rsoft, let my example be vivid to you."

"Why your books are not so bad as that," said Paul, fairly laughing and
feeling that if ever a fellow had breathed the air of art--!

"So bad as what?"

"Your talent's so great that it's in everything you do, in what's less
good as well as in what's best. You've some forty volumes to show for
it--forty volumes of wonderful life, of rare observation, of magnificent
ability."

"I'm very clever, of course I know that"--but it was a thing, in fine,
this author made nothing of. "Lord, what rot they'd all be if I hadn't
been I'm a successful charlatan," he went on--"I've been able to pass off
my system. But do you know what it is? It's cartonpierre."

"Carton-pierre?" Paul was struck, and gaped.

"Lincrusta-Walton!"

"Ah don't say such things--you make me bleed!" the younger man protested.
"I see you in a beautiful fortunate home, living in comfort and honour."

"Do you call it honour?"--his host took him up with an intonation that
often comes back to him. "That's what I want _you_ to go in for. I mean
the real thing. This is brummagem."

"Brummagem?" Paul ejaculated while his eyes wandered, by a movement
natural at the moment, over the luxurious room.

"Ah they make it so well to-day--it's wonderfully deceptive!"

Our friend thrilled with the interest and perhaps even more with the pity
of it. Yet he wasn't afraid to seem to patronise when he could still so
far envy. "Is it deceptive that I find you living with every appearance
of domestic felicity--blest with a devoted, accomplished wife, with
children whose acquaintance I haven't yet had the pleasure of making, but
who _must_ be delightful young people, from what I know of their
parents?"

St. George smiled as for the candour of his question. "It's all
excellent, my dear fellow--heaven forbid I should deny it. I've made a
great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of it, to use it
without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to make it fructify. I've
got a loaf on the shelf; I've got everything in fact but the great
thing."

"The great thing?" Paul kept echoing.

"The sense of having done the best--the sense which is the real life of
the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from
his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in
it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or
he doesn't--and if he doesn't he isn't worth