of time, he seems to have succeeded in quarrelling.  Throughout life, evidently, he has had capital fingers for plucking off parasites.  Rich, lonely, and vain, he must have been fair game for the race of social sycophants and cormorants; and it’s much to the credit of his sharpness and that instinct of self-defence which nature bestows even on the weak, that he has not been despoiled and exploite.  Apparently they have all been bunglers.  I maintain that something is to be done with him still.  But one must work in obedience to certain definite laws.  Doctor Jones, his physician, tells me that in point of fact he has had for the past ten years an unbroken series of favorites, proteges, heirs presumptive; but that each, in turn, by some fatally false movement, has spilled his pottage.  The doctor declares, moreover, that they were mostly very common people.  Gradually the old man seems to have developed a preference for two or three strictly exquisite intimates, over a throng of your vulgar pensioners.  His tardy literary schemes, too—­fruit of his all but sapless senility—­have absorbed more and more of his time and attention.  The end of it all is, therefore, that Theodore and I have him quite to ourselves, and that it behooves us to hold our porringers straight.

Poor, pretentious old simpleton!  It’s not his fault, after all, that he fancies himself a great little man.  How are you to judge of the stature of mankind when men have forever addressed you on their knees?  Peace and joy to his innocent fatuity!  He believes himself the most rational of men; in fact, he’s the most superstitious.  He fancies himself a philosopher, an inquirer, a discoverer.  He has not yet discovered that he is a humbug, that Theodore is a prig, and that I am an adventurer.  He prides himself on his good manners, his urbanity, his knowing a rule of conduct for every occasion in life.  My private impression is that his skinny old bosom contains unsuspected treasures of impertinence.  He takes his stand on his speculative audacity—­his direct, undaunted gaze at the universe; in truth, his mind is haunted by a hundred dingy old-world spectres and theological phantasms.  He imagines himself one of the most solid of men; he is essentially one of the hollowest.  He thinks himself ardent, impulsive, passionate, magnanimous—­capable of boundless enthusiasm for an idea or a sentiment.  It is clear to me that on no occasion of disinterested action can he ever have done anything in time.  He believes, finally, that he has drained the cup of life to the dregs; that he has known, in its bitterest intensity, every emotion of which the human spirit is capable; that he has loved, struggled, suffered.  Mere vanity, all of it.  He has never loved any one but himself; he has never suffered from anything but an undigested supper or an exploded pretension; he has never touched with the end of his lips the vulgar bowl from which the mass of mankind quaffs its floods