ear them sing, I
breathe an atmosphere that is like the ether beyond the pull of our
planet, and is as far from all its laws and limitations."

* * * * *

Our friend continued to talk pretty well through the whole interval
between the first and second acts; and we were careful not to interrupt
him, for from the literary quality of his diction we fancied him talking
for publication, and we wished to take note of every turn of his phrase.

"It's astonishing," he said, "how little art needs in order to give the
effect of life. A touch here and there is enough; but art is so
conditioned that it has to work against time and space, and is obliged
to fill up and round out its own body with much stuff that gives no
sense of life. The realists," he went on, "were only half right."

"Isn't it better to be half right than wrong altogether?" we
interposed.

"I'm not sure. What I wanted to express is that every now and then I
find in very defective art of all kinds that mere _look_ of the real
thing which suffices. A few words of poetry glance from the prose body
of verse and make us forget the prose. A moment of dramatic motive
carries hours of heavy comic or tragic performance. Is any piece of
sculpture or painting altogether good? Or isn't the spectator held in
the same glamour which involved the artist before he began the work, and
which it is his supreme achievement to impart, so that it shall hide all
defects? When I read what you wrote the other month, or the other year,
about the vaudeville shows--?

"Hush!" we entreated. "Don't bring those low associations into this high
presence."

"Why not? It is all the same thing. There is no inequality in the region
of art; and I have seen things on the vaudeville stage which were graced
with touches of truth so exquisite, so ideally fine, that I might have
believed I was getting them at first hand and pure from the
street-corner. Of course, the poor fellows who had caught them from life
had done their worst to imprison them in false terms, to labor them out
of shape, and build them up in acts where anything less precious would
have been lost; but they survived all that and gladdened the soul. I
realized that I should have been making a mistake if I had required any
'stunt' which embodied them to be altogether composed of touches of
truth, of moments of life. We can stand only a very little radium; the
captured sunshine burns with the fires that h