tical persistently fold their hands over their
abdomens, shrug their shoulders and reiterate monotonously: "But, my
dear fellow, there are the facts! It is only necessary to consider the
facts of the case!" or, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid the bare facts are
against you!" I suppose that is why they are so often called bare,
because so little of the important, informing or attractive is draped
around them.

Consider for instance, the bare facts of Roger's adventure. Here is a
man who, meeting a perfectly unknown and singularly beautiful young
woman in a questionable locality at dusk, enters into conversation
with her, takes her to a French restaurant for dinner, then finds
himself embroiled in a disgraceful altercation in which wine-glasses
are thrown and chairs waved, and finally escapes with her in a closed
carriage, which soon becomes the scene of a violent struggle
culminating in a ferocious kiss! The case is really too clear; it is
almost too conventional for an art student of any initiative and
originality. Anyone possessed of the slightest acquaintance with
fiction or the daily papers could tell you instantly that here were a
dissipated clubman and a too-unfortunately-stereotyped creature who
not only required no description but were best, in the interests of
morality, undescribed. And yet Roger was emphatically not dissipated,
nor even a clubman, in the sense in which the word appears to be used
in America, and Margarita was not in the least unfortunate and so far
from stereotyped that she pressed the unusual hard toward the utterly
unique.

"Well, well," I hear the practical man, "but this is a case in
one--five--ten thousand, surely! We all know--"

My good man, there is absolutely nothing we all know except that we
shall certainly die, one day, and from this one bare fact more utterly
contradictory inferences have been drawn than I can afford ink to
enumerate. Nothing could be more certain than this bare fact, and can
you show me anything more productive of human uncertainty? I trow not.
What do you know of the private life of the man in the next house?
Have you a friend who cannot tell you from one to three melodramatic
tales, lying quite within his experience, at which you will gasp,
"Why, it's as exciting as a novel!" The best novels never get into
print and the most blood-curdling, goose-pimpling dramas are played by
the boxholders. The longer I live the more firmly am I convinced that
the really quiet l