t you
were bound to become great."

"True; otherwise I could not have stooped to play the charlatan. Without
it my work might as well have been rotten for all the public could
judge. Charlatanism is the only 'open sesame' to the world's cave, once
you get inside you may be as honest as you please. All is fair in love
or art or war, and there is a consolation in knowing that one's aim is
Jesuitical, and not merely base. Had it not been for Mrs Brune--good
soul--and the gambling instinct, I might be still, like you and Grey's
'gem of purest ray serene,' flashing my facets in the desert."

From Mrs Brune's portrait he devolved on one or two others of persons
distinguished in the art sphere, whose autographs, with cordial or
extravagant expressions of devotion, scrambled octopus-wise over the
card.

"And here," he said, handling an album bound in chicken skin, adorned
with the grace of Watteau's rurality--"here are my Flower Martyrs."

"What does that mean?" asked I, knowing him for an eccentric of
eccentrics.

"Don't you remember the quotation, 'Butchered to make a Roman holiday?'
It struck me once I should like to make an index of the flower lives
that had been sacrificed on the Altar of Selfishness."

"And this is the index?"

"No, not exactly. I soon tired of the experiment, for there was such
wholesale murder it was impossible to keep pace with it. I then confined
myself to the martyrs, the veritable martyrs broken on the rack of human
emotion. Here are a few--with remarks and dates--they have each a little
history of love or heroism or----" he shuffled for a term.

"Lunacy," I offered.

"Yes, that is the best word. They convey little histories of lunacy--my
own and others."

"May I inspect them?"

"You may," he conceded, throwing himself into an arm-chair and looking
over his elbow at the open page. "First," he said, "some rose leaves."
He coughed slightly, and stirred the fire with caution, as though it
shaped some panorama he feared to disarrange. Then he began his story:--

"First some rose leaves shaken into the finger-glass of a great
actress--you know Lalage?--on the night when all Paris was intoxicated
by her. It was my supper, and she honoured me. Many men would gladly
have been that rose--to lay down its life for a touch of her
finger-tips: several have parted with all that life holds dear for less
than that."

He struck a match and lit a cigarette, throwing the case to me, and then
proceede