“Who are the people living in these houses?” The boy put the question in a whisper, as if fearful of disturbing the strange silence, the close secrecy that hung about them.

“The people who live here?  God knows!  Probably you would find a blanchisseuse on the ground floor, and on the fourth a poet or perhaps a musician, like our fiddler of Louise.  This is the real Bohemia, you know—­not the conscious Bohemia, but the true one, that is lawless simply because it knows no laws.”

They had come to the end of the steps and were once again traversing the dim rue Andre de Sarte, the boy’s eyes and ears awake to every impression.

“Yes,” he said in slow and meditative answer.  “Yes, I think I understand.  It must be wonderful to be born unfettered.”

“I don’t know about wonderful; it’s a profoundly interesting condition.  You get that blending of egoism and originality—­daring and scepticism—­that may produce the artist or may produce the criminal.”

“But you believe that the creature of temperament—­of egoism and originality—­may spring up in a lawful atmosphere as well as in a lawless one?” The question came softly.  Max had ceased to look about him, ceased to observe the streets that grew more crowded, more brightly lighted as they made their downward way.

Blake smiled.  “The tares among the wheat, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, of course I admit the tares among the wheat; but such growths are mostly unsatisfactory.  Forced fruit is never precisely the same as wild fruit.”

“Why not?”

“Because, my boy, there is a self-consciousness about all forced things, and the hallmark of the Bohemian is an absolute ingenuousness.”

“But to return to your example.  Suppose the tare among the wheat had always recognized itself—­had always craved to be a tare with other tares—­until at length its roots spread and spread and passed beyond the boundary of the wheat-field!  Why should it not flourish and lift its head among the weeds?”

“Because, boy, it would have its traditions.  It might live forever among the weeds, it might flourish and reign over them, but it would have a reminiscence unknown to them—­the knowledge of the years in which it strove to mold itself to the likeness of the wheat before rebellion woke within it.  I know!  I know!  I know Bohemia—­love Bohemia—­but at best I am only a naturalized Bohemian.  I can live on a crust with these good creatures, or I can send my gold flying with theirs, but I’m hanged if, for instance, I can sin in quite the delicious, child-like, whole-hearted way that is their prerogative!  I have done most of the things that they have done, but their disarming candor, their simple joy in their exploits, is something debarred to me.  It isn’t for nothing, I tell you, that I have countless God-fearing generations behind me!”

He spoke jestingly, but his glance, when it met the eager impetuosity of the boy’s, was quiet and observant.