thing of the sort. So
that there lurks, you see, much virtue in this 'if only.'"

Impervious to nonsense, she asked, "And have I not earned the right to
lament that you are changed?"

"I haven't robbed more than six churches up to date," he grumbled.
"What would you have?"

The answer came, downright, and, as he knew, entirely truthful: "I
would have had you do all that you might have done."

But he must needs refine. "Why, no--you would have made me do it,
wrung out the last drop. You would have bullied me and shamed me into
being all that I might have been. I see that now." He spoke as if in
wonder, with quickening speech. "Pauline, I haven't been entirely not
worth while. Oh, yes, I know! I know I haven't written five-act
tragedies which would be immortal, as you probably expected me to do.
My books are not quite the books I was to write when you and I were
young. But I have made at worst some neat, precise and joyous little
tales which prevaricate tenderly about the universe and veil the
pettiness of human nature with screens of verbal jewelwork. It is not
the actual world they tell about, but a vastly superior place where the
Dream is realized and everything which in youth we knew was possible
comes true. It is a world we have all glimpsed, just once, and have
not ever entered, and have not ever forgotten. So people like my
little tales. . . . Do they induce delusions? Oh, well, you must give
people what they want, and literature is a vast bazaar where customers
come to purchase everything except mirrors."

She said soberly, "You need not make a jest of it. It is not
ridiculous that you write of beautiful and joyous things because there
was a time when living was really all one wonderful adventure, and you
remember it."

"But, oh, my dear, my dear! such glum discussions are so sadly
out-of-place on such a night as this," he lamented. "For it is a night
of pearl-like radiancies and velvet shadows and delicate odors and big
friendly stars that promise not to gossip, whatever happens. It is a
night that hungers, and all its undistinguishable little sounds are
voicing the night's hunger for masks and mandolins, for rope-ladders
and balconies and serenades. It is a night . . . a night wherein I
gratefully remember so many beautiful sad things that never
happened . . . to John Charteris, yet surely happened once upon a time
to me . . ."

"I think that I know what it is to remember--better than