he chivalric to which he could probably lay
no rightful claim. Still it was disconcerting to realize that he had, in
the flesh, contributed absolutely nothing to the picture. She had simply
devised from the whole cloth of imagination a collaborative sum of
Galahad the Pure and Richard the Lion-Hearted. She had seen him only
once in later years--from the sidelines of a Yale-Harvard football game.
He was playing with the crimson and she was at the impressionable age.
There was the whole and meager foundation for his apotheosis. She did
not state the year, but she gave the score, and by that I identified the
occasion.

"I devoutly pray," I confided to young Mansfield, "that she never meets
him. She has fed herself on dreams. I hope she doesn't wake up."

Mansfield promptly took up the unknown hero's defense. He invariably
held a brief for the idealist.

"Why do you assume that he's a bounder?" he demanded almost resentfully.
"He may be all she thinks."

"I don't assume anything," I retorted, "but I happened to play on that
team myself and I am compelled to admit, though with chagrin, that we
had among us no knights from Arthur's Round Table. Warriors of ferocity
we had; young gentlemen who played the game to the lasting glory of John
Harvard; but this letter-perfect type of chivalry, valor and gentleness
well, I'm afraid he failed to make the team."

You remember the story of Bruce and the spider? In his ermine,
surrounded by his stalwart barons, Robert would probably have learned no
lesson from the weaving of filmy webs. Alone and in peril, it taught him
how to conquer. To us, alone and in peril, this diary assumed an epochal
importance entirely out of kelter with its face value.

Of course, there were many topics which we might have discussed to
divert our minds from morbidly watching the cloud of impending mutiny
spread and grow inky. But the cloud was present and human, and the diary
was present and human, and we were present and human. Whether or not we
were creatures of atrophied brains and distorted vision is an academic
question. The fact remains. For us there was genuine relief in turning
from the miasma of brooding doom which overhung the _Wastrel_ to the
spiced fragrance of this self-revealed personality. It was a clean
breeze into our asphyxiation. It was a momentary excursion out of a
noisome dungeon into an old-fashioned garden, where roses nod and
illusions bloom.

One steaming night when darkness ha