elf at home in it, and The Duel
is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers, of that
presumption. Personally I have no qualms of conscience about this piece
of work. The story might have been better told of course. All one's work
might have been better done; but this is the sort of reflection a
worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his
conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.
How many of those visions have I seen vanish in my time! This one,
however, has remained, a testimony, if you like, to my courage or a
proof of my rashness. What I care to remember best is the testimony of
some French readers who volunteered the opinion that in those hundred
pages or so I had managed to render "wonderfully" the spirit of the
whole epoch. Exaggeration of kindness no doubt; but even so I hug it
still to my breast, because in truth that is exactly what I was trying
to capture in my small net: the Spirit of the Epoch--never purely
militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike in its
exaltation of sentiment--naively heroic in its faith.

1920. J. C.

CONTENTS

GASPAR RUIZ

THE INFORMER

THE BRUTE

AN ANARCHIST

THE DUEL

IL CONDE

A SET OF SIX

GASPAR RUIZ

I

A revolutionary war raises many strange characters out of the obscurity
which is the common lot of humble lives in an undisturbed state of
society.

Certain individualities grow into fame through their vices and their
virtues, or simply by their actions, which may have a temporary
importance; and then they become forgotten. The names of a few leaders
alone survive the end of armed strife and are further preserved in
history; so that, vanishing from men's active memories, they still exist
in books.

The name of General Santierra attained that cold paper-and-ink
immortality. He was a South American of good family, and the books
published in his lifetime numbered him amongst the liberators of that
continent from the oppressive rule of Spain.

That long contest, waged for independence on one side and for dominion
on the other, developed in the course of years and the vicissitudes of
changing fortune the fierceness and inhumanity of a struggle for
life. All feelings of pity and compassion disappeared in the growth of
political hatred. And, as is usual in war, the mass of the people,
who had the least to gain by the issue, suffered most in the