of which I am certain is that
the piece is wanted for March, and that we cannot work together at
this distance. I will meet you where you like--Paris, Brussels, Vienna,
London, Hong Kong. It is all one to me so long as I get you back to work
in time. But, for whatever reason, this second act is so written that
it will not do. And I cannot wait I am a poet, but I am a poet without
a language. If you will not be my interpreter, I must find another. Is
friendship friendship, or is business business? In the name of both I
ask you to meet me and to work with me.'

Look at it how he would, and distort his own perspective as he might,
Darco's angry and outspoken appeal was larger than anything his duty to
Gertrude might ask of him. But, to tell the whole truth, his sense
of duty was his curse, because the sense itself had grown distorted.
Because of some rooted infirmity of character, he must needs be true
to the ideal which least merited truth. He saw this fact throughout his
career. He had bowed at foolish shrines. Gertrude--oh yes, Gertrude was
impeccable. But just as he was wasting the heart of ardent manhood now,
he had wasted the heart of youth and the heart of boyhood The career was
all of a piece. Born to be fooled, whether by a village coquette, or
his own loftiest, or his own lowest, or by practised _femme de feu_ and
_femme de glace_ in one--always born to be fooled, frustrated, enticed
to the throwing away of real passion and of real power.

And over and above all these, arrange them in what imaginary perspective
he might choose, the sordid side of things, the bills--bills from
lodging-house keepers of the better sort, from hotels, from milliners,
and from modistes--and the shrinking exchequer, which barely, when all
claims were satisfied, would leave him so much as two hundred and fifty
pounds.

What had his year and a half of dalliance brought him? A dream of
pleasure, a desert ache of hunger, an occasional delirious spur to
appetite. Now, what in the name of common-sense is the good of it
all? And is Gertrude any better, after all, than an innocent Delilah,
trapping no Samson, but a fool unmuscled, who has no strength to break
the weakest of her withes? Innocent Delilah! He never profaned her in
his thought.

But in this mood--with his conscience, literary-artistic and simply
human, entirely endorsing old Darco's reproof of his work and his
evasions; with a financial crevasse at his feet, and Annette choppi