hearsing the
deception it would practise on future time."

"You must consider the influence of impure literature upon young
people," said John.

"No, no; the influence of a book is nothing; it is life that
influences and corrupts. I sent my story of a drunken woman to
Randall, and the next time I heard from him he wrote to say he had
married his mistress, and he knew she was a drunkard."

"It is easy to prove that bad books don't do any harm; if they did,
by the same rule good books would do good, and the world would have
been converted long ago," said Frank.

Harding thought how he might best appropriate the epigram, and when
the influence of the liberty lately acquired by girls had been
discussed--the right to go out shopping in the morning, to sit out
dances on dark stairs; in a word, the decadence and overthrow of the
chaperon--the conversation again turned on art.

"It is very difficult," said Harding, "to be great as the old masters
were great. A man is great when every one is great. In the great ages
if you were not great you did not exist at all, but in these days
everything conspires to support the weak."

Out of deference to John, who had worn for some time a very solid
look of disapproval, Mike ceased to discourse on half-hours passed on
staircases, and in summer-houses when the gardener had gone to
dinner, and he spoke about naturalistic novels and an exhibition of
pastels.

"As time goes on, poetry, history, philosophy, will so multiply that
the day will come when the learned will not even know the names of
their predecessors. There is nothing that will not increase out of
all reckoning except the naturalistic novel. A man may write twenty
volumes of poetry, history, and philosophy, but a man will never be
born who will write more than two, at the most three, naturalistic
novels. The naturalistic novel is the essence of a phase of life
that the writer has lived in and assimilated. If you take into
consideration the difficulty of observing twice, of the time an
experience takes to ripen in you, you will easily understand
_a priori_ that the man will never be born who will write three
realistic novels."

Coffee and cigars were ordered, and Harding extolled the charm and
grace of pastels.

Thompson said--"I keep pastels for my hours of idleness--cowardly
hours, when I have no heart to struggle with nature, and may but
smile and kiss my hand to her at a distance. For dreaming I know
nothing like p