avoid translation before his hour was
ripe.

It was no pale morality that got between Richard and the wine cup. In
another day at college he had emptied many. But early in his twenties,
Richard discovered that he carried his drink uneasily; it gave a Gothic
cant to his spirit, which, under its warm spell, turned warlike. Once,
having sat late at dinner--this was in that seminary town in France
where he attended school--he bestrode a certain iron lion, the same
strange to him and guarding the portals of a public building. Being thus
happily placed, he drew two huge American six-shooters, whereof his
possession was wrapped in mystery even to himself, and blazed vacuously,
yet ferociously, at the moon. Spoken to by the constabulary who came
flying to the spot, Richard replied with acrimony.

"If you interfere with me," remarked Richard on that explosive occasion,
addressing the French constables, "I'll buy your town and burn it." The
last with a splendid disdain of limitations that was congenital.

Exploits similar to the above taught Richard the futility of alcoholic
things, and thereupon he cultivated a Puritan sobriety upon coffee and
tobacco.

Richard cast the half-burned cigar into the fire. Stepping to the
mantel, he took from it a small metal casket, builded to hold jewels.
What should be those gems of price which the metal box protected?
Richard did not strike one as the man to nurse a weakness for barbaric
adornment. A bathrobe is not a costume calculated to teach one the
wearer's fineness. To say best, a bathrobe is but a savage thing. It is
the garb most likely to obscure and set backward even a Walpole or a
Chesterfield in any impression of gentility. In spite of this primitive
regalia, however, Richard gave forth an idea of elevation, and as though
his ancestors in their civilization had long ago climbed above a level
where men put on gold to embellish their worth. What, then, did that
casket of carved bronze contain?

Richard took from its velvet interior the heel of a woman's shoe and
kissed it. It was a little kissable heel, elegant in fashion; one could
tell how it belonged aforetime to the footwear of a beautiful girl.
Perhaps this thought was aided by the reverent preoccupation of Richard
as he regarded it, for he set the boot-heel on the table and hung over
it in a rapt way that had the outward features of idolatry. It was right
that he should; the little heel spoke of Richard's first strong passi