is baptized, the mother, in choosing the name, should, he told himself,
think of the lover who will one day pronounce it. And what had her
mother chosen? It would be forethought indeed if she had selected Undine
or even Iseult; but what mother was ever clairvoyant enough for that?

He thought this over awhile and was about to give the query up, when
suddenly, without an effort on his part, he was visited by a name that
announced her as the perfume announces the rose, a name that pictured
and painted her, a name that suited her as did her gown of canary, a
name that crowned her beauty and explained the melancholy of her lips.
"It is Madeleine," he said, "it can be nothing else."

And into the syllables he threw the waving inflection of the French.

"It is Madeleine," he continued, "and when I see her I will tell in what
way I divined it."

The possibility that she might be indifferent to such homage did not,
for the moment, occur to him. He was loitering in the enchanted gardens
of the imagination, which have been visited by us all. It was the
improbable that fluttered his pulse.

Hitherto the life of Tristrem Varick had been that of a dilettante.
There had been no reason why he should work. His education had unfitted
him for labor, and his tastes, if artistic, were not sufficiently
pronounced to act as incentives. He handled the brush well enough to
know that he could never be a painter; he had a natural understanding of
music, its value was clear to him, yet its composition was barred. The
one talent that he possessed--a talent that grows rarer with the
days--was that of appreciation, he could admire the masterpieces of
others, but creation was not his. A few centuries ago he would have made
an admirable knight-errant. In a material age like our own, his _raison
a'etre_ was not obvious. In a word, he was just such an one as his
father had intended he should be, one whose normal condition was that of
chronic pluperfect subjunctive, and who, if thrown on his own resources,
would be helpless indeed.

In some dim way he had been conscious of this before, and hitherto he
had accepted it, as he had accepted his father's attitude, as one
accepts the inevitable, and put it aside again as something against
which, like death, or like life, it is useless to rebel. After all,
there was nothing particularly dreadful about it. An inability to be
Somebody was not a matter of which the District Attorney is obliged to
take cogniz