“Paul, Paul,” he said, “I only criticise you for your good.  What have you done with your three adolescences?  You are getting stout, yet you still write poetically.  You have some wit, imagination, learning and aptitude.  You might make a name in science or art, but everything you do lacks substance, because you live only in your old eternal catchwords of the Past and the Future.  You can sketch and paint, yet have never exhibited your pictures except in ladies’ albums.  You profess to love botany, yet your sole herbarium has been the mignonette in sewing-girls’ windows.  You are inoffensive, you are possessed of a competency, but in everything, in every vocation, you rest in the state of amateur—­amateur housekeeper, amateur artist, amateur traveler, amateur geographer.  And such a geographer as you might be, with your taste for travel and the Hakluyt Society’s publications you have pored over for years!”

This chance allusion to my grand secret took me from my guard.  Hohenfels, blundering up and down in search of something to anathematize, had stumbled upon the very fortress of my strength.  I deemed it time to let him into a part of my reserved intellectual treasure—­to whirl away a part at least of the sand in which my patient sphinx had been buried.

“I have indeed been a reader,” I said modestly.  “When a youth at Heidelberg, I perused, with more profit than would be immediately guessed from the titles, such works as the Helden-Buchs and the Nibelungen-Lieds, the Saxon Rhyme-Chronicles, the poems of Minnesingers and Mastersingers, and Ships of Fools, and Reynard Foxes, and Death-Dances, and Lamentations of Damned Souls.  My study since then has been in German chemistry from its renaissance in Paracelsus, and physical science, including both medicine and the evolution of life.  Shall I give you a few dozen of my favorite writers?”

“Quite unnecessary,” said the baron with some haste.  “But I fancied you were going to speak of geographical authors.”

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“Are you fond of such writings yourself?” I asked.

“Immensely—­that is, not too scientific, you know,” said the baron, who was out of his element here.  “Bayard Taylor, now, or some such fellows as the Alpine Club.”

“My dear baron, the republications by the Hakluyt Society are but a small part of the references I have taken down for my Progressive Geography.  You admire Switzerland?”

“Vastly.  Steep jump, the Staubbach.”

“But the Alps are only hillocks compared with the Andes of Peru, with the Cordilleras, with Chimborazo!  Ah, baron, Chimborazo!  Well, my dear boy, the system I elaborate makes it a matter of simple progression and calculation to arrive at mountains much more considerable still.”

“Such as—?”

“The Mountains of the Moon!”

I then, in a few dexterously involved sentences, allowed the plan of my newly-invented theory to appear—­so much of it, that is, as would leave Hohenfels completely in the dark, and detract in no wise from the splendor of my Opus when it should be published.  As science, however, truly considered, is the art of dilapidating and merging into confused ruin the theories of your predecessors, I was somewhat more precise with the destructive than the constructive part of my plan.