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were written of in social columns, whose names were on the lips of the
journalists and of the world. He never thought about his social position
as compared with that of others. Accustomed to being a gentleman, he did
not want to be more or other than he was. Had he been poor the
obligation to struggle might have roused within him the instinct to
climb. A forced activity might have bred in him the commoner sort of
ambition. But he had enough money and could gratify his inclination
toward secrecy and retirement. For several years, since he had left the
Royal College of Music and settled down in his little house, he had been
happy enough in his sheltered and perhaps rather selfish existence.
Dwelling in the center of a great struggle for life, he had enjoyed it
because he had had nothing to do with it. His own calm had been
agreeably accentuated by the turmoil which surrounded and enclosed it.
How many times had he blessed his thousand a year, that armor of gold
with which fate had provided him! How often had he imagined himself
stripped of it, realized mentally the sudden and fierce alteration in
his life and eventually, no doubt, in himself that must follow if
poverty came!

He had a horror of the jealousies, the quarrels, the hatreds, the lies,
the stabbings in the dark that make too often hideous, despicable, and
terrible a world that should be very beautiful. During his musical
education he had seen enough to realize that side by side with great
talent, with a warm impulse toward beauty, with an ardor that counts
labor as nothing, or as delight, may exist coldness, meanness, the
tendency to slander, egoism almost inhuman in its concentration, the
will to climb over the bodies of the fallen, the tyrant's mind, and the
stony heart of the cruel. Art, so it seemed to Claude, often hardened
instead of softening the nature of man. That, no doubt, was because
artists were generally competitors. Actors, writers, singers,
conductors, composers were pitted against each other. The world that
should be calm, serene, harmonious, and perfectly balanced became a
cock-pit, raucous with angry voices, dabbled with blood, and strewn with
the torn feathers of the fallen.

The many books which he had read dealing with the lives of great
artists, sometimes their own autobiographies, had only confirmed him in
his wish to keep out of the struggle. Such books, deeply interesting
though they were, often made him feel almost sick at heart.