enius
with a sense of its responsibility. She held tightly her hands and
leaned back, awaiting the precious moment when the oracle would speak,
when this modern magician of art would display his cunning. But he was
fatuously commonplace in his remarks.

"I have often told Madame Keroulan that my successes in Europe do not
appeal to me as those in far-away America. Dear America--how it must
enjoy a breath of real literature!"

Mrs. Sheldam sat up primly, and Ermentrude was vastly amused. With a
flash of fun she replied:--

"Yes, America does, Monsieur Keroulan. We have so many Europeans over
there now that our standard has fallen off from the days of Emerson and
Whitman. And didn't America give Europe Poe?" She knew that this boast
had the ring of the amateur, but it pleased her to see how it startled
him.

"America is the Great Bribe," he pursued. "You have no artists in New
York."

"Nor have we New Yorkers," the girl retorted. "The original writing
natives live in Europe."

He looked puzzled, but did not stop. "You have depressed literature to
the point of publication," he solemnly asserted. This was too much and
she laughed in mockery. Husband and wife joined her, while Mrs. Sheldam
trembled at the audacity of her niece--whose irony was as much lost on
her as it was on the poet.

"But _you_ publish plays and books, do you not?" Ermentrude naively
asked.

Madame Keroulan interposed in icy tones:--

"Mademoiselle Adams misunderstands. Monsieur Keroulan is the Grand
Disdainer. Like his bosom friend, Monsieur Mallarme, he cares little for
the Philistine public--"

He interrupted her: "Lys, dear friend, you must not bore Miss Adams with
my theories of art and life. _She_ has read me--"

Ermentrude gave him a grateful glance. He seemed, despite his
self-consciousness, a great man--how great she could not exactly define.
His eyes--two black diamonds full of golden reflections, the eyes of a
conqueror, a seer--began to burn little bright spots into her
consciousness, and, selfishly, she admitted, she wished the two women
would go away and leave her to interrogate her idol in peace. There were
so many things to ask him, so many difficult passages in The Golden
Glaze and Hesitations, above all in that great dramatic poem, The
Voices, which she had witnessed in Paris, with its mystic atmosphere of
pity and terror. She would never forget her complex feelings, when at a
Paris theatre, she saw slowly file before her