y another American had joined the circle around the dinner table
on the terrace,--a long, lanky young man who had been in the navy during
the late war and was now engaged in the production of literature. That
is, he contributed profusely to those American magazines with flaming
covers stories of love and adventure in strange seas,--the highly
seasoned bonbon entertainment for the young. He was southern by birth
with a pronounced manner towards women. And Milly found him attractive.
Roberts and the fat Hawaiian wit had many encounters that kept the table
stirred. To-night they were discussing the needs of the artist
nature,--and "temperament." That was a term not much in vogue in the
Chicago of Milly's time, but it seemed to occupy endlessly the talkers
about the table at the Hotel du Passage. Milly never understood exactly
what was meant by "having a temperament," or the "needs of the artistic
temperament" except vaguely that it was a license to do flighty things
that all reasonable Chicago folk would deplore.

To-night the Hawaiian was maintaining his favorite thesis,--that the
first duty of the artist was to himself, to preserve and make effective
his "temperament." Modern life, especially in America, he held, made
_bourgeois_ of us all. The inevitable ruin of the artist was to attempt
to live according to the _bourgeois_ ideal of morality. (That was
another term which puzzled Milly always,--_bourgeois_. These young
artists used it with infinite contempt, and yet she concluded shrewdly
that the people she had known best and respected all her life would have
to come under this anathema. To be healthy and normal, to pay one's
bills and be true to husband or wife, was to be just _bourgeois_.
According to that standard Jack was _bourgeois_, she supposed, and she
was glad of it, and yet a little afraid at the same time, because it
seemed to mark him out for artistic ineptitude.) But the fat man was
talking heatedly, and Milly was listening.

"In our society artists have no chance to experiment in life, to perfect
their natures untrammelled by public opinion, as the artists of old
did." (And he cited a lot of names, beginning, of course, with Benvenuto
and including Goethe, but Milly was not interested in these historical
cases. It was the immediate application of the principle she was waiting
for.)

"In those days," some one said, "artists were content to live in their
own class like actors and had no social ambitions."