Fitzgibbon Desmond Invern. It's a mouthful. I am the namesake of my uncle, my father's elder brother, now the head of our house and present Marquis of Invern and Desmond. Yes, there's a Marquis in the family, a poverty-stricken one at that, poor but proud. But it will do me no good, for he has a quiverful of children. My cousin, St. Alban, his heir, is my age, a regular prig. So, dear, it will be Shamus, if you don't mind." She nodded. Shamus would do. Now for the girl. He again made the nomination. "She is called Grane." Mona rebelled. "Why such an unusual name?" "Don't you remember the white horse of Brunnhilde in 'Siegfried'?" "Certainly, and I also remember the white horses in Rosmersholm which foretold trouble." "I like Grane, and you will like her, too." He was so firm that she acceded. "All right, dear, and now what are you going to do with the pair since they are born?" He took out his watch and started up. "Past five, and I've a first-night on. Good-bye, darling Mona," and he kissed her upon the mouth for the first time in the twilight and with a moon like an effaced silver coin looking at them over the synagogue. It was a consecration, she whispered; my first kiss. Then aloud: "Good-bye—darling—I'll take Shamus and Grane home, the dears might take cold. Good-bye Ulick, my husband and father of our children." As he strode away, not daring to look back, he ruminated: That's a case of suppressed maternal instinct. Mona ought to be married or—or—steady boy! Else you are in it either way you jump.

X

The new Ibsen play enjoyed a stormy première. After he had sounded its praise and expressed his personal opinion that critics who thought to the contrary were imbeciles not worth the powder to blow them hell ward, Ulick went to the Utopian Club there to relax. He ran into Edgar Saltus as he entered. That writer was then at his brilliant apogee. He had published The Anatomy of Negation, The Philosophy of Disenchantment, The Truth About Tristram Varick and Mr. Incoul's Misadventure, and was enjoying with his ironic humor the row raised by the moral bell-boys of criticism over his incomparable style and incomparable unmorality. Ulick had been his admirer in Paris and told the aristocratic author so in no measured manner. Saltus liked the young man and encouraged him. "Naturally, you should have remained in Paris. Here you commit spiritual suicide. I don't care what De Gourmont advised. You have the soul of a cosmopolitan. There is no nationality in art any more than there is democratic art. Demos dislikes art as much as he does a bathtub. Soap and social equality are akin. His self-constituted champion, Walt Whitman, who wrote some stunning head-lines, not to mention his catalogue of the human genitals, is not welcome to Mr. & Mrs. Demos. Longfellow about fills their lyric cup to overflowing. However, I was about to write you. I've an invitation for you." Then he went into details. Ulick was delighted. "Of course, I'll accept the invitation. It's very kind of you to think of me. What a jolly party it will be. I'm getting staler and staler in this town of my mother's. That party may bring back a whiff of dear old Paris." They shook hands and parted. Ulick went to the Maison Felicé, across Madison Square park, and after he had gone to bed he couldn't sleep; yet the noise of poker-chips in the next room didn't keep him awake. It's those damnable dream-brats, he irritably exclaimed and though it was long past two he donned a dressing gown and sat down to his desk in the music-room.

XI

Either I've made a mistake in coming to New York, or else I'm going soft in the upper-story, he said aloud, as he opened his portfolio, crammed with papers, some scribbled over, some blank, some carefully folded. There is Edgar Saltus, who knows life in a broader sense, perhaps better, than De Gourmont—he says I made a mistake. Is Paris my real home, and am I deracinated as Maurice Barrès calls it, and only transplanted in America? Ah! abominable music-critics' jargon, how glad I am to have escaped your adjectives and repulsive technical terms. That is no way to find one's individuality, overpraising vain screaming sopranos, voluptuous contraltos—I wonder why contraltos are more temperamental than sopranos? worst of all those monkey tenors, with their lascivious bleatings like goats in rut. Why do women admire the miserable, whitewash whinneying of tenor singers? Baritones and basses are at least virile. Whether or not the tenor is castrated, he sings like a eunuch. No, they adore the eunuch voice in preference. Thank Apollo, I'm through with the lot, though dramatic criticism isn't much better. In the concert-world one at least listens to good music. A good play in New York is as rare as a well-written critique. I'm afraid that criticism is a poor proving-ground for one's intellectual development. Let me see what I've written the last few months. Only notations. This romantic rot must stop. Mona—oh, Mona is all right, but the waste of time, the waste of emotion. What of those factors?

No women! Balzac had sternly warned Théophile Gautier. The Emperor Honoré did not practise what he preached. Compact of sex himself he was ever preoccupied with petticoats. La crise juponnière overtook him once a week and oftener. Ulick recalled an anecdote of the great man when, after he had succumbed to the blind fury of eroticism—a chambermaid, or somebody feminine had crossed his path—he went about the boulevards bemoaning to his friends: "J'ai perdu un livre, j'ai perdu un livre!" his theory being that an orgasm valued an entire story, and in his case it may have. Save your seed for nobler purposes than copulation. That is the wisdom of the sages. And the transposition so painfully accomplished by the saints of all times, climes and creeds, has ever impressed mankind as a deed heroic. Women secretly admire the chaste man. He is a sum of ineluctable forces. Men deride the Josephs and Parsifals, not crediting them with self-control. But that is nonsense, asserted Ulick. A priest here and there succumbs, but as a rule, and notwithstanding the atrocious martyrdom of unsatisfied legitimate desires, the sacerdotal man emerges from the trial a conqueror. As for women, they are the self-contained sex. No one knows precisely what happens in the alchemy of their emotions. Some burn their smoke, others blaze coram publico; but the majority hide this sort of light under a bushel of hypocritical reservations.

I mustn't waste myself in little spasms then. How about correspondence? "ça forme le style," Balzac told Gautier, and rather grudged him that concession. Ulick smiled. He knew his master-weakness, his vice. He knew that when the flesh moved him the spirit took a holiday. No self abnegation for him, no transposition to his cortical cells of his sexual longing. Like a bull he saw red everywhere. It's a pity all the same, he sighed. I should marry, raise a family and be unfaithful to my wife not more than twice weekly. The programme of the majority of good fathers, good husbands. And the American man is the worst of the lot. A regular Turk plus a religious humbug. And some clergymen! Town bulls. Over in Brooklyn they put up statues to their piety—and virility. Bon! They should. A womanly woman is admirable, and she is not rare. A virile man is as rare nowadays as a chaste one.

What an enormous faculty of inattention I possess! I wander, I stray into the queerest pastures. What's this I've written? Philanthropy is inverted egotism. True. All the immortal turpitudes are to be found in the ranks of the philanthropists. A pecuniary heresy. The latrines of my soul were overflowing in Paris. Am I purer in New York? Here we buy our ecstasy, rent that brief syncope called passion. What's the difference? It's the début that counts. The fury of enlacement leaves me a cynic. I wonder if women feel the same? That eternal triangle of theirs. And the pensile penguin of the eternal masculine. Wicked Walt has in The Children of Adam made some stunning phrases about the procreative organs. People who rave over his rotten poetry wouldn't read him if he hadn't been an exhibitionist in print. No one with a particle of taste seduces a young girl nowadays; they wait till she is married—it saves time and trouble. "Sir," roared old Doctor Johnson, "maidenheads are for ploughboys." Oh, the delicious, pernicious conversation that depraves. Thought deforms. Seduction by starlight sometimes ends in a police court with a fornication and bastardy charge. Anyhow, we must have our psychic satisfactions, else spiritual atony. Why this mania of certitude in the choice of a phrase? Pure dandyism of style. Goethe said in his Truth and Poetry, "All herein is true; nothing exact." That is fine in its implications. Stained-glass socialism! Most of it is nothing else. Anything to keep out the daylight of reality. Like the tigress that has tasted human flesh and blood so is the woman who knows man; neither are satisfied but with human prey. That's why widows remarry or—: why seduced girls "fall" again—though Ulick smiled at that silly word—why, convents are peopled by disillusioned souls—and there is a waiting list!

Why does man crave self-abasement? Pascal is an example. Caesar wept when, after watching a ballet of beautiful girls dance, he saw them killed. But he didn't weep from pity, but with ecstasy because of their beauty. The aesthetic temperament. Love is not a sentiment, it's a sensation. The Japanese know that. An orchestra of sensations in which the silences are sonorous. What an Iliad of Imbecility is the history of mankind. My idealistic anxiety over my affairs is proof positive of their pettiness. We never escape the prison of self, though we attempt to project our personality into the thoughts of another; this process is called sympathy. But a thought and a thing are identical. There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff, says William James. We can never know anything outside of ourselves. Oh! the sour hair, the dark breath of these psychologists! In the cuisine of love there are flavours for all tastes. Else ugly women wouldn't be sought after. Are there any ugly women? my brother Oswald used to say that once a pillow over their face all women were alike to him. Discriminating person, Oswald. His mind must be a slop-jar of the infinite. How mirific to mingle our essences. What immaculate perception is required to pick the precise woman with whom to "amalgamate our sublimes." The vagabondage of my soul through the universe, fluid, profound, and choral, is a gift denied most men and women. Yet it is at my threshold for the asking. My conceit is character—I think; yours is merely apoplectic. The lassitudes of love are divine. The human plant does not best flourish in the sunlight of success; it needs darkness, sin, sorrow, crime, to bring it to a rich maturity. The ignoble dung of miseries demands the spade of adversity. And Flaubert has said that the ignoble is the lower slope of the sublime. Which is consoling. As Rabelais would remark: I am an abstractor of quintessences.

I once longed to unhook the sun from the wall of the firmament and now I would fain crawl into a certain sultry crevice. The prism of desire deceives the Jasons in search of the golden—or brunette—fleece. I have made love to virtuous women who gave me the sensation of the force and felicity that attends the commission of a rape. And the pure woman who teases is worse than a streetwalker. A course of anatomy on a pillow, says a fellow cynic. Ah! the rapture of her little solitudes, her ivory tower, her mimique in the "naked war." In this life all the rest is gesticulation or secular sorrow. Ideas may be domesticated like cats. The pathos of distance—memorable phrase of Nietzsche—boasts its obverse, the bathos of propinquity—Walter Littlefield's mot. Some men look like a carefully pared thumb-nail; perhaps they are; anyhow, it's better than being a noble débris. Lawyers earn their bread in the sweat of their brow-beating. Fais aux autres ce que tu ne veux pas qu'ils te fassent! Pity is inutile. Every one of our actions is an addition. Why then worry over free-will? Not to animal life, nor to machinery must we go when studying the human heart, but to vegetables and flowers. I believe that romantic feelings are much less common than we imagine; the vast majority of the race mimic the gestures of the stage and fiction. Food, shelter, fornication, the fight for daily existence—these are the prime levers; not sentiment. We fool ourselves. We take our religion and sentiment in small doses. There are souls of prey like birds of prayer. Few women are in harmony with the moral landscape. What music is comparable to the exquisite sighs of a woman satisfied? The orchestra of her soul and sensations plays a triumphant fortissimo, and what a cruel, piercing note is the supreme spasm; the entire gamut of dolor is compressed therein.

We owe the world a living, not t'other way round. How I loathe Gounod's Ave Maria with its slimy piety, slimy echoes from the brothel. This vibrion of music, Gounod, never touched masterpieces without blighting them. Think of the Bach prelude accompanying the song. Think of mighty Faust maimed, tortured to make an operatic holiday. The Truth, so-called, is not necessarily tonic to all souls. Free-thought is never free; sometimes it is not thought; and it is usually inverted dogmatism. The woman who gives an elderly man the illusion of virility will always be sought after. Man is the only animal who can imagine what is not. We think backwards, but live forwards, said the Scandinavian mystic, Søren Kierkegaard. There are no illegitimate children; babies are always born legitimately. Ask the women. What medical pathos. Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? That's Nietzsche. He never made the blunder of lying down in the dirty straw of the sex-trough. That's why he wrote as if with a diamond on a slate of crystal. Yet he could say in the same breath that chastity is a virtue with some, with the majority almost a vice. Every man knows that a woman has a dozen different ways to make him happy, and a hundred to make him unhappy. Nous nous promenions nos préjugés! Sounds like Stendhal, doesn't it? I imitated him when I paraphrased it in English: Let us promenade our prejudices. Just as I gave Baudelaire the credit of a line he never saw, though one I believe he would have approved. Here it is: Lo! the Lesbians, their sterile sex advancing. Curious, isn't it, how Baudelaire and Swinburne loved to write about Lesbians. The influence of the Sapphic legend, I fancy, not alone because of the sweet inversion.

Ah me! groaned the young man, as the light filtered through the curtains, here's another day, and I've been wasting good sleep over this twaddle instead of being in bed. But I couldn't sleep. Too much black coffee. It doesn't matter what. Only I wonder how many of these phrases are my own. I don't believe in originality. George Moore is quite right when he derides ideas; their expression is the only worth while to the artist prose. Truth—error? This side of the Pyrenees— and the other side. Map-morality. He paused, and ruefully reflected: Nor can I say much for the formal quality of these phrases. Ah! the precious pagodas of prose, pagan and subtle, built by those master artificers, Renan, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès. Nevertheless, Stendhal, who wrote drily, whose books are psychological labyrinths, is their ruling sun, one that shines in a frosty heaven of his own fashioning. De Gourmont—a prober of the soul. Bourget, another, though more mundane, decorative. Maurice Barrès is a metaphysical Chopin in his feeling for nuance. He promenades his incertitudes through many pages of perverse, cadenced prose. But perverse. He has now deserted his ivory tower for another illusion like his "culte du moi;"—nationalism, patriotism, as opposed to egoism and cosmopolitanism. Well, I'm following in his footsteps, trying to become a sturdy American citizen in my native city—where I wasn't born. I'll stick. I like mince-pie, baseball and a good rough-neck prize-fight. I must be a real Yankee.

As for these notes—heaven help any reader if I ever make of them a chapter in a book. That book! Fiction or criticism, or both? The novel as a literary form is stale. I should like to write a story, not all empty incident, nor yet all barren analysis. Neither Henry James, nor old Dumas—I'm not flying high, am I?—but one in which the idealogies of Barrès and the concrete narrative of De Maupassant would be merged. A second Dickens, a second Thackeray are inconceivable. A soul-biography framed in harmonious happenings—Ah! what an ideal is Walter Pater who, when his critical prose plays second-fiddle to his fiction, will be called the master-psychologist of them all. Marius, Imaginary Portraits, Gaston—those are unapproachable. Pater has revealed to us the rarest of souls. He achieves ecstasy in a prose-music never sounded since the Greeks. As Tristan is to Aida, so Marius to all fiction—oh, but now I'm going off my handle again, grumbled Ulick. Vanity Fair and Pickwick are good enough for me, even if I do admire Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Mérimée and the Russians. The man who doesn't read Pickwick once a year is fit for treason. If only Dostoievsky, the greatest psychologist since Balzac, had mastered the compression of Turgenev? What a scooper of souls. There's too much descriptive padding in modern novels, too many landscapes, not enough characterization. I don't mean descriptive characterization— the clothes, the gait and the eternal simper of the pulchritudinous gum-chewing heroine—but a searching characterization that not only paints your man without, but also within. Think of Julien Sorel in Red and Black. Not the master that is Tolstoy could better Stendhal. A detestable character? Admitted, but what has that to do with the vitality of his characters, the validity of his portraiture? Too much cluttered-up with futile things our novel reminds me of a drawing-room which you can't see because of the furniture or the bric-à-brac, so crowded is it with everything.

To avoid conventional chapter transitions, to write swiftly with weight, emotion, also succinctly; to cram every inch of space with ideas as well as action—the fiction of the future—all this I fear is not in abundance. Henry James is the man who may solve the difficulty. Flaubert swore that the characters should reveal themselves by their acts, and loathed long-winded analyses, though he abused his powers of description. It is his narrative that is the pride and despair of his successors. Henry James says character is plot, but plot is not character. That's my notion. And Cardinal Newman was also correct when he gently insinuated that no one could make psychology easy reading. He didn't live long enough to read William James. Lord, Lord! And we go afield to burn incense under foreign nostrils and here we can boast of two such brothers of genius as William and Henry James. Magnificent genius. But to bed. I'm afraid I'm a confused thinker. I wonder what Easter—no I mean Mona—is doing now? Encore la femme! He fell asleep and dreamed of a strange blonde creature, all fun and fire and flame.

XII

Ulick was shown into a room filled with carbon photographs by a coloured butler in sober livery. It was an ante-chamber on the first floor of a large, old-fashioned house on a side-street off the Avenue somewhere in the thirties; he forgot just where. When he entered the atelier, huge in size, he was greeted by a half dozen men he knew; some he had chummed with in Paris; one, Robbie Sanderson—the Bullrush, he was nicknamed—had been an intimate of Oswald Invern's. He, too, was a painter. The host, Ned Haldane, called the Zephyr, because he was so fat and light on his feet, welcomed the newcomer, as did big Stanley the sculptor and popular man-around-town. It was a group congenial to Ulick. All were graduated from the Parisian art treadmill; men who took a liberal view of life, men without puritan morals and with charming manners.

"We are not all here yet," proclaimed the Zephyr, "but I hope soon will be. We are only to be a dozen." "A baker's dozen," corrected Stanley, "for there's Jim the butler." "Oh, no, my boy, Jim isn't to do any butlering in this room tonight. He'll be busy in the cork-room with the fizz. Besides he is a respectable married man and we musn't make him forget his dusky spouse." The Zephyr laughed. "Are you going to give us another pony-ballet tonight? What's the lark, Ned?" asked Robbie Sanderson. "Never you mind, lad, be patient and just stick to the cocktails. What—you won't drink anything?" pursued Haldane when Ulick refused. He seemed puzzled, as if he were about to blurt out, "Then what the devil did you come for?" but he smiled and bowed. He liked the looks of the young aristocrat sponsored by Edgar Saltus and of whom he had heard so much from friends in Paris. The bell rang. A message from Saltus begging off. Illness the excuse. "I bet he's working on the chapter of a novel—he's not sick," laughed Haldane. Ulick's face was long. The Bullrush clapped him on the back and reassured him by whispering, "Don't worry, Ulick. There will be lots of fun. You won't be lonely. Girls!" The painter significantly winked. Again the bell rang—furiously. The Zephyr went out and received noisy salutes. Evidently belated guests. Ulick, now thoroughly bored, looked around him.

The studio was not particularly inviting; it was almost bare. No pictures, a few easy divans, the floor covered with rugs of fabulous weave—he recognized that—and nothing in the middle of the room, no tables, no preparatory symptoms of a banquet, much less a saturnalia. Tapestries adorned the walls. The doors were draped. He was disappointed at the absence of Saltus and annoyed with himself for coming. He did not join the men clustered about the buffet. He felt isolated and was mentally casting about what excuse would serve him to escape, when the room was invaded by the gang. There were introductions—not many. The crowd belonged to one family, the Seven Arts. And they were at home. Drinks speedily disappeared down parched gullets. There was a punch bowl, and early as was the hour the air was heavy with cigarette smoke. Haldane clapped his hands. Silence. Jim and his fat wife entered carrying a small table. Then another, and another, till six were placed around the room, close to the walls. Each table was set for two persons. Flowers, silver, napery and porcelain. Hurrah! came from a dozen throats. As usual Ned Haldane had royally spread himself. Anticipation floated in the air. After a minute's conference with the butler the master of ceremonies bade him good night. "And now get out Jim, and don't show your shiny face till noon tomorrow." Jim grinned and withdrew. He knew the ropes. Haldane cried: "Gentlemen, please be seated. The comedy is about to begin." Then he blew a silver whistle.

Folding-doors opened and there slowly defiled through them a band of beautiful girls, bearing silver platters. These girls were quite naked save for a scarf which depended from their shoulders, wound under their breasts and traversed their thighs. Blonde and brunette; all the intermediate flesh-tints. There were a dozen and not one was more than twenty. Their hair was filleted and their feet in sandals. A dazzling vision from some old Greek processional cult, thought Ulick as he clapped his palms in company with his companions. "My God, I'm hungry," roared Robbie, and the laughter was deafening. "Listen to the gourmand," commented the Zephyr. "Here I've gathered the finest choir of virgins he ever saw and the beggar yells for food. What guts you boast, Rob." The silver platters held hors d'oeuvres of quality. No sakuzka at a Russian dinner could show so many exotic delicacies. With these appetizers were tiny glasses of aperitives. The virgins vanished, only to reenter with fresh dishes. No soup was served. Oysters and shell fish. Birds. Salads. One half the band carried bottles. Champagne of the dryest sort. Ulick was hungry enough to forget that he was being waited upon by a plump blonde nude angel and ate as unconcernedly as if she were a plain waitress, clothed and from the hills of New Hampshire. Parisian training hath its uses. The candles in sconces at the side were grateful to the eyes, the rich yet subdued tones of the tapestry and Persian rugs evoked a harmonious atmosphere. To the memory of Ulick, furnished with images of European picture-galleries, there came Venetian episodes, festal suppers, and the mellow debaucheries of Tintoretto's days and the days of the Doges. Sensualist as he was he experienced a slight sensation of satiety.

They had reached the cognac and were now smoking, gabbling. His table companion was the Bullrush who already felt his wine. He saluted the virgins by their names, and when he forgot them he invented new ones; sometimes his inventions weren't tasteful. One girl, fatter than the others, he called rumpsteak and patted her when she passed. But it was a well-trained orchestra; not by the movement of an eye-brow did she notice his rudeness. After a brief interlude, during which every one bawled or guzzled, there was heard the premonitary tinkling of little bells. The twelve virgins emerged in Indian file; they had changed their scanty costume; they no longer wore sashes. Instead, sleigh-bells were fastened to their ankles, and to the insistent clicking of castanets they danced the Dance of the Seven Devils. This spawn of Satan, these devil's daughters, had been drilled in the technique of the ballet infernal. Monotone of castanets and tufted footfalls framed rhythmic obscenities. At times Ulick gasped, and he had been in Oriental brothels where sex is become a delirium. The Ctéis was appropriately worshipped. They sprawled and postured, they reared their polished posteriors in porcine rhythms, as if to invite their brethren, who ringed them with applause, urging them to audaciously lascivious acts. The air was charged with cigarettes, the acrid smell of wine and odor di femina. Ulick's head began to ache.

Suddenly from languourous weavings, from legs and arms in unholy embrace, the current changed to crazy gallopings. The dancing mania seized the men, all except the Zephyr, who leaned against a wall and coolly regarded the spectacle, surely not a novel one to him. Ulick was caught by the plump blonde and furiously whirled. She was an enticing houri with gold-coloured eyes and scarlet lips—rouged. Her breath was extra-dry. He turned his head away as she repeatedly kissed him. But the heated curves of her finely modelled torso made him a helpless prisoner. Sweetness exhaled from her. Young, pretty, absolutely depraved, she had fancied the handsome youth who sat so still and haughty, coldly refusing her libations and unconsciously frowning when Robbie Sanderson pinched her cheeks. She drank with the others each time they went out to the service-room, and she found her tongue as the night wore on in frenzied intoxication. The men were in their shirtsleeves. Everyone sang. The heat and noise were terrific. And all this pagan revelry in a drab, respectable quarter of New York! No matter, Ulick breathlessly exclaimed, it's a relief from the accursed hypocricy of puritanical Yankeedom. Again the whistle sounded. A lull followed. The girls, their smooth bodies glistening with moisture, slipped away. A fresh attack was made on the wine stacked in ice-pails.

"What's up?" asked a jolly, white-bearded old reprobate, a great swell, whose granddaughter had "come out" that winter at a débutante's ball of exceeding splendour. Haldane smiled. "Wait!" he begged. However, no one seemed to care. The intermezzo proved a breathing-spell. Ulick debated whether he would be committing an offense against good manners if he deserted. He could pretend to go into the ante-room—but there was a hush. A trestle was borne in by the twelve virgins. Upon it was a monstrous pie, a fabulous confection, the crust ermine-white, like the souls of the votive maidens, icy as their virtue, and surmounted by an iridescent plumage of flowers. The pagan priestesses, who with difficulty carried this offering to Ceres—or was it Bacchus!—had once more changed their costumes; each wore a dainty liberty cap in tricolor. They sang, and their voices were heavy with wine, passion and incipient catarrh. At a signal they placed their burden upon the middle rug, then encircled it. Someone clapped hands. The top of the pie was thrown off, birds, doves, canaries and nightingales, flew out in every direction seeking shelter and piteously piping to the flappings of their wings. A shining child of exquisite beauty arose in the centre of the pie and made graceful weaving motions. She, too, was newly-born. Her breasts were lilliputian, tender, rose-colored. Her evasive hips proclaimed precocious puberty and Jason himself would not have become inflamed over further search for the toison d'or. As a picture she is admirable, thought Ulick; as a spectacle decidedly suggestive. He was wrong. There was not the slightest evocation of evil in the posed gestures of this pretty maid; the evil lay in the lewd imaginings of the men, blasé from indulgence, brain-sick with wine, their nerves taut from morbid imaginings. The Zephyr went to the sacrificial pastry and lifted the pink darling to the floor, then cradling her in his arms he disappeared behind the arras to the choral accompaniment of his jeering guests. The storm burst. A tornado of twirling flesh, the atmosphere punctured by shrieks of laughter, and growlings of wild-men. It became too much for Ulick and he begged his girl to desist. She had sunk on the floor and imploringly grasped his hand. Kneeling, he told her to dress and he would go home with her. For some reason his proposition pleased. She went to the retiring-room, he to get his own things. Their presence was not missed on the carnal battlefield.