‘There!’ he said, offering me in his steady hand the glass which had received the smaller quantity of the green fluid.  ‘Taste.’

‘But what is it?’ I demanded.

‘Taste,’ he repeated, and he himself tasted.

I obeyed.  At the first mouthful I thought the liquid was somewhat sinister and disagreeable, but immediately afterwards I changed my opinion, and found it ingratiating, enticing, and stimulating, and yet not strong.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked.

I nodded, and drank again.

‘It is wonderful,’ I answered.  ‘What do you call it?’

‘Men call it absinthe,’ he said.

‘But—­’

I put the glass on the mantelpiece and picked it up again.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ he soothed me.  ’I know what you were going to say.  You have always heard that absinthe is the deadliest of all poisons, that it is the curse of Paris, and that it makes the most terrible of all drunkards.  So it is; so it does.  But not as we are drinking it; not as I invariably drink it.’

‘Of course,’ I said, proudly confident in him.  ’You would not have offered it to me otherwise.’

‘Of course I should not,’ he agreed.  ’I give you my word that a few drops of absinthe in a tumbler of water make the most effective and the least harmful stimulant in the world.’

‘I am sure of it,’ I said.

‘But drink slowly,’ he advised me.

I refused the sandwiches.  I had no need of them.  I felt sufficient unto myself.  I no longer had any apprehension.  My body, my brain, and my soul seemed to be at the highest pitch of efficiency.  The fear of being maladroit departed from me.  Ideas—­delicate and subtle ideas—­welled up in me one after another; I was bound to give utterance to them.  I began to talk about my idol Chopin, and I explained to Diaz my esoteric interpretation of the Fantasia.  He was sitting down now, but I still stood by the fire.

’Yes, he said, ‘that is very interesting.’

‘What does the Fantasia mean to you?’ I asked him.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Nothing!’

’Nothing, in the sense you wish to convey.  Everything, in another sense.  You can attach any ideas you please to music, but music, if you will forgive me saying so, rejects them all equally.  Art has to do with emotions, not with ideas, and the great defect of literature is that it can only express emotions by means of ideas.  What makes music the greatest of all the arts is that it can express emotions without ideas.  Literature can appeal to the soul only through the mind.  Music goes direct.  Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.  Therefore all I can say of the Fantasia is that it moves me profoundly.  I know how it moves me, but I cannot tell you; I cannot even tell myself.’

Vistas of comprehension opened out before me.

‘Oh, do go on,’ I entreated him.  ’Tell me more about music.  Do you not think Chopin the greatest composer that ever lived?  You must do, since you always play him.’