"as much as ever you did; more than anyone I
have ever seen."

"It is true," he cried, his face lighting up quickly, "more than anyone,
Frank. Life delights me. The people passing on the Boulevards, the play
of the sunshine in the trees; the noise, the quick movement of the cabs,
the costumes of the _cochers_ and _sergents-de-ville_; workers and
beggars, pimps and prostitutes--all please me to the soul, charm me, and
if you would only let me talk instead of bothering me to write I should
be quite happy. Why should I write any more? I have done enough for
fame.

"I will tell you a story, Frank," he broke off, and he told me a slight
thing about Judas. The little tale was told delightfully, with eloquent
inflections of voice and still more eloquent pauses....

"The end of all this is," I said before going back to London, "that you
will not write?"

"No, no, Frank," he said, "that I cannot write under these conditions.
If I had money enough; if I could shake off Paris, and forget those
awful rooms of mine and get to the Riviera for the winter and live in
some seaside village of the Latins with the blue sea at my feet, and the
blue sky above, and God's sunlight about me and no care for money, then
I would write as naturally as a bird sings, because I should be happy
and could not help it....

"You write stories taken from the fight of life; you are careless of
surroundings, I am a poet and can only sing in the sunshine when I am
happy."

"All right," I said, snatching at the half-promise. "It is just possible
that I may get hold of some money during the next few months, and, if I
do, you shall go and winter in the South, and live as you please without
care of money. If you can only sing when the cage is beautiful and
sunlight floods it, I know the very place for you."

With this sort of vague understanding we parted for some months.

FOOTNOTES:

[25] _Cfr._ Appendix.

[26] See Appendix.

CHAPTER XXII

"A GREAT ROMANTIC PASSION"

There is no more difficult problem for the writer, no harder task than
to decide how far he should allow himself to go in picturing human
weakness. We have all come from the animal and can all without any
assistance from books imagine easily enough the effects of unrestrained
self-indulgence. Yet it is instructive and pregnant with warning to
remark that, as soon as the sheet anchor of high resolve is gone, the
frailties of man tend to become master-vices. All our civilis