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 unfathomable. Her eyes seemed to be looking beyond the canvas, into the studio where it had been painted. She made no comment on his criticism, but he guessed that it had, somehow, gone deep under the surface. In his mind was running the little song, "Cruel portrait, tu fais couler mes larmes." Sophie was now looking at him with the abstracted regard she had turned on him at luncheon, when she had said, "You've seen so little, but you see so well."

As he stood looking over at her, a wave of longing and loneliness swept over him, for what he saw was that, no matter what might happen to them, he would always be a little boy in Sophie's eyes. However much Scotch he might be able to carry like a gentleman, however telling he might be in his observations, Sophie would always have the advantage of experience and feminine divination. But the wave of longing was succeeded by another wave, a warmer wave, of assurance, for, though her attitude toward life differed fundamentally from that of Rhoda and his mother, Sophie was their sort of woman, the generous and true sort, with rich resources of imagination and charity and tenderness. As this thought grew in him his fondness for Sophie, his gratitude toward her, became blended with his passion. Deep within him new harmonies were sounding, climbing toward a full, sonorous, spreading chord that resolved an intricate pattern of youthful wonderments. As if hypnotized, he had laid down his glass and was surging a little unsteadily

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 toward the sofa, when he was brought to a halt by the apparition of Matthew at the door.

"Miss Marple is calling, Madam."

Sophie threw Grover a look of dismay, followed by a wry smile, "Oh dear!" she murmured.

"Oh hell!" said Grover.

"I know I should have telephoned," said Rhoda, walking briskly to the sofa and thrusting aside the cushion which Sophie had been stroking. "But I happened to be passing. We've been rehearsing at Alcie Pender's for the charity garden fête. Guess who's coaching us, Grover—Noémi Janvier! . . . My Lord, he's taken to drink! Congratulations! Pour me one; I'm all in. May I, Sophie?" And Rhoda helped herself to a cigarette. "How was the exam?"

"Thank you, rotten."

"You mean you failed?"

"I do."

"Oh, Grover—what will your poor mother say!"

"That I'm breaking her heart. She'll add that it would have broken my poor father's. If they didn't want their hearts broken they should never have had me."

He had poured himself a third whiskey, out of sheer desperation. Rhoda's intrusion and the tone of irrelevant exuberance she had brought into the house enraged him. A mood that might never be recaptured

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 had been spoiled. And the most annoying part of it all was that Rhoda had done nothing for which she could be technically reproached. She certainly might have been more tactful about referring to Noémi Janvier, for she knew,—indeed he had in a very weak and mellow moment confessed it to her,—that Mme. Janvier had for years been the goddess whom he secretly and ardently worshipped from a distance. Rhoda knew that he had got up at eight o'clock on cold winter mornings to stand in line for student tickets to hear Janvier sing Dalila, Carmen, Kundry, Elektra. For Rhoda, Janvier was merely a flamboyant public personality; for him she was a symbol, an embodiment of intangible forces that had stirred his imagination to the depths, arousing vague creative longings in him. More than that, Janvier was the glamorous centre of a group in Paris, a friend of half the people he hoped, some day, to know. That Rhoda should have had the privilege of talking to her, of stripping her to the soul with her merciless gray eyes and then come and 'gloat, or even worse, maintain a tacit but superiorish indulgence toward his romantic interest in the lady,—was a little too much. If Sophie would only invent some pretext to get Rhoda out.

But Sophie was politely saying, "Do tell us about the fête. What are you doing in it?"

"A lot of thankless work," said Rhoda. "Organizing committees, collecting funds, bullying workmen, doing nineteen things at once and expecting a twentieth

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 any moment. Alcie's mother roped me in; it's to be given in her garden at Brookline. Of course we all wanted roles in the pageant thing, and I thought for sure I'd get one, but no, they sent me out to wheedle bank presidents into being patrons. The chief parts are twelve famous women in history, and after a lot of spilt blood twelve girls were chosen and put through their paces. Alcie's father, who's an old rip, persuaded Janvier to sing at the fête as a special drawing card and to coach the girls, so today she was dragged over from the Copley Plaza, all hot and cross, with a young man that looks like a human lap dog.

"If you could have seen her making those poor things do everything different from the way they'd been directed! She cut out parts and put in others, scolded, threatened to walk out, but gradually warmed to it and galvanized them all into life—all but Hilda Venables, who is stunning to look at but mentally nul and void. Hilda was supposed to be Jeanne d'Arc and she was drooping around the Pender ballroom like Ophelia looking for a muddy stream to lie down in. Janvier finally stopped the whole show and said Hilda couldn't do the part. 'That girl wouldn't hear angels if they used megaphones,' said Janvier, 'and if she ever led an army into battle the war would be over before she got there.' . . . General consternation. Hilda in hysterics. And dear old Mrs. Venables, who's literary and thought up the whole idea, was sitting there, her pride in ruins, being perfectly sweet about

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 it, while Janvier rolled back her sleeves like a cross between Brunnhilde and strong-armed Katrinka, her fancy young man sitting on a lounge smoking cigarettes through an ivory mouthpiece and pretending not to know that all the girls were talking about him and the trick way he'd done his eyebrows. Mrs. Pender purring and placating and loving the whole God-awful mess because it gave her such a good chance to be tactful. If Alcie had been given the hook instead of Hilda, Mrs. Pender would have devoted the rest of her life to running Janvier off the stage, if she had to gas her.

"Just then I was called out to the telephone, and a few minutes later came back fairly bursting with the news that Morty Pearn had subscribed the final thousand we needed, Janvier saw me come blurting in and grabbed me by the shoulders. 'Here's a girl,' she shouted, 'who looks plausible. At least she isn't sound asleep.' She shoved a broomstick into my hand, saying it was a sacred banner, and pushed me across the room. 'Walk over there,' she commanded, 'and don't budge. I'll tell you what to do when it's your cue. Meanwhile be feeling like a Marshal of France with secret orders from God Almighty.'

"So that's what I'm doing in it, and why. I felt beastly about poor Hilda, but did what I was told. Janvier was decent to her afterwards and explained that acting was a brutalizing profession and no nice person should ever go in for it. She told me I had

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 perfect horse-powers of energy under perfect control, and I liked her and hated her both at once. It's quite a wonderful feeling, being bossed by somebody who's a reincarnation of Potiphar's wife—little Joseph and all—and yet she'd go out in the kitchen if she was hungry and fry herself a T-bone steak, or sit down and get drunk with the cook."

Rhoda glanced up at Grover, who was standing by the mantel, staring at nothing. She studied him for a moment, a little uncertainly, then turned away. "What a pretty little dress, Sophie. You're the only person I know who can wear those shades of tan and still look cool. What I really came in for was to see if I couldn't persuade you to come up for a few weeks this summer. You can have two rooms and a verandah and a little garden, if you want to be alone. If you don't there's us, and the boat, and the horses, and anybody you'd like to invite—dull but healthy, and you do like Dad . . . Perhaps if you come up Grover will decide to stay home. He can dine with us and make music on the piano, or tell you about Henry James. Between us perhaps we can hold him."

"Why should he be held?" asked Sophie. "Why try to make people do what they don't want to?"

"I don't. I merely try to make them not want to do what they want to do! . . . Which doesn't make my invitation to you sound half as cordial as I really mean it. We'd love to have you in any case."

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 Sophie forced a smile, and Grover took a vindictive pleasure in the constraint that had arisen between the two women. There were some things after all that Rhoda couldn't organize. He knew Sophie would decline, and for reasons which wouldn't be explained. It was comforting to have even this shred of a secret understanding with her.

"It's sweet of you to ask me," said Sophie, "but I'm afraid I can't. I may take a house for the summer,—then perhaps you'll come to me instead."

Again Rhoda's eyes were studying Grover. It was as though she had come up against an invisible wall. Grover knew he was standing in an unnatural attitude, but he couldn't change it. He felt the frown on his forehead but he couldn't relax it; his nerves and his patience had been stretched too taut.

"Janvier's little playmate is French," said Rhoda with a smile at the recollection. "It's you, standing there like an actor, that made me think of him, though you don't dress half as well."

"Nor 'do' my eyebrows," he retorted.

"After all the famous men she's been accused of," Rhoda reflected, "you'd expect her to produce something more substantial in the way of a bon ami. And how even he, pale weed that he is, can let himself be mawled by an old lion-tamer with vermilion hair and a record that makes Catherine the Great look like a Carmelite nun, is beyond me. Perhaps she sings him to sleep! Hilda called her a cradle-snatcher, where-

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 upon young Alcie, who's so blond you imagine she doesn't know a thing till she springs something, piped up and said he was Janvier's biological escape from reality and a natural phenomenon. 'Every old tart,' said Alcie, 'has some good-looking boy around as a sort of personal maid. Look at George Sand!

"Why bore us with Alcie's profundities!" Grover exploded. George Sand evoked de Musset, and the allusion was singularly infuriating because this very afternoon the Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle had flashed into his own mind.

Rhoda's expression changed. She got up cajolingly and went over to take his arm. "If it's the stupid exam that makes you so touchy, forget it, old top. What difference does a degree make? It can't be worth much if Pep can get one. Your mother won't mind, really. She thinks Harvard has gone steadily downhill since your father dropped out of it, and she'll blame it all on the faculty,—I can just hear her! Which reminds me that I had a letter from her last week beseeching me to take you by the hand and get you a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, the kind that don't break when you drop them; she underlined it twice. But I didn't, partly because I forgot and partly because I was sure that whatever you might be straining it wasn't your eyes."

She had dropped his arm, having failed to dispel his moroseness, A little perplexed she left his side.

"Do change your mind, Sophie. We can always

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 find room for you. If the house gets too full of noisy kids you can beat a retreat, the way poor father does, and be like the dove, at rest. . . Now I'm off. I have a horrid sort of feeling that I interrupted an important discussion about Life and such. I'm sorry."

That she genuinely was sorry was evident to Grover in the ring of her voice, just before she turned and vanished. Rhoda was not lacking in intuition, and he could imagine her hurrying back to Alcie's, locking herself in her room, and weeping: first at the discovery of some deep entente with Sophie; second at the belated realization of her own maladdress in dwelling upon Mme. Janvier's liaison, with the grotesque but ineffaceable analogy it implied,—Potiphar's wife and Joseph, George Sand and de Musset, Sophie and himself. Most disquieting of all was Sophie's white face. There was a hint of horror upon it. He himself felt as though every bit of courage and hope had been drained from him. He was numb and rigid, and his limbs ached as though they were braced for the assault of all the troubles that had been lying in ambush for him.

He sat down in an armchair opposite Sophie and reached for her hand. It was lifeless. Sophie tried to say something, but her voice stuck. She swallowed and tried again. "I never quite realized before that you—that Rhoda and you—"

"That we what?"

Sophie had shrunk into a cold little effigy of herself.

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 "She was so sweet about your examinations, and your mother. She seems such an integral part—"

Grover went over to the sofa and resumed his old place, but Sophie was still inert. In her eyes was the dark, faintly bitter light that had been there when he had spoken of her portrait.

"Naturally!" he tried to explain. "We grew up together. She's a sort of sister. At times, when she comes blundering into my affairs I have a truly brotherly desire to murder her. She didn't know what she was doing—"

Sophie got up suddenly, with a dreadful hollow little laugh. "Nor did the Marshall of France with orders from God Almighty!" As she spoke she struck a match viciously and reached for a cigarette.

"Sophie!"

"You being the Dauphin!"

He sprang up and seized her arms. Her eyes met his, steadily. They were hard, but it was an assumed hardness masking some deadly hurt. Her rigid unresponsiveness baffled him to the point of frenzy. After a moment she pushed away his hands.

His whole body trembled. He had no voice, and nothing to say. Rather he had so much to say that the words jostled and jammed solidly together at the exit.

Sophie was crushing her newly-lighted cigarette into an. She began walking toward the door. When she was half way across the room he hurried

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 after and caught her in his arms, kissing her forcibly against all her stifled protests. In the end she wrenched herself away, and he saw her face puckered into a pitiful travesty of the girl in the portrait. He had never seen such a strange expression, and didn't know whether it was an indication of mirth or woe, until the tears broke through and she began fumbling for a handkerchief.

"I don't mind being forty," she said with difficulty. "What makes it all so final is that I can't cook beefsteaks."

A laugh broke from him, and turned into a sob. "That," he said, "is the most foolish thing I've ever heard anybody say." The incongruous humor of it made the whole analogy break down, but only he saw that it did. Sophie was walking away, and his protests were dying within him. He followed through the hall, to the foot of the staircase, but at that point he was paralyzed by something relentless in her silhouette as she withdrew further and further.

"Sophie!" he called brokenly, "It's my tragedy too!"

At the top of the stairs, without looking back, she crossed to a bedroom and closed the door behind her. He heard the lock turn.

The big black and white tiles of the floor seemed to undulate. Outside, as if in another world, motor cars went glibly by.

He reached mechanically for his hat and went to the door, leaning against the wall a moment for

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 strength to draw it open. This sickening hollow feeling was a new and terrible thing. Was it whiskey, he wondered a little wildly, or grief?

He had walked across the Common and come within sight of the Park Street subway entrance when the image of his rooms rose before him. It seemed as unnatural to be going back to them as it would be to go back to English 2. He turned down the street, drifting with the crowds who were hurrying home from the shops. For once the faces and advertisements and noises were not repellent; they had the effect of a strong liniment. He wandered through a maze of narrow streets until his back ached with weariness, and when he sank exhausted before the marble-topped table of a tawdry restaurant near Scollay Square, he felt as though he no longer existed in a region, but in a state. All things concrete seemed but magnified particles in a vast shifting cloud, as though the only thing ultimately stable was a yearning for the unattainable, a vacuum which life filled with mere weather: winds and showers of futile reality. He thought of himself as a sort of hour-glass. For twenty years the sand had been running into his consciousness, and all he could see was a void into which the sand would have to be poured drearily back.

At his elbows dispirited men and women were feeding: hour-glasses every one, taking life witlessly in,

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 pouring it mechanically out, recording time for leisurely gods. The world, he was thinking, is one little factory in an industrial cosmos; each man at his lathe, each turning out some part that will presumably be fitted into other parts, and the gods too contemptuous of our intelligence to show us the plan of the finished machine. That was their privilege, but it was caddish of them not to protect us against injury while we slaved for them.

An old man noticed that he needed sugar for his coffee, and pushed the bowl along the table. This attention brought Grover to earth. That old walrus, he reflected, is kinder than the gods in whose image he is made.

But perhaps the gods were kinder than one knew; the bitter things they put before one might be a sort of divine sugar for which one had to acquire a taste. This thought, and the narcotic coffee, and the metallic eyes of a young woman who was staring hopefully at him gave him courage to return to Cambridge.

On reaching his rooms he found under his door a note that had been delivered by messenger. "Dear Grover," he read, "it just struck me that often, when people are moody, it's bills and nothing else. I bet you have dozens of unsettleable ones this week. If you can't stall, let me be your banker. I'm flush at the moment. Also I really am sorry about the exam, for I know it means more than thumbscrews would make you admit. Love, Rhoda."

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 With the ache set throbbing again he sat down and began to scribble a reply. "Dear Rhoda, why in God's name can't you let my life take it's own course—"

He crumpled up the paper and threw it away. He was thinking of occasions when he had played a hand in the course of her life, of the time for example when he had advised her not to go to college and risk being turned into the sort of compromise Radcliffe had made of Emma Sipe, that appalling theorizer. Furthermore it was becoming depressingly clear to him that Rhoda's intrusion had not been the cause of his adversity but merely the hastener of it. With her feminine intuition she had long ago foreseen the day when the wind would be taken out of his sails, but it wasn't in the bond that Rhoda should take it out; she might have had the grace to leave Sophie a free hand. Had she done so, he and Sophie might have progressed at least to a momentary state of felicity from which, if it proved to be more than Sophie with her aesthetic scruples felt willing to consummate, she might at any rate have retreated without humiliation. Whether or not Rhoda was aware of what she had done, she had acted with a sureness that could not have been more deadly if she had been Sophie's foe. He had every reason to absolve her, but the incident had none the less taught him that no woman who has an interest, mild or intense, in a man can be trusted to see another woman as he sees her, It also confirmed a theory about himself which he had already formulated as a

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 result of his school and university experience, that no matter how wide a circle of friends and acquaintances he might make for himself, his relations with society would always be essentially à deux.

He had turned on the light in his bedroom and thrown off his coat. As he moved about the room his attention was suddenly transfixed by a second message, in the form of a yellow oblong on the pillow of the bed.

"The idiot!" he exclaimed.

In an excess of care the janitor had placed a telegram where he thought it would be most likely to be found.

Hasn't there been enough already, Grover was thinking, standing cold with the unopened message, warding off premonitions of further harm, shrinking from the confirmation that he knew he must eventually read.

"Your mother dangerously ill. Very little hope. Come at once. James Marple."

He walked back into the study and closed the piano, then returned for the coat he had thrown on the bed, and put iton. Why did they always leave the laundrybag on the chair! He hung it on its nail in the closet. How intricately the Marples were bound up in his life! The tidying urge gradually released the cogs in his brain, and his thoughts began to revolve, slowly. This is It, they were saying: It, It, It, the Thing that had been getting ready to happen, the Thing he had known without knowing it.

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 He read the message again. More cogs were released. Business men were so monstrously terse. Monstrous, monstrous, monstrous!

Vales were only Aves turned hind-side-to. Everything went hind-side-to when the past turned into the future.

He rummaged a drawer for his cheque-book, but it wasn't there. Could he have left it on the work table? King Lear—Keyserling in two volumes—he carried them to the book-shelf. So many books to sort,—some to go back, some to be sold. And that bloody cheque-book staring him in the face all the time!

Somebody upstairs was playing jazz, and the door was ajar. He slammed it, for the news was grating on his nerves.

He had already put one pair of pyjamas into the bag; why in God's name put another! Why any? Why the bag? The thing was to get there, to get to a train.

Perhaps she would never know of his failure after all—

He would sell everything but the bust of Voltaire, and go into the wide world with that—armed with a terra cotta grin.

He darted back to examine the telegram once more. It hadn't occurred to him to see when it had been sent.

Eleven-thirty! Just as he was leaving for Concord—the beginning of forever—and the same day! It was now ten o'clock. A wave of sickness came over him.

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 Someone was on the stairway—the janitor's heavy tread. Grover hid in the bedroom, listening. The knock that he was waiting for startled him.

It was a second telegram. "Aldergrove has been trying to get you on long distance all day," said the janitor in a tone of reproof.

"Yes," said Grover. "I wasn't here."

When the door was shut he read the new message.

Anything might happen now; for he was beyond feeling the blows. It was all over.

the twenty-fifth of August and about the fourth day out," wrote Grover, using his knee as a desk and looking up from the paper to stare away at the tumbling gray waves of the Atlantic. He recalled another letter he had written to Geoffrey Saint in the spring: a letter outlining in confident detail a plan for the salvation of his soul. Now that he was, after many setbacks, though perhaps not as confidently as then, on the road toward salvation, it was not going to be easy to explain to Geoffrey, and thereby to himself, how it had all come about. If a lot of self-satisfied nobodies would refrain from spoiling his view of the lovely desolate ocean, he was thinking, it would be

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 easier to concentrate on this really important missive.

"My fellow-passengers are very trying," he wrote. "They walk seven times around the deck each morning and announce each lap in loud flat voices to their recumbent friends, and accompany the information with bright looks, as though they had said something witty. The fact that they aren't sick is nothing to brag about: better men than they have been—though I'm feeling less green now, thanks.

"It's Sunday morning, and far away over my left shoulder I can hear holy strains. Why do voices sound so high and bitter when singing hymns? A deck steward came and got a dollar off'n me to swell the collection for widows and orphans, but when he'd gone with it, it seemed to me that the inveterate hymn-singers themselves were orphans and that Church was a sort of foundling home for the essentially heavenly-fatherless. If you enjoy perpetual converse with God, why get all dressed up on Sundays and make formal calls on him! As a matter of fact the Church isn't half so much God's house as it is God's tomb."

God's Tomb sounded like a title, and Grover gazed at the sea, listening with an indulgent smile to the accusation of sententiousness with which Geoffrey would greet that last sentence. But everybody is sententious when they're just barely twenty-three, Grover was thinking: give me time.

"I believe I'm in a state of mental and moral convalescence," he continued. "June was a month of

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 casualties; in July scars formed; this is August, and the thing I call a creative urge,—at any rate the thing that sent me down to the passport bureau,—may merely be an itch caused by the scars, though I dare hope it goes deeper, something in my blood. You on your Californian hilltop, you who are omniscient, tell me by return post whether all creative desire is diagnosable as an itch; if so, it's frightful to think how many future blows I've got to steel myself against and how many scars I've got to scratch, for so help me God I'm going to create something, if it's only Christmas cards, and go on doing it till I'm a decrepit old man. But maybe you arrive at a point where you scratch from sheer habit. Even Sargent's late things—"

Damn! Divine Service was over, and the faithful were coming out on deck in a thin stream. Grover cursed because one of the faithful occupied the deckchair next his: a clothey old woman who was forever dropping things,—her book, her shawl, her other sweater, her orange, the end of her rug. She lowered herself cautiously into her chair and landed with a thump. "My rheumatism," she explained, and reached for a cup of bouillon from the tray which a patient steward was extending. "I see you're a writer," she said.

"Only letters," Grover replied. If she asked him what he was going to do for a living he would have his chair moved to the hurricane deck. Hurricanes were merciful.

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 But she settled down to her bouillon and grazed slowly on her crackers, crunching them one by one and brushing the crumbs from her bosom to her lap.

"Even Sargent's late things," Grover resumed, "look as though they'd been done by heart—"

"Have you read The Little French Girl?" The old woman had seen him glance up from his paper. She had extracted the novel from a shawl and was feeling around for her spectacles. Grover had read it, but not even he, polite as he was, could be expected to discuss Anne Sedgwick with this crumby old bore, so he kept his eyes on his letter.

"Creation," he wrote, "is the only solution I can see to my problems. In Aldergrove the future seemed to recede rather than advance. Everything you do there is merely a prolongation of the past: a poor old past that's like the watch you got for your fifteenth birthday,—nice, but it won't go any more. You just can't conceive of anything in Aldergrove ever being essentially different. As you grow up it doesn't seem so far from Boston; you can even commute, like Mr. Marple and Mr. Sipe; the fields turn into real estate, and people come for the summer. But that's not different; it's only more, and a wrong kind of more. What I'm trying to say is that in Aldergrove your only prospect is to become more completely what you used to be,—and God knows I'm enough of that already. I want to be something else!

"I went home from Harvard on flat tires. The last

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 day in Cambridge was like'an explosion for which the fuse had been burning through four slow, slow years, For a while I couldn't see myself for the smoke, nor feel anything for the bruises, but after two months as a guest of the Marples, I got my bearings; I mean I got some bearings,—whether they're mine or not remains to be seen. I came to the conclusion—don't smile—that the vein of discontent in me may be a vein of precious ore. After the shaft is sunk it may turn out that there's no gold there at all, but till I'm certain of that I can't settle down to a life of—tin. When I was sixteen, and bad at algebra, you used to say to me—and how I hated you for it—'work it out for yourself.' Well, bless your heart, I am!

"Circumstances—Geoffrey, there's an old woman sitting beside me who's spoiling this whole lovely trip for me; she can't hang on to a bloody thing; I just picked up her Baedeker for her and she said she had a daughter who graduated from Vassar and writes for the Ladies Home Journal, and don't you think it's a dirty trick to interrupt this letter like that? If I'd been the kind of man I hope to become, I'd have told her to go walk around the deck seven times. What I was saying, circumstances were all against this experiment,—and if she butts in again I'll go down to my cabin (minimum price and stuffy) and finish this there, even if it makes me seasick. The first circumstance was poverty. After Mr. Marple had sold the house there was enough all told to yield me about

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 fifteen hundred a year, and you know one can't live on that—I mean not live. The second circumstance was public opinion, of which there's an awful lot nowadays. It regarded me as another young man going wrong, an impractical youth full of notions that would lead but to the grave, via temptation and radicalism and starvation, unless he were given a good hard job. Public opinion couldn't see the Paris idea. Neither could Rhoda, and that brings me to the third circumstance—no Circumstance.

"No human being could have behaved more humanly than good old Rhoda, when the bottom dropped out. Geoffrey, when I think of all the mean little things I've done and thought, and that I still have a Rhoda, I could almost weep—in fact I have. She gave up all her engagements in town and came home, not to be officious, but just to be there and do the thankless, nameless trifles that wouldn't have been done if she hadn't done them, to place screens wherever there might possibly be a draft. You knew my mother, and you know what it's like when there isn't anybody like that any more, suddenly, and perhaps you can imagine how comforting it is to have a Rhoda hovering in the background, and not asking questions! And preventing Mrs. Daggett from asking them, not to mention Mrs. Sipe and the others. I'll never forget how Rhoda held the motherly neighbors at bay. She didn't even invite me to live at her house; she just damn well moved me over, then left me to myself.

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 "Some mornings we got up early and rode. We sailed and swam with John Marple, who's fourteen now, and Frances, who's turning pretty after an ugly duckling start and who has two fascinating big gaps waiting for a pair of belated second teeth. I spent long afternoons in the woods with books I'd saved up to read and then couldn't be bothered, and long evenings talking to Mr. Marple about the days when you used to have a carriage and a coachman. There were a few guests, variegated Marples and Pearns and Scantleberries—though not Sophie, who's in Quebec,—and Alcie Pender, a doughy girl whom Rhoda is turning into celluloid so she won't sag, nor keep getting crushes on Jewish violinists. All very domestic and quiet.

"It's a mew experience to have everything unobtrusively done for you, to come down to breakfast on a porch that overlooks acres and acres of lawn falling away toward a sea framed by evergreens and sounding pleasantly of crickets and lawn-mowers, to find your bath and your clothes staring you in the face when you come up before dinner, to have invisible slaves put stamps on your letters and waft them away. All my life postage stamps have been my despair. At home, as you remember, nobody ever wafted away anything, unless complained at, or ever brought anything back that you really wanted; nobody remembered what day it was and the calendar was last year's, and

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 dinner wasn't until you happened to finish doing something else and began to wonder about it.

"Luxury is terribly insidious. At first I didn't pay much attention to my surroundings, but when I came to, there I was actually depending on them. That worried me a little. But it's hard to go on worrying about being comfortable. Sitting on the terrace after dinner, with pre-war things in your glass, and the moon creeping up out of the sea to make silhouettes in the garden, smelling thick sweet smells and hearing the fresh rustle of the trees and the fountain, it seemed downright fanatical to think of giving up all that for a remote, doubtful, single-handed fight for something you couldn't even define. I kept reminding myself of the austere vows I made at Harvard to keep my flame burning high and bright, to go out into the world and preach the gospel of Me, as though by doing that hard enough and long enough I would get somewhere and make something happen. But where, and what? What more could one ask for? The Marples comfort you with apples and stay you with flagons; they have a Corot landscape and a Sargent portrait of Rhoda's mother to look at; a piano to play on; and a bay with a wonderful canter to ride. And the tacit implication was that I could go on eating and drinking and cantering right into Kingdom Come if I wanted to.

"One night when Rhoda and I were roaming alone between hedges of roses and I got out of my shell a bit and spoke of the forlorn little Thanet acres far off

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 on the next hill and a garden of pettings and protections and tender scoldings, a hundred affectionate old-fashioned posies than can never, never blossom again, quite gone forever, Rhoda went all soft and said, wouldn't I see if some of them couldn't be transplanted into her garden. 'It won't be the same,' she said, 'nor nearly so nice, but it will be as nice as it knows how.' I told her it was lucky for me there was a her, because what would I have done if I'd had nobody but the Daggets and Sipes,—me with my one solitary relation who lives in Santa Fe and wears an ear-trumpet. She didn't tell me what I would have done, but she did tell me that while she probably wasn't at all in love with me in the way people are when they're 'in love,' she was certainly in love with me in some other sort of way and had been since the days when she used to's ay' me in her prayers along with John and Frances and her father, and it was absurd that people should give her all the money she wanted when she signed her name on a hunk of paper and only give me a tiny 'bit when I signed mine. 'As far as I'm concerned,' she said, 'you could have half all I've got tomorrow, and now that I'm twenty-one there's quite a lot. I don't see that it's any wronger to give somebody you like ten thousand a year than it is to give him a dozen handkerchiefs.'

"That little speech made me think; and it became clear to me that even the gift of a dozen handkerchiefs would have a demoralizing effect on you provided you

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 were not in a position to buy a dozen for yourself. But I didn't argue the point; she was being too sweet and direct. She wasn't even making the mistake of proposing to me, though the last time it happened, rather flippantly, during the Christmas vacation, she said she wouldn't take my No as final.

"Her father, she went on to tell me, would have offered me a job, only he had a proud feeling that I would scorn his sort of life, and it would seem rather an 'anachronism' for me to be making rubber roofing. I called her Rhoda Malaprop which didn't phase her at all. She said she had come across anachronism in a new novel and had been waiting all day for a chance to use it and couldn't wait any longer.

"There were such oceans of kindness all about me, warm buoyant oceans, that something in me got unstranded and floated free. Old hurts had been massaged into memories; the future was a nightmare I'd had from eating too much poetry; the present was real and warm and sufficient. There I was walking hand in hand with the person I've known the longest, contented, grateful, uncritical, unresisting, just there. Suddenly, I don't know why, I had to stop and kiss Rhoda. I couldn't not have! And that was odd, because it wasn't an arrival or a departure or a birthday or anything. Moreover, it wasn't that kind of kiss; it was the other kind—head-on collision. I've often surprised myself, but this was a real shock.

"It took her all of a heap too. She went limp and

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 looked awfully subdued,—as though she'd seen a bad accident. And what I had my arms around wasn't the substantial Miss Marple who had had a mysterious lifelong authority over me, but a being I'd never seen or felt before, a willowy, wide-eyed, timid girl, whispering wasn't it time to go in. So we did, frightened stiff—at least I know I was."

"My, is that all one letter?" Grover was startled by the question. The bugle was sounding and his neighbor was heaving herself slowly up, intent on food. He rose and gave her a hand. "My rheumatism," she explained again, as. The Little French Girl and sundry other paraphernalia went sliding to the deck. Grover stooped to pick them up and as the ship lurched the lady lurched too, steadying herself against the only part of him at the moment available. Stay home next time, you old moose, he muttered to himself, and drop things on your own floor. He wondered if the girl from Vassar was too highbrow to pick them up.

"It's three days since I wrote the last sentence. Since then we've sailed into a calm blue stretch, where you don't even have to touch wood, not to be sick. We're almost there, and my nerves are singing little tunes—French tunes. It's hard to get one's thoughts back into a letter-writing mood, but having got so far into my life story I must give you the sequel, provided

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 we don't arrive before I finish. Incidentally I've unbent and made a few acquaintances; it takes so much strategy to avoid people on a boat, and you can't read all day.

"How far had I got? Oh yes, to where we went in the house because it was too much like being lovers, being out in the garden. I don't know how to explain what that incident did for me. For one thing it kept me awake all night. Two minutes before I kissed Rhoda I had virtually accepted Things-as-they-are on a golden platter; two minutes after the kiss I was a man-who-makes-things-happen,—things that wouldn't have happened except by virtue of him. You may laugh at the triviality of the incident, but you can't laugh down its significance. All night I kept reliving that sudden flare-up in me, and seeing the change it wrought in Rhoda, as though I were someone she didn't really know. All my life, I kept thinking, I shall be surprising and shocking myself with spasmodic gestures that will sweep Things-as-they-are straight off the platter. There's something rebellious in me that will always refuse to conform to a given pattern, something that will insist on making a pattern for itself.

"I came down to breakfast a little crushed. In the morning light, eating berries on the porch and hearing drowsy drones and buzzes in the garden, it seemed to me that I wasn't such an energetic anarchist after all—but rather, a tired, flat, docile young man. Rhoda was

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 getting ready for her annual visit to the Pearns in Lenox, and left before lunch. So I had several days in which to think my way through.

"The first thing I discovered was that Aldergrove without Rhoda is like food without salt. I was amazed to find that I had to exert myself merely to share the daily existence of the family. Mr. Marple and I are good friends. We haven't a single taste in common that I know of: he likes Mark Twain and golf and chess and President Coolidge, and they make me tired; but that doesn't keep us from liking each other. Yet with Rhoda gone I saw that it was she and she alone who had been creating the setting in which I had begun to feel so comfortable. She was my only reason for being in that setting at all. And it dawned on me, as it would have done long ago on anybody else, that I was being kept, pure and simple.

"From that moment on I put a lot of twos and twos together and got a lot of fours,—perhaps I got too many; if I'd only inherited my poor father's head for mathematics, instead of my poor mother's impressionistic noddle!

"Another trifling incident drew a line under the fours and faced me with the grand total. I had gone down to the beach to go for a row. John and Spikey Daggett were at work on some momentous nautical invention but came to give me a hand with the boat. When it was in the water they returned to the boathouse. From outside, as I took off my shoes and

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 socks, I could hear their voices. 'Does he live with you?' Spike asked. 'Sure, he does now.' John's voice always sounds negligent but authoritative. 'Why?' persisted Spike, 'is he your cousin?' 'No.' This in a tone that seemed to deprecate the taste of the interlocutor. I thought the discussion was at an end and put the oars into place when John, somewhat more conciliatory, resumed,  ' His mother's dead, too.' That was rather touching, for there was a hint of wistfulness behind John's male nonchalance. 'I know, Folly went to the funeral,' said Spike, horridly concrete as usual, then added, 'Frances says Rhoda's going to get married to him.' 'Frances,' said her brother, 'talks through her hat.' 'Well, aren't they?' John became impatient, perhaps because he had been offered a startling new thought by a boy for whose intelligence he has no great respect. 'How do I know!' he exclaimed. 'They can if they want to. If they do, though, I hope it's when I'm at school. I don't want to go to any old weddings.'

"With muffled oars I + rowed away, like a culprit, assommé. Spikey's voice and freckles and vulgar assumptions were Aldergrove in a nutshell. The future there would be a thing peopled by grown-up Spikes. As I got clear of the shore I saw the Marple estate rolling and dipping and a big happy house sprawling firmly, oh so firmly, on top of it all,—while aloof on its own little knoll stood the deserted house I was born in. I saw a gigantic pair of scales, with Rhoda on

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 one side surrounded by fields and forests, relations and servants, factories and banks, Mrs. Daggett bowing to the Bishop of Massachusetts and hugging the social register,—also, as Max Bruff would say, the book of etiquette,—and, for good measure, orange blossoms, a motor car from Aunt Sarita Scantleberry, a Babylonian statuette from Mortimer Pearn. And on the other side of the scales—what? Nothing but the way my cheek went from the corner of my eye to my chin. I didn't want to go to any old weddings either!

"Late that afternoon she got back, all cool, fresh, competent, and solicitous. Inside an hour she had speeded up the household, put flowers in shady corners, consulted Emma Kittendorf about Frances' diet, and changed into a dinner frock and thereby a sort of radiant prettiness of the elusive kind which,—despite the gray-blueness of her eyes, the straightness of her nose, the waviness of her brown hair, the sheen of her skin, the slenderness of her feet,—you always associate with girls on the horizon. I mean I'm repeatedly taken by surprise to find Rhoda seductive, when heaven knows it's evident enough!

"I didn't know how, nor what to tell her. A complete explanation was out of the question, for I couldn't explain it completely even to myself. All I could say was that I was going away to give my soul a chance,—and as I said it I could hear my soul piping up inside me and echoing, 'Yes he is, he's going away to give me a chance, he is, he is.'

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 "This was after dinner, on the terrace. For a long while Rhoda just made smoke go quietly out into the air. Then she said about the last thing on earth you would have expected her to say. 'I thought about you a lot while I was away. And I'm sure you'd be making a mistake not to go. Everybody has to find out what it's all about, in his own way. All I wish is that I had as much to look forward to as you have.'

"That from Rhoda, who has always treated my drawings as pretty things which I'd grow up and stop doing! Had she only been teasing me; or did she detect a new strength in me; or was she getting tired of having me around?

"Somehow her calm acquiescence gave my conceit a punch in the wind. And I was even more chastened to find her entering so completely into the spirit of my pilgrimage that she helped me pack, helped me add up my accounts, and actually drove me down to Boston, bag and baggage, in her own car, without a whimper. I kept wondering whether I had got on her nerves, whether the episode in the garden had made her dislike me. That thought was a new thing under the sun, and not a very cheerful one. I kept wondering how well the Pearns knew their neighbors the Peperells, and if Rhoda was perhaps beginning to take Pep seriously. Why shouldn't she, for that matter: there's absolutely no reason—no reasonable reason. On the contrary. But if so, why not be frank about it? If I can think of Rhoda as a sister, I ought to be

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 able to think of Eric as a brother-in-law; but I can't. That was what the drive down to town was all about,—that and the thought of the final break with home and the old order, and how awfully hollow you'd feel if there weren't any Rhoda to absorb shocks for you between now and the time you were eighty, if you could bear living till then. Now, when I put it to myself in those terms, I can see how beastly selfish my whole attitude has been, and what you meant when you told me I always wanted to have my cake and eat it. I couldn't see it at the moment; I was too busy being miserable.

"Until I actually got on board the train. And then, when my bags were stowed away I looked around and saw Rhoda's face. Like magic, misery and all the nasty little doubts went crashing into Limbo forever and ever. For any girl who controls her feelings in the adorable funny way Rhoda was at that moment visibly controlling hers will always be there for you, no matter if you both get married in the meantime and have a dozen children apiece. The combination Rhoda-and-me, whatever it is—I'll tell you what it is: do you remember Joseph Vance and Lossie? Well, that sort of thing. And I'm taking it abroad with me as a talisman.

"The rest of my impedimenta is precious light. It consists of one trunk, a good deal of nervous excitement, a nineteenth century romanticism, and my mind made up to turn into Somebody. Like every other

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 American on this boat I'm ridden by the curse of self-consciousness; you see it so clearly when three hundred of you are penned up for a week together,—and that's the first thing I have to outgrow. Perhaps that's all I shall accomplish! The soul I'm in search of may be like the poor stoker who tried to jump overboard yesterday. On some incongruous urge he threw his suitcase into the sea first, and-as he was climbing the rail to follow it, he was pulled back by the ship's barber and hustled below. Meanwhile a confused report of the event reached the bridge with the astonishing rapidity inherent in such bits of news. The officer on duty gave an order to lower the life-boat. The ship cut a beautiful circle, the sea was strewn with beautiful life-buoys, imaginative passengers pointed out the poor man's head in the water, and a boatful of sailors went grimly to the rescue of one dilapidated, imitation leather portmanteau, while the distraught devil who was theoretically drowning was being pinned down in his bunk.

"So with me: in the watches of the night, as we glide toward Europe, I lie awake thinking my distraught soul may after all be safe in Boston while I fare heroically forth to its rescue in Paris, Oh, Geoffrey, to come back with a suitcase full of washing and find your poor creative urge locked up in the Harvard Union, dead or crazy!"

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 "Next day. We are now at anchor off Cherbourg, within a stone's throw of a long black mole,—French lights winking on a black felt hill; a sky of dark gray gauze behind it, in rags, with stars showing through. Early in the morning we land, and the search commences,—not the customs, my soul! Pray for it, Geoffrey, and write me encouragingly thereof. The most encouraging thing I know is that if I've acquired enough perspective on the immediate Past to be able to state it at as great length as I've stated it in these presents, I ought to be able to turn the same apparatus on the immediate Future and at least find my way into it; though I'm quite aware,—so don't you go and tell me,—that the future has to be lived, not stated.

"Allons, enfants de la patrie! Life begins tomorrow!"

the various addresses he had been given, Grover best liked the sound of "rue Truffaut, just off the rue des Batignolles."

"It's fairly near the heart of the city yet gives the impression of not being so," Geoffrey Saint had written, "and I think you would find it a more satisfactory neighborhood to work in than the left bank, which

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 since the war has become the stamping ground of students who don't study and painters who talk. For really invigorating flings I commend the honest Parisian gutter, uncontaminated by theories about art. Indeed there are no theories worth bothering about, except those you shed in your progress, like an impeding garment. Ideas hinder thought.

"Within a stone's throw of the Place Clichy or the prosaic rue de Châteaudun there's not a single idea, but there's a lot of life—more than there is the length and breadth of the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Life on that overrated hill wears foolish disguises; the quartier exists for those who have more talent for dalliance than for creation."

Grover would have given a good deal to know what had disgruntled his cherished ex-tutor on the overrated hill. But there were limits to the confidences between tutors and tutees.

After a day of unreal but extremely fatiguing colloquys with porters and taxi-drivers, a day of miscalculations monetary and topographical, a day of zigzagging through streets that smelt stuffily of asphalt and petrol, a day of whirling around corners in little vehicles which were saved from destruction only by the famous esprit gaulois, Grover went to bed with a headache, too tired to take stock of his landlady, who seemed fat and fluent, or his room, which was both grander and shabbier than anything he had ever slept in,

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 He dreamed he was drawing a portrait of a woman who sold horrid cigarettes in yellow packets, but no sooner had he sketched in her shoulders than they began to shrug, and, when he protested, the drawing walked right off the page and said to him with humiliating emphasis, "If you can't draw me in French don't draw me at all."

When he awoke he found himself in a world of faded brocade and tarnished gilt. Facing him was a titanic clock that said ten minutes to twelve, and probably had been saying it for a quarter of a century. The clock on his night table said nine-thirty, and his own watch two to four. Not one of us is right, thought Grover, or ever will be.

Between him and the remote ceiling was a stiff canopy that bowed and shook whenever he moved in the bed. Between the windows was a prodigious mirror framed by porcelain cupids, porcelain apples and swallows, porcelain rings and garlands. There was an armoire so big one couldn't imagine how it had got into the room. There was also an inlaid desk with peeling legs, a nicked mantle built over a false fireplace, a dusty bust of Marie Antoinette, sinister gas jets too far away from the bed to read by, and you took your bath, Mme. Choiseul had said, around the corner in the rue des Dames, which made it sound improper.

He kicked off the sheets and lay still, luxuriously cool. Even if all the clocks hadn't stopped, it wouldn't make a particle of difference what time it was; the

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 thought was a little terrifying, for surely it always ought to matter, else why were people forever asking what time it was! Outside were several million souls,—one could hear the faint drone of them,—to whom time did make a difference, people whose lives were scaled in twelfths and sixtieths, Why didn't the French introduce a metric system of hours,—I'll meet you tomorrow at ten decimal three three three, and if you stretched the threes right across the Atlantic it would still be the same time, which proved the essential foolishness of Arithmetic.

The long windows were wide open and his eyes rested on the green of a circumscribed court that smelt faintly sour. His room was in the shade, but the cream-colored walls across the court were bathed in sunlight, except for still shadows cast by a linden tree.

He got out of bed, stretched, and sank into a low chair facing the window. A woman dressed in black cotton was folding sheets at the opposite. She glanced over at his pyjama-clad form and gave her pillows a final smack. She thinks I'm lazy, Grover reflected, and so I am, and hope I'll outgrow feeling guilty about it.

Down below a muffled altercation was going on. A dog, he gathered,—doubtless the suspicious buttoneyed little weazle named Mouche with whom he had shaken hands last night,—had been trespassing on the concierge's patch of geraniums, and, the concierge was alleging, loudly, in rather difficult French, that

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 that, for example, was too strong, that that passed all the boundaries, and two persons who sounded like four were very angry and it was restful to let somebody else do all the spleen-venting in the world. When you came to think of it, there was so infinitely much that needn't be worried about by oneself. He felt remote and disembodied, though he knew that the moment he arose from the chair and began to think about shaving water and clothes his body would reassert itself in manifold aches and heavinesses.

The air was strong and cool; one wanted to close one's eyes and bathe in it, instead of getting into the same old trousers and the same dreary shoes. Beyond the garden wall somebody was beating a carpet, and beyond that, far beyond, were the raucous cries of a vendor of unintelligible wares: just like the second act of Louise. Beyond that, on all sides, was Paris, a mystery, a trick of civilization, an exciting new chapter in the Thanet saga, and it was pleasant to loll here in the tiny heart of it and imagine what Paris "was like." Always, he reflected, in whatever city or in whatever situation, pleasant or desperate, he would be somewhere in the tiny heart of it, imagining what it was like while being ever so concrete a part of it. Life was an eternal preparation for something that never came off. Paris, Sophie Scantleberry had once remarked, was more than any other city an amplifier of moods: if you were of a blithe temperament it fed you gaiety till you were surfeited; if you were

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 melancholic it whispered unbearably sad secrets in your ear; if you were romantic it wove enchanted tapestries for you; but bitter dregs were at the bottom of every glass Paris had to offer. That's all right, thought Grover,—just sip carefully when you're nearing the dregs, and fool it.

His drowsy musings were interrupted by a young tenor voice, which emerged from the neighboring court where the carpet had been beaten into complete submission. The beater, rolling it into portable form, was singing snatches of a love song with a haunting twist in its rhythm, as though at intervals half a bar were dropped out. The singer was unseen, the song of no musical consequence, but there was in the timbre of the voice and in the blend of sentiment and irony it expressed something that gave Grover a hint as to the nature of his need for coming to Europe. I need Europe, he was thinking, because I believe in the ultimate significance of life, and in America they see only the immediate significance, if they see that. We Americans see the facts of life as a blur; we are like children rolling hoops through a garden. Europeans are gardeners who watch the children go scampering by, trampling the beds, occasionally stopping a moment to exclaim inanities over a rose-bush cultivated by dint of endless pains. From Maine to California no beater of carpets would have sung that sort of ditty in that sort of way; in America a cruder ditty would have been sung and the sentiment expressed would have

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 heen either naive or vulgar. Here in Paris nothing was naive, and though many things might be evil, there were few that were vulgar. Something is happening to me already, he reflected, as the song broke off and gave place to an energetic oath—"Nom d'un nom!" the carpet-beater having collided with something solid, apparently a high-voiced chambermaid,—and when. I go back to America, if ever I do, it will be as a man who is Gallic, a man with an interpretative way of looking at the commonplace, a man with a waistcoat pocketful of ironic little pills that will render life less indigestible, a man—with a haunting twist in his rhythm! Half a bar left out here and there to break the obvious and eternal tum-tum, tum-tum. A man "comme ces musiciens qui jouent faux par raffinement." Life in America is written in strict four-four time in the key of Major: anything subtler than that we, to use our own immortal phrase, have to be educated up to, God help us. As if you could be educated up to fine sensibilities! Here people were born with them, even the boys who beat carpets. Here people caught subtleties on the wing and recognized the myriad shades between the black and white which don't exist in nature but which Americans, with their incurable belief in hundred percentism, were forever postulating as realities. Where, thought Grover, is my patriotism?

He wondered all the more later in the day when he watched the antics of a number of his compatriots

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 from a chair on a sidewalk cafe on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Having been gently warned by Geoffrey Saint against the Dome and the Rotonde, he had of course made a bee-line for them, and a little timidly taken his place in the throng sipping apéritifs in the late afternoon. Every language smote his ear. Before his eyes was a jumble of types: indigent Russians and Roumanians, clumsy but affluent Danes; Englishmen wearing their dégagé air with a difference, a little subdued by the Frenchness of it all; and several groups of Americans, some quiet and serious who looked as though they were thoroughly bored with their surroundings but had been there too long to venture home, and some who were wearing corduroy jackets and bérets and doing as many other things as possible that you couldn't do in Kansas. But whatever they did, the measure of their triumph was indicated by their appearance; for in Kansas you certainly couldn't look like that,—not with impunity. More self-assertive even than these artists was a group of three American girls who, though decidedly the worse for wear, would have passed muster in a Ziegfeld chorus and probably had. With them were some American sailors, pink and robust, and, for all their bravado, slightly embarrassed. One of them, a giant, was eating ice-cream. They seemed torn between a desire to take the girls at their very liberal word and a desire to respect them, for while their physical insolence was even more marked than that of the average street girl of New

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 Orleans, yet their clothes, their perfume, their rings, even their talk with its strange allusions to Brancusi, Stravinsky, Pitoeff, proclaimed them bafflingly different. The hostess was a young woman with hard green eyes and a Hollywood manner. Grover thought of the recruiting signs he had seen near the Boston waterfront: Join Uncle Sam's navy and see the world. Verily!

People coming and going, the purplish taste of his byrrh à l'eau growing gradually sweeter, the afternoon shadows making fantastic patterns, the leaves whispering overhead, the whole scene gradually losing its hostile character,—something more was happening to him. The little song with a twist in its rhythm was being played, badly, by an itinerant musician. The laughter, the tinkle of ice, the scurrying of insufficient waiters, the greetings tossed here and there, the warmth of the air, the blend of unknown scents,—he heard someone saying that the man who had just passed, bare head, blue shirt, and walking stick, wrote snooty articles for the American Mercury and had stolen himself a new wife,—he was slipping into a pleasant abyss of loneliness, a new kind, for he was yearning for something he couldn't have defined if his life had depended on it. All these people, however impossible they might be, possessed the secret that eluded him, Even the most self-conscious of the Americans within his range of vision had discarded an inhibition which still ham-

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 pered him. What could it be? Something, he presumed, that had to do with erotics.

He had finished his second drink and was searching in vain for a waiter to pay, when he was startled by the sight of well-known faces, grotesque in this setting, and a shout of recognition. "Hey, fellahs, here's young Thanet, right in the middle of Paris France! Hot dog!"

Four Harvard classmates were surging towards him, led by Max Bruff, who made his way forward with ruthless unconcern of tables and chairs and elbows, to deposit a paternal and patronizing kiss on his bare head.

During the noisy installation of the four youths at his little table, a waiter who had made no response to Grover's mild proffer of money, came rapidly forward in answer to Max's compelling cry of "Gahsonne! Gahsonne! Words with thee—avee toi!"

"We been here two weeks," said Max. "Come on a cattle boat—like the Hamburg zoo, with the elephants and the wild kangaroo. Ponderby'll pay for the drinks so have another, his sire being a profiteer, and us being bums. Some town!"

As the whole four represented an element in his class he had instinctively avoided, Grover wondered why he was glad to see them. Lowbrows they were, to a man. But when one's own brow is so desperately high! he sighed.

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 "Well here we all are," said Max, when little glasses of cognac stood before them.

"Which nobody can deny," Grover assented, and got an exuberant crack on the back.

"The American intelligentsia, what!" Max added.

"I wouldn't go so far—" Grover began.

"Have another drink and you will," Max interrupted. "Farther!"

"This is an expensive joint," protested Ponderby. "Have a heart."

"Thank you," said Max, "I will, having had four already, to wit, two blonds—wash blonds—a brunette—and a Halgerian. That's why you go to college, to get to be a bachelor of hearts. When a Halgerian, though never so black, uses 'Oubigant's Some Flowers—well, one touch of nature—ain't it the truth!"

A bleary-eyed beggar was holding out his hat. "How's your mother?" Max politely inquired. As he did so he caught sight of a plump, full-blown, weary cocotte who had arrived at the table behind him.

"Parlez-vous français?" Max asked her.

The woman glanced up, her powder puff arrested in mid-air.

"Parfaitement, Monsieur," she replied in husky but incisive tones, "Only not with monkeys," she added in English.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again," said Max, pounding philosophically on the table for the waiter.

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 "Doesn't your pride ever feel anything?" asked Grover.

"What do you mean, pride! I make at least one woman out of every ten, and I call ten per cent damn good business! Ho hit's the rich wot 'as the pleasures—"

After dinner they progressed by easy stages, each stage an oasis, to the other side of Paris, coming to a terminus at the Bal Tabarin. Next day Grover had a confused recollection of pink lights, a great blare of music that was tossed from one orchestra to another with merciless continuity, a slippery floor over which five Harvard men, himself included, had belied their hard-earned culture once and for all by lurching through a ring-a-round-of-roses that scattered narrowbooted men and gaudy women to right and left and brought from a man who introduced himself as the Management a waspish threat of gendarmes. A hundred per cent American interruption, in which if none of the five participants could be said to take any pride, they all, at the moment, took delirious pleasure, a pleasure converted into ecstasy by the poisonous shower of Gallic arrows it evoked.

Somewhat before dawn a pair of waiters, after a frigid but excessively polite discussion, maintained that Grover was obligated for two bottles of champagne ordered by a thin young woman in a dress that

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 looked like a yellow lampshade. He freely admitted having danced with her more than once; he was prepared to bear witness that he had concluded no further business with the lady; he could never hope to make anyone understand how bored he had been by her talk of the high cost of practically everything,—but as to two bottles of champagne, dear but not good champagne, he would have no hesitation in telling St. Peter at the pearly gates that he would have seen the lady in tophet first—in short any man with a sense of logic would see—did they realize they were talking to the son of the Professor Thanet!—

But he paid. And that left him barely enough francs to placate the dragon in charge of his hat and stick.

After that there had been the unexpected damp coolness of the air, the green-gray of the houses, the stale slatey smell of the pavements as waiters in aprons and sluiced water over them in preparation for a rapidly approaching morrow.

As he set out for the rue Truffaut he wondered idly what had become of his companions. One by one he had lost sight of them. By now each had disappeared into a furtive side street, accompanied by some night-moth with gay wings and sore feet. "Lulu, Froufrou, Dodo—" Max would no doubt spring forth at noon, undismayed by strange walls and a pink dress over the chair, and proceed to the nearest cafe to drink coffee and jot down harmonies built up on unheard-of

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 intervals to be worked into a new prelude symbolic of the soul's aspiration toward the ineffable. Inside Max there burned a sizzling flame that baked his very common clay into lovely porcelain.

Why on earth, Grover wondered, had he behaved in such an idiotic fashion. And having gone to such a blatant haunt, why had he seemed so to enjoy it—for surely he hadn't! He supposed it was the sort of thing you did once, like Coney Island. This first day in Paris, he mournfully reflected, as he crossed the empty Place Clichy, had scarcely proved the "tomorrow" on which life was destined to begin. Though chockablock full of happenings, it had been merely a day comme les autres. Life was still elusive, still over the brow of the hill. After a good sleep he would set forth again—in earnest. Perhaps a schedule would help.

He rattled the chain and rattled it yet again, and yawned, and shivered in the raw air while the concierge kept him waiting at the foot of the stairs.

A schedule allowing for play hours, hours for exploration, and hours for work. He must inquire right away about the chances of working under some painter who would instruct without imposing, and criticize without blighting.

The house was almost sinister in its stillness. A vague sense of heavily somnolent humanity pervaded the stairs and the passages. He had the feeling that if he didn't get quickly to bed, shutters would begin

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 to go up and alarm clocks off, and somehow ensnare him into the activities of the day.

As he turned up the gas jets in his pompous bedroom the titanic Empire clock was stubbornly maintaining its lie. His own watch had stopped. A towel, the only one, had fallen into the water pitcher. His washing had not been sent to the laundry. Little waves of despair lapped at the edge of his consciousness, and his poor head buzzed.

I and schedules! he thought. I and time! I and an atelier full of snooty painters who know why Cézanne is good! I and thin girls in lampshades! I and life! Dear God.

It took several weeks to draw up a schedule, and when it was drawn up there was no point in putting it into effect before a Monday. As he stepped from the cool entry into the narrow street on the Sunday morning before the first available Monday, Grover was enveloped in billows of heat. It was like stepping into a bowl of warm soup. If this were Aldergrove, he was thinking, it would be Indian summer, with a vengeance. The laundress across the way was sitting in the strip of shade before her establishment mending the socks of her customers. The sun was beginning to encroach upon her knees, and when she bent forward to take the scissors from her basket it shone through her pale hair, giving her an aura that belonged to a

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 type far less efficient than Grover had found her to be. I wouldn't put it past a Botticelli virgin, he reflected, to have been a sharp-tongued boss of a lot of wilted dark-eyed girls perspiring over long ironing boards. The girls often looked at him, while he waited to have his wash wrapped up, as though they were noticing the way his cheek went from the outside corner of his eye to his chin. Poor Rhoda. Her last letter, blowing into the sultry and exotic air of Paris, had seemed strangely simple, like fresh dainty muslin against rich but threadbare brocade, like a Scarlatti sonata after a Scriabin prelude. And as always, his affectionately.

The laundress looked up for a moment and smiled, impartially, the sort of smile that Parisians seemed able to accomplish with their thoughts far afield, just as certain persons say Thank You without being conscious of doing so. It would be so comforting, he reflected, as he walked down the tiny street, to feel that one did not impress them as being so fearfully harmless. Is it because I buy peaches and spit the stones into the gutter? Is it because I sprawl on Mme. Choiseul's balcony and play with Mouche? Is it because I never seem to know whether my laundry is going to be twenty francs or five? Is it merely the way my cheek goes? And if it goes that way when you're twenty-three, will it keep going that way even when you're sixty and it's all over white stubble?

The woman who kept the odds-and-ends shop where

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 he had bought sewing cotton for Mme. Choiseul and pastel crayons for himself peered through the curtain as he went by with his portfolio tucked under his arm. Her pristine cordiality had waned a little when she learned that he was not acquainted with her nephew, Hercule, who lived in Philadelphia, America.

Before the window of the antiquary's shop near the rue des Dames he paused to look again at a little bronze statue of Corneille he had coveted. He could not buy it because the antiquary was holding it for a prohibitive sum, on the strength of its having once belonged, allegedly, to Lafayette. Some day, Grover reflected, a big Swede will come in and pay the thousand francs on the strength of its having belonged to Bernadotte. One of the many ramifications of the esprit gaulots.

This Sunday was to be devoted to art. As he turned into the Boulevard des Batignolles his mind was on an inn near Suresnes where he had spent a pleasant afternoon two weeks previously: a remote spot with shady plane trees, trellises, and a lawn sloping down toward the Seine.

The bus took him as far as the Pont de l'Alma, and he walked to the boat landing. It was only eleven o'clock, and the Sunday promenaders had not got a good start. Soon the city would be at its festive worst. As the little steamer drew alongside he was cheered by the sight of an empty bench on the shady side of the deck. As they left the city behind, he slid down in the seat till his back was in a straight line with his

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 legs, and watched the glassy waves roll from the prow of the boat and collapse crisply on the bank. After the dust of the pavements it was a renovating experience to breathe air filled with an earthy fragrance. Between Bas-Meudon and St. Cloud people still in summer dress were sitting on terrasses or in the gardens of tidy villas, and their voices came over the water above the murmur of kitchen sounds.

He landed with regret, in spite of the hard bench. The breeze had ceased as the boat slowed down. Dust and glare were ahead of him, and aggressive passengers behind.

After walking a mile he was welcomed by Felix, the waiter, and escorted through a crumbling house to the cafe above the river. Would Monsieur eat in the garden, as on the former occasion?

Monsieur would, at the little table under the big acacia. And Monsieur, all to himself, was pleased at being remembered by one casual soul in a universeful of casuals who didn't know him from Adam. Moreover, aloud, he had great thirst and would commence with a Turin sec.

He threw his portfolio on the grass and sailed his hat after it. The pebbles were uneven and his chair had to be adjusted to a lazy angle. The old landlord, in, came out to greet his solitary guest and pass the time of day in language which was neatly economized. Only a Frenchman could say nothing so adequately. Only Frenchmen had the kind of men-

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 tal machinery that never knocked or missed—even though their mouths might be in ruins.

It was flattering too to be taken automatically for an artiste-peintre.

Lunch could be protracted, for there was any amount of time—oh any! It was frightening to think of the myriad things there weren't to do. Never in your life had there been so many. But in twenty-four hours the schedule would be in operation, then time would come back into scale. Meanwhile there was a patient landscape waiting to be recorded on a brand new sheet of oatmeal paper, and the whole afternoon in which to do it. The little island in the middle, the canal boats trailing off toward the left, the poplar's on parade, and the whole composition would lead up to the group of factory chimneys to the right,—a modern pastoral, with industry invading the meadows.

After his second Benedictine, and his fifth or sixth cigarette, he stationed himself in an advantageous corner of the garden. He was feeling uncomfortably responsible. Having come for the ostensible purpose of painting, he couldn't put it off any longer without compromising his gentlemanly understanding with himself. Of course he was perfectly willing to paint, but he dreaded the straining and tightening process which would be entailed by trying to bring "composition" out of the pretty disorder before his eyes. It was so hard to see a tree as a tree and not as a bundle of branches. If one could only be as a little child

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 and see credulously! A third Benedictine was of no help whatever: it softened the outlines instead of giving them an edge.

He resharpened his charcoal and filled a page of a sketch block with studies of the cat that had begged him for part of his excellent lunch. The cat scratching, the cat washing her face, the cat yawning, the cat sound asleep—and it was already four-thirty. Oh Time in thy flight! Real artists, he was thinking, don't approach their Muse so gingerly; they take her by storm, the brutes. Unlike real artists I have only a finite capacity for taking pains; it would therefore seem that I am no genius.

Painting was like fishing. It was one thing to lie on the bank of a stream and watch flashing ideas dart in and out amongst the mysterious mosses, but it was quite another to be a clever angler and induce them to attach themselves to your expedient hook. And if by chance you did succeed in landing one, you were disheartened at the utter unattractiveness of the thing as it lay gasping and moribund at your feet, reproaching you for having wheedled it out of its setting, resisting you with its last volt of energy. Even Mona Lisa, compared with the image on the painter's retina, was a fish out of water. And how infinitely far removed from her was anything you might ever hope to depict.

So with those damn chimneys. Here one sat, seeing a perfect allegory: man-made clouds of smoke

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 casting a shadow on a God-made river, perfectly simple and quite paintable. Just enough irony to give the picture the suggestion of caricature that every good picture should have. Any fool, thought Grover, can paint what's materially there. It takes some one with a philosophy, or at any rate an attitude, to convey the little tilt that makes all the difference, to point the moral and adorn the tale without actually doing so. All I need to do now is to do it. And am I going to? Apparently not. I'm going back to a stuffy flat with seven useless sketches of a useless cat. Rhyme and all. No moral or anything Is it always going to be like this with me—sort of all dressed up and no place to go?

Worst of all, he reflected, as he packed his materials neatly into the portfolio, he had actually postponed his departure for the sake of looking like an inspired painter in the eyes of the benighted bourgeois who had strolled in with their families for a Sunday afternoon apéritif, all dust and alpaca,—and I hope I'll remember this to my dying day, and never accuse anybody else again of being a poseur, ever. I might just as well have been sitting at the Dome all afternoon.

"All I need," he wailed that night, in a letter to Geoffrey Saint, "is a reason for being."

The first item on the schedule was the following note: Look up Monsieur Ripert.

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 M. Ripert was a painter personally known to one of Grover's professors at Harvard and recommended as a master "sympathetic with the modern movement but not carried away by it." To Grover this sounded rather depressingly like Harvard, but, like Harvard, it would do for a start. M. Ripert had a commodious studio but no telephone. "You had better call in the afternoon," the professor had added. "He paints in the mornings and doesn't like to be disturbed."

At three o'clock, therefore, on a Monday afternoon late in September, Grover emerged from the Nord-Sud subway station at the Rotonde and walked somewhat gingerly down the rue de la Grande Chaumière to the number indicated on his correct letter of introduction. There were obviously a number of studios in the building, but no names on the doors, Paris being a casual sort of city.

A businesslike young woman, seated at a small table in the entry, was writing names on cards and placing them in a file. Three or four students armed with portfolios not unlike his own stood about chatting in low tones. Grover stepped forward timidly; he hoped no one would get the impression that he overestimated the worth of the paltry sketches hidden under his arm, for no man had ever felt more humble than he was feeling at the moment, here at the portals of Art.

An inquiry, in studied phrases, was on the tip of his tongue, and he was all ready to get it off to the businesslike young woman, when she astonished him

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 by asking him his name and thrusting a card before him on the table. Dutifully he wrote it and she told him, briskly, with the bright hard smile of Parisians, the smile of the laundress in the rue Truffaut, to enter the door on the left. He had not mentioned his errand, but assumed that M. Ripert was so famous that one approached him by stages and through anterooms. So without remonstrance he opened the door à gauche.

And stood there in the doorway transfixed with horror and embarrassment!

Beneath him, in a small amphitheatre, sat a hundred young men and women, with sketch blocks before them, engrossed in the task of drawing the portrait of a girl who hadn't a stitch of clothing on. There she sat on the platform in an attitude that only a model could have got herself into, arms and legs going in every direction but a comfortable one, being as hard to draw as she could possibly be.

He felt that at any moment a gendarme might arise from some corner and eject him. To make matters worse there was no sign of anybody who might be M. Ripert. Not an eye was raised to greet or banish him. To retreat was difficult, for the door had been shut behind him by the businesslike young woman. He had never been so frightened and unhappy in his life.

At the height of his dismay a pale young man on the back bench looked up and saw his plight,—at least his external plight. Moving over on the bench he

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 made a place and jerked his head toward it. As there was nothing else to do, Grover tip-toed to the youth's side and sat down, his brow damp and his knees trembling. The youth paid no further attention to him and Grover took out a providential sketch block and pencil and turned his eyes on the model.

More embarrassing even than his maladroit intrusion was the thought of having to confess on paper that he had no right to be in such precincts. Over the shoulders of his neighbors he saw dozens of skilful strokes. A good many of the drawings failed to resemble the naked girl. Indeed the pale youth beside him was translating her into something that looked exactly like a proposition in Euclid. But every design seemed so appallingly professional. And something in the air made him feel that the use of an eraser would constitute grounds for arrest.

Beginning with her forehead and nose, he was relieved to find that no curiosity was manifested, but before he reached her shoulder a voice across the room called out something which he couldn't catch, whereupon the girl yawned, undid herself, and proceeded to get into another attitude, full of foreshortening. With one accord his neighbors turned to a fresh sheet and set to work on a new design. The pale youth, in doing so, emitted one word under his breath, an exceedingly coarse word, from which Grover judged that he was annoyed at the briefness of the periods for each pose; it was as though he hadn't had time to work out his

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 exercise in geometry. Fatalistically he began a new design of his own.

He was calm now, and delighted with the adventure. Only, how was one going to get out?

An hour later, as he tucked five or six drawings into his portfolio,—drawings which he would have been afraid to show, but of which he was privately quite proud,—the process of getting out took care of itself. One just walked out. And nobody paid any attention. This emboldened him, and he addressed the pale youth.

"Pardon, Monsieur, could you tell me which of these gentlemen is M. Ripert?"

"Je regrette, Monsieur—je ne le connais pas."

"You know him by name, though?"

The young man still regretted.

"But he's supposed to be very well known!"

"Oh ça!" The shrug that accompanied the words implied utter willingness to concede the fame of the unknown gentleman in question, plus utter lack of interest in fame. So are millions of others, the shrug seemed to say. To become well known is a misfortune that assails many.

"Doubtless Monsieur is also well known," he added, "In spite of which I have not, until this fortunate occasion, had the honor—" There was no mockery in the look of tolerant fatigue which accompanied the remark, merely Frenchness, and Grover smiled apologetically.

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 "My name is Thanet, and I am the least well known of mortal men."

"Erreur, Monsieur, I have that distinction."

And he's going to let it go at that, thought Grover, chagrined to see that the Frenchman was preparing to saunter off. They were now in the entry, where students were jostling their way out of the building.

He had lost interest in M. Ripert, and his instinct was to depart as inconspicuously as he had come, but he dreaded the scolding he would be sure to give himself later in the day for having shirked the issue. At the risk of a snub he must face it. He walked out behind the bored young man and caught up with him as the latter paused to light a cigarette.

No one ever offers you a cigarette in this country, Grover reflected, fishing for his own,—nor yet a match, he added to himself, unless deliberately asked.

"Pardon, Monsteur, voulez-vous me donner du feu?"

The pale youth saved his flame, for which Grover thanked him with an echo of the ironic tone that had characterized the other's remarks throughout their brief exchange.

"I propose to walk with you at least to the top of the hill," Grover persisted, "come what may. I'd like to ask some questions."

"What questions?"

"On second thoughts they're not questions at all; they're statements." And without a trace of the mortification that had been surging through kim an hour

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 earlier, Grover made a clean breast of his intrusion into the life class.

His companion, whose name turned out to be Vaudreuil, was diverted. Or rather, he seemed to find amusement in something behind the episode, in the attitude of the narrator. He thinks me naive, thought Grover, and perhaps I am, but D. V. I won't always be. Give me time.

"Sans blague?" asked Vaudreuil, incredulously, "you had never seen a woman before?"

"Life is so funny, Grover reflected. Here he is shocked because I hadn't, and here am—I shocked because you're supposed to have!

"I swear it," he said.

"Ne jurez point, mon ami; dites plutôt la verité! Quel âge avez-vous?"

"I'm twenty-three," Grover confessed, and the confession merely increased the bewilderment in his companion's countenance.

"But of course, in America—" A large gesture completed the sentence. It conveyed not only incomprehension of the new world, but a final disposal of it.

"Do you know America?" inquired Grover, a little testily.

"Only from a brief sojourn."

"What part did you visit?"

"Principally Boston."

Grover was startled. It was as if the man had read

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 his mind and had decided to tease him. "I come from Boston," he said.

"You did well to leave."

"Why?"

"What conceivable reason was there for remaining?"

"When were you there?"

"This very year—in the spring. The lady with whom I travelled, a very old friend, treated herself to a rich American who objected to my presence on the same side of the ocean. So I withdrew."

"Without a, fight?"

"Qu'est-ce que vous voulez! Money—it's always a force majeure. Why fight it?"

The implications in these remarks were astonishing enough to make Grover feel in need of a drink, and he invited his new acquaintance,—his first real French acquaintance and for that reason not to be too carelessly relinquished,—to stop at a cafe near the Gare Montparnasse, which they had reached.

For once Grover was accepting a man at his immediate value. There were many points in the appearance and the views of his companion concerning which his judgment was being reserved: the languid pose, the floppy hat, the cynical droop of the mouth which at moments gave him the appearance of a man of forty, whereas he could not be more than twenty-eight at the most, and might even be a mere twenty-two. For the moment, however, the decadent aura enhanced the value of the companionship. This young man

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 knew so many things that Grover needed to know. The difference between Frenchmen and us, he was thinking, is that they are born with an ability to take for granted facts which we spend a lifetime in merely becoming aware of. And he desperately hoped, as he ordered the drinks, that Vaudreuil would not too quickly plumb the chasms of his own ignorance.

Carefully he brought the talk back to painting, and sought counsel as to a master. He was a little discouraged at the outlook for himself, for, if Vaudreuil could be believed, it was highly dangerous to "study" under any master, even the best,—whoever the best might be, and opinions seemed to differ collosally on this vital point. Our American need, he was thinking, to classify everything into worsts and bests!

"But you must have worked under a good man yourself," he argued, "to have acquired such a high degree of subtlety as one can detect even in your ten-minute sketches."

"I have never worked in my life," affirmed Vaudreuil with an air of fatigue that lent weight to the statement. "The object of work is to be able to pay your bills. I have very few bills, and there is always somebody willing to pay them."

"Will there always be?"

"There isn't any always."

Already stalled in low gear, thought Grover. And in the back of his mind he was avidly wondering what could be at the foundation of such a laconic philosophy.

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 There must be something below it all, for no human being could exist without a foundation, certainly no human being as highly sensitized and discriminating as his companion, who, however languid he might appear to be, was curiously consistent.

"I suppose you mean that there's only the present," said Grover. "But how can you make that square with your recollection of the past? Think of yourself fifteen years ago, ten years ago, five years ago, and today; when you look back over it doesn't that period present itself to you in the light of a fraction of an always?"

"Not at all. It presents itself as a multitude of little presents flowing into a big present, just as each wave that leaves the shore of America flows into a next and a next till the water contained in it touches the shore of France; yet it's only one ocean. Each new present creates a situation to which one automatically adjusts oneself. The whole trick consists in keeping up, exactly, with the present. If one does that, there is no problem of a future. It's like paying all your moral bills in cash."

"Sufficient unto the day, in other words."

"What would Americans do without their Bible!"

This isn't getting us any nearer a clue to Art, thought Grover, and he came back to the charge. "It may be true that you have never worked, but it's equally true that you have developed a talent for

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 drawing, and I should like to know under what auspices, or whose."

Vaudreuil shrugged his shoulders. "My uncle," he said, "was régisseur of an abortive art theatre in Lyon. Ibsen held no thrall for the makers of silk. I spent my childhood back-stage; my sister and I played Nora's children; and I constructed miniature settings out of bits of cardboard. When I first came to Paris I danced in a ballet at the Chatelêt. For one production I submitted designs, which were accepted. I knew Casimir in the days before he had become a cult, and he let me paint in a corner of his studio. His criticism of my work was valuable."

"Who is Casimir?" asked Grover timidly.

But it seemed a matter of indifference to Vaudreuil that the name of Casimir had not yet penetrated the consciousness of this particular outlander.

"Since Cézanne," he said calmly, "he is probably the first innovator of any real consequence."

Grover's mind leaped ahead to an interview and foresaw a contemptuous dismissal as soon as this rare genius should get a glimpse of the old-fashioned sketches in his chaste portfolio.

"Does Casimir take pupils?" he asked.

"He has a small group of disciples who imitate him and pick up crumbs of wisdom they can't digest. No painter who respects himself will seek to impose a method of painting. The best he can hope to do is to point out to a less experienced painter wherein he is

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 being false to his own conception. Casimir has only one principle in art, as in life, and that is that it is one's duty to progress in the direction in which one's temperament has foreordained that one shall go: that any road leads to truth provided you walk far enough on it."

"It must be difficult," said Grover, "to recognize another man's direction and give him advice that will help him to progress in it, rather than divert him into your own direction."

For the first time since they had met, Vaudreuil looked at him with a gleam of cordiality, as though recognizing a vein of intelligence that saved the encounter from being a total loss. "That's precisely why most art and most teaching is futile," he exclaimed. "Most painters and most teachers are so enchanted in giving birth to one idea that they nurse it to death. It's only the rare man who fathers a whole progressive family of ideas and who can be at the same time a good godfather to the ideas of others. Every artist must resist the temptation to be a moralist; that is the besetting sin of Anglo-Saxons. Casimir is the unwilling and almost unwitting centre of a cult that has no more to do with his real contribution to art than it has to do with Mohammedanism. Ten years ago, in one of his experimental moods, he happened to paint a picture of a lightning storm. It was a canvas with certain merits and certain defects. It caused a violent altercation among the critics, who

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 staked their reputations on it, pro and con. Since then he has developed in many directions. He has forgotten and almost abjured the painting in question. He is many years ahead of the public. The public knows him as the painter of lightning storms. And for him the public doesn't exist. He leaves it to his wife."

"And she keeps the legend going?"

"She has a private secretary who helps her fabricate news items about Casimir, and for moments of relaxation a handsome chauffeur whom she selected from the model market one Monday morning. Matter of habit. She had always done her own marketing."

"How much talent must one have before one dare make a bid for Casimir's critical attention?"

"One must have the talent of seeming good in the sight of Mme. Casimir. That procures one an introduction. From that point it's a matter of chance. If you have a minimum of talent but a maximum of earnestness, Casimir may encourage you. He is very simple and very good-natured—when he isn't in a thundering fury. On the other hand you may have a maximum of talent and yet fail to rouse his interest. In which case he will tell you so, sans façons."

Grover decided on another plunge. The little glasses of cognac were giving him confidence, and he had begun to feel that this all important day, the first of the schedule, was more than living up to his expectations of it. In the back of his mind he was composing

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