aid aloud. "'It is a nation,' would I answer Plato,
'that has no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters----'" And with
that he sat about reshaping Montaigne's conceptions of Utopia into
verse. He wrote--while his left hand held the book flat--as orderly as
any county-clerk might do in the recordance of a deed of sale.

Midcourse in larceny, he looked up from writing. He saw a tall, dark
lady who was regarding him half-sorrowfully and half as in the grasp of
some occult amusement. He said nothing. He released the telltale
book. His eyebrows lifted, banteringly. He rose.

He found it characteristic of her that she went silently to the table
and compared the printed page with what he had just written. "So
nowadays you have turned pickpocket? My poet, you have altered."

He said: "Why, yes. When you broke off our friendship, I paid you the
expensive compliment of falling very ill. They thought that I would
die. They tell me even to-day I did not die. I almost question it."
He shrugged. "And to-day I must continue to write plays, because I
never learned any other trade. And so, at need, I pilfer." The topic
did not seem much to concern him.

"Eh, and such plays!" the woman cried. "My poet, there was a time when
you created men and women as glibly as Heaven does. Now you make
sugar-candy dolls."

"The last comedies were not all I could have wished," he assented. "In
fact, I got only some L30 clear profit."

"There speaks the little tradesman I most hated of all persons living!"
the woman sighed. Now, as in impatience, she thrust back her
traveling-hood and stood bare-headed.

Then she stayed silent,--tall, extraordinarily pallid, and with dark,
steady eyes. Their gaze by ordinary troubled you, as seeming to hint
some knowledge to your belittlement. The playmaker remembered that.
Now he, a reputable householder, was wondering what would be the upshot
of this intrusion. His visitor, as he was perfectly aware, had little
patience with such moments of life as could not be made dramatic. . . .
He was recollecting many trifles, now his mind ran upon old
times. . . . No, no, reflection assured him, to call her beautiful
would be, and must always have been, an exaggeration; but to deny the
exotic and somewhat sinister charm of her, even to-day, would be an
absurdity.

She said, abruptly: "I do not think I ever loved you as women love
men. You were too anxious to associate with fine folk, too eag