So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the validity of his popularity.  It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and poured its gold into his money-sack, and from what little he knew of the bourgeoisie it was not clear to him how it could possibly appreciate or comprehend what he had written.  His intrinsic beauty and power meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying his books.  He was the fad of the hour, the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while the gods nodded.  The hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him with the same brute non-understanding with which they had flung themselves on Brissenden’s “Ephemera” and torn it to pieces—­a wolf-rabble that fawned on him instead of fanging him.  Fawn or fang, it was all a matter of chance.  One thing he knew with absolute certitude:  “Ephemera” was infinitely greater than anything he had done.  It was infinitely greater than anything he had in him.  It was a poem of centuries.  Then the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry tribute indeed, for that same mob had wallowed “Ephemera” into the mire.  He sighed heavily and with satisfaction.  He was glad the last manuscript was sold and that he would soon be done with it all.

CHAPTER XLIV

Mr. Morse met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metropole.  Whether he had happened there just casually, intent on other affairs, or whether he had come there for the direct purpose of inviting him to dinner, Martin never could quite make up his mind, though he inclined toward the second hypothesis.  At any rate, invited to dinner he was by Mr. Morse—­Ruth’s father, who had forbidden him the house and broken off the engagement.

Martin was not angry.  He was not even on his dignity.  He tolerated Mr. Morse, wondering the while how it felt to eat such humble pie.  He did not decline the invitation.  Instead, he put it off with vagueness and indefiniteness and inquired after the family, particularly after Mrs. Morse and Ruth.  He spoke her name without hesitancy, naturally, though secretly surprised that he had had no inward quiver, no old, familiar increase of pulse and warm surge of blood.

He had many invitations to dinner, some of which he accepted.  Persons got themselves introduced to him in order to invite him to dinner.  And he went on puzzling over the little thing that was becoming a great thing.  Bernard Higginbotham invited him to dinner.  He puzzled the harder.  He remembered the days of his desperate starvation when no one invited him to dinner.  That was the time he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine.  That was the paradox of it.  When he wanted dinners, no one gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners and was losing his appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left.  But why?  There was no justice in