ot read you at sight, may not like you, but there's a
chance they'll come round; and the only way to court the chance is to
keep it up--always to keep it up. That's what I do, my dear man--if you
don't think I've perseverance. If some one's touched here and there, if
you give a little impression of truth and charm, that's your reward;
besides of course the pleasure for yourself."

"Don't you think your style's a trifle affected?" Nick asked for further
amusement.

"That's always the charge against a personal manner: if you've any at
all people think you've too much. Perhaps, perhaps--who can say? The
lurking unexpressed is infinite, and affectation must have begun, long
ago, with the first act of reflective expression--the substitution of
the few placed articulate words for the cry or the thump or the hug. Of
course one isn't perfect; but that's the delightful thing about art,
that there's always more to learn and more to do; it grows bigger the
more one uses it and meets more questions the more they come up. No
doubt I'm rough still, but I'm in the right direction: I make it my
business to testify for the fine."

"Ah the fine--there it stands, over there!" said Nick Dormer. "I'm not
so sure about yours--I don't know what I've got hold of. But Notre Dame
_is_ truth; Notre Dame _is_ charm; on Notre Dame the distracted mind can
rest. Come over with me and look at her!"

They had come abreast of the low island from which the great cathedral,
disengaged to-day from her old contacts and adhesions, rises high and
fair, with her front of beauty and her majestic mass, darkened at that
hour, or at least simplified, under the stars, but only more serene and
sublime for her happy union far aloft with the cool distance and the
night. Our young men, fantasticating as freely as I leave the reader to
estimate, crossed the wide, short bridge which made them face toward the
monuments of old Paris--the Palais de Justice, the Conciergerie, the
holy chapel of Saint Louis. They came out before the church, which looks
down on a square where the past, once so thick in the very heart of
Paris, has been made rather a blank, pervaded however by the everlasting
freshness of the vast cathedral-face. It greeted Nick Dormer and Gabriel
Nash with a kindness the long centuries had done nothing to dim. The
lamplight of the old city washed its foundations, but the towers and
buttresses, the arches, the galleries, the statues, the vast
rose-window, t