d Afra mimicked my tone of horror. "You know, a
Bohemian is at home anywhere, so a change of country don't affect him
much. If we find a place disagreeable, we travel."

"Was he insane?"

"Not more than the rest of us, but _you_ can't understand the feeling
that would induce a man to do such a thing. This young fellow painted
a picture: he put his mind, his soul, himself, into it, and sent it to
the Exhibition. It was rejected--that is, he was rejected--and he came
here and died. They found him suspended from that beam where the lamps
hang now."

"I thought your Bohemia was so gay?"

"So it is, but the brightest light makes the deepest shadows."

The conversation went on. These ladies discussed politics, literature,
art and society with absolute confidence. One of the topics was Alfred
de Musset. The Englishwoman was praising the English Alfred, when
a pale-faced girl, who up to this moment had been intently reading,
oblivious of all about her, closed her book with a snap (it was a
much-worn edition of one of the classics, bought for a few sous on the
quay) and broke out with--"Your Tennyson is childish. His King Arthur
puts me in mind of our Louis Philippe and his umbrella. Did you know
Louis carried an umbrella with him when he was obliged to fly from
Paris? One would have looked well held over Arthur's dragon helmet
that disagreeable night he left the queen to go and fight his nephew.
But perhaps Guinevere had lent it to Launcelot, and even the best
friends, alas! do not return umbrellas. Your poet writes in white
kid gloves, and thinks in them too. Imagine the magnificent rush and
struggle of those ancient days, the ecstasy of battle, the intensity
of life, and then read your Tennyson's milk-and-water tales, with
their modern English-menage feelings. Arthur would have been much more
likely to give his wife a beating, as did the hero of the _Nibelungen
Lied_, than that high-flown lecture; and it would have done the
Guinevere of that time more good."

"And what is your Alfred, Anita?"

"He is divine."

"After the heathen pattern. He dipped his pen in mire."

"What is mire?--water and earth. What are we?--water and earth. Mire
is humanity, and holds in itself not only the roots of the tree,
but the germ of the flower. A poet who is too delicate to plant
his thought in earth must be content to give it but the life of a
parasite: it can have no separate existence of its own."

"But one need not be bad to be