letter, give me the letter, I will prosecute that
man," and I saw Symons waving Rolleston's letter just out of reach. Then
Symons folded it up and put it in his pocket, and began to read out A. E.
and the publisher was silent, and I saw Beardsley listening. Presently
Beardsley came to me and said, "Yeats, I am going to surprise you very
much. I think your friend is right. All my life I have been fascinated by
the spiritual life--when a child I saw a vision of a Bleeding Christ over
the mantelpiece--but after all to do one's work when there are other
things one wants to do so much more, is a kind of religion."

Something, I forget what, delayed me a few minutes after the supper was
over, and when I arrived at our publisher's I found Beardsley propped up
on a chair in the middle of the room, grey and exhausted, and as I came in
he left the chair and went into another room to spit blood, but returned
immediately. Our publisher, perspiration pouring from his face, was
turning the handle of a hurdy gurdy piano--it worked by electricity, I was
told, when the company did not cut off the supply--and very plainly had
had enough of it, but Beardsley pressed him to labour on, "The tone is so
beautiful," "It gives me such deep pleasure," etc., etc. It was his method
of keeping our publisher at a distance.

Another image competes with that image in my memory. Beardsley has arrived
at Fountain Court a little after breakfast with a young woman who belongs
to our publisher's circle and certainly not to ours, and is called
"twopence coloured," or is it "penny plain." He is a little drunk and his
mind has been running upon his dismissal from _The Yellow Book_, for he
puts his hand upon the wall and stares into a mirror. He mutters, "Yes,
yes. I look like a Sodomite," which he certainly did not. "But no, I am
not that," and then begins railing, against his ancestors, accusing them
of that and this, back to and including the great Pitt, from whom he
declares himself descended.

XVI

I can no more justify my convictions in these brief chapters, where I
touch on fundamental things, than Shakespeare could justify within the
limits of a sonnet, his conviction that the soul of the wide world dreams
of things to come; and yet as I have set out to describe nature as I see
it, I must not only describe events but those patterns into which they
fall, when I am the looker-on. A French miracle-working priest once said
to Maud Gonne and myself an