surely won't deny that
we are remarkable." I was irritated by her use of the plural pronoun,
for she had no right to pair herself with her brother; and moreover, of
course, I could not see my way to include Mrs. Ambient. But there was
no doubt that, for that matter, they were all remarkable, and, with
all allowances, I had never heard anything so artistic. Mark Ambient's
conversation seemed to play over the whole field of knowledge and taste,
and to flood it with light and color.

After the ladies had left us he took me into his study to smoke, and
here I led him on to talk freely enough about himself. I was bent upon
proving to him that I was worthy to listen to him, upon repaying him
for what he had said to me before dinner, by showing him how perfectly
I understood. He liked to talk; he liked to defend his ideas (not that
I attacked them); he liked a little perhaps--it was a pardonable
weakness--to astonish the youthful mind and to feel its admiration
and sympathy. I confess that my own youthful mind was considerably
astonished at some of his speeches; he startled me and he made me wince.
He could not help forgetting, or rather he could n't know, how little
personal contact I had had with the school in which he was master; and
he promoted me at a jump, as it were, to the study of its innermost
mysteries. My trepidations, however, were delightful; they were just
what I had hoped for, and their only fault was that they passed away too
quickly; for I found that, as regards most things, I very soon seized
Mark Ambient's point of view. It was the point of view of the artist to
whom every manifestation of human energy was a thrilling spectacle, and
who felt forever the desire to resolve his experience of life into a
literary form. On this matter of the passion for form,--the attempt at
perfection, the quest for which was to his mind the real search for the
holy grail,--he said the most interesting, the most inspiring things. He
mixed with them a thousand illustrations from his own life, from other
lives that he had known, from history and fiction, and above all from
the annals of the time that was dear to him beyond all periods,--the
Italian _cinque-cento_. I saw that in his books he had only said half
of his thought, and what he had kept back--from motives that I deplored
when I learnt them later--was the richer part It was his fortune to
shock a great many people, but there was not a grain of bravado in his
pages (I hav