muttered
something that sounded like "fiddlesticks." They discussed the relation
of imagination to literature on this latter basis. At the conclusion of
the discussion, Miss Melville, for that was her name, delivered the
following ultimatum:

"Well, I tell you right now, Robert Severne, that I'll never marry a man
who has not more soul in him than that. I am very much disappointed in
you. I had thought you possessed of more nobility of character!"

"Don't say that, Lucy," he begged, in genuine alarm. Serious-minded
youths never know enough not to believe what a girl says.

"I will say that, and I mean it! I never want to see you again!"

"Does that mean that our engagement is broken?" he stammered, not daring
to believe his ears.

"I should think, sir, that a stronger hint would be unnecessary."

He bowed his head miserably. "Isn't there anything I can do, Lucy? I
don't want to be sent off like this. I _do_ love you!"

She considered. "Yes, there is," she said, after a moment. "You can
write a romantic story and publish it in a magazine. Then, and not until
then, will I forgive you."

She turned coldly, and began to examine a photograph on the mantelpiece.
After an apparently interminable period, receiving no reply, she turned
sharply.

"Well!" she demanded.

Now, in the interval, Severne had been engaged in building a hasty but
interesting mental pose. He had recalled to mind numerous historical and
fictitious instances in which the man has been tempted by the woman to
depart from his heaven-born principles. In some of these instances, when
the woman had tempted successfully, the man had dwelt thenceforth in
misery and died in torment, amid the execrations of mankind. In others,
having resisted the siren, he had glowed with a high and exalted
happiness, and finally had ascended to upper regions between applauding
ranks of angels--which was not realism in the least. Art, said Severne
to himself, is an enduring truth. Human passions are misleading.
Self-sacrifice is noble. He resolved on the spot to become a martyr to
his art.

"I will never do it!" he answered, and stalked majestically from the
room.

Severne took his trouble henceforward in a becomingly serious-minded
manner. For many years he was about to live shrouded in gloom--a gloom
in whose twilight could be dimly discerned the shattered wreck of his
life. After a long period, from the _debris_ of said wreck, he would
build the structure of a gre