rust with these good
creatures, or I can send my gold flying with theirs, but I'm hanged if,
for instance, I can sin in quite the delicious, child-like,
whole-hearted way that is their prerogative! I have done most of the
things that they have done, but their disarming candor, their simple joy
in their exploits, is something debarred to me. It isn't for nothing, I
tell you, that I have countless God-fearing generations behind me!"

He spoke jestingly, but his glance, when it met the eager impetuosity of
the boy's, was quiet and observant.

"I disagree with you!" Max cried, suddenly. "I disagree with you wholly!
Individuality has nothing to do with environment--nothing to do with
ancestry."

"Ah, that's not logical! Humanity is only a chain of which we are the
last links forged. I have had my own delusions, when I sent the ideal to
the right-about and made realism my god, but as time has gone on my
theories have gone back on me, and tradition has come into its own,
until now I see the skeleton in every beautiful body, and the heart of
me craves something behind even the bones--the soul of the creature."

"But that is different, because your desire and your theory have been
the common desire and theory--the things that burn themselves out. My
theory is not of the body, it is of the mind. I only contend that in all
the greater concerns of life I am a being perfectly competent to stand
alone."

"My dear boy, by the mercy of God all the ideas of youth are reversible!
My fire has been extinguished; your ice will hold until the sun is in
the zenith, and not one moment longer."

"I deny it! I deny it!"

He spoke with a fine defiance. He paused, the more convincingly to
express himself; but even as he paused, his eyes and his mind were
suddenly opened to a fresh impression, were lured from the moment of
gravity, caught and held by the lights and crowds into which they had
abruptly emerged--lights and crowds through which the pervading sense
of a pleasure-chase stole like a scent borne on a breeze.

"Where are we?" he said, sharply. "What place is this?"

"The Boulevard de Clichy. Come, boy! Discussions are over. The curtain
is up; the play is on!" Without apology, Blake caught his shoulder and
swung him out into the roadway, as he had swung him across the Esplanade
des Invalides that morning. "Come! I'm going to insist upon a new
medicine; my first prescription was not the right one. You're too
theoretical to-night fo