“I disagree with you!” Max cried, suddenly.  “I disagree with you wholly!  Individuality has nothing to do with environment—­nothing to do with ancestry.”

“Ah, that’s not logical!  Humanity is only a chain of which we are the last links forged.  I have had my own delusions, when I sent the ideal to the right-about and made realism my god, but as time has gone on my theories have gone back on me, and tradition has come into its own, until now I see the skeleton in every beautiful body, and the heart of me craves something behind even the bones—­the soul of the creature.”

“But that is different, because your desire and your theory have been the common desire and theory—­the things that burn themselves out.  My theory is not of the body, it is of the mind.  I only contend that in all the greater concerns of life I am a being perfectly competent to stand alone.”

“My dear boy, by the mercy of God all the ideas of youth are reversible!  My fire has been extinguished; your ice will hold until the sun is in the zenith, and not one moment longer.”

“I deny it!  I deny it!”

He spoke with a fine defiance.  He paused, the more convincingly to express himself; but even as he paused, his eyes and his mind were suddenly opened to a fresh impression, were lured from the moment of gravity, caught and held by the lights and crowds into which they had abruptly emerged—­lights and crowds through which the pervading sense of a pleasure-chase stole like a scent borne on a breeze.

“Where are we?” he said, sharply.  “What place is this?”

“The Boulevard de Clichy.  Come, boy!  Discussions are over.  The curtain is up; the play is on!” Without apology, Blake caught his shoulder and swung him out into the roadway, as he had swung him across the Esplanade des Invalides that morning.  “Come!  I’m going to insist upon a new medicine; my first prescription was not the right one.  You’re too theoretical to-night for a place of traditions.  We’ll shelve our little cabaret till some hour when genius burns, and instead I’ll plunge you straight into common frivolity, as though you were some Cockney tourist getting his week-end’s worth!  Have you ever heard of the Bal Tabarin?”

“Never.  And I would much—–­ much rather—­”

“No, you wouldn’t!  I have spoken.  Come along!”

Before Max could resist he was swept across the wide roadway, round a corner, and through what looked to him like the entrance to a theatre.

There were many people gathered about this entrance:  men in evening dress, men in shabby, insignificant clothes, women in varying types of costume.  Max would have lingered to study the little crowd, but Blake looked upon his hesitancy with distrust, and still retaining the grip upon his shoulder, half led, half pushed him through a short passage straight into the dancing-hall, where on the instant his ears were assailed by a flood of joyous sound in the form of