“And what is your friend doing now?” asked the Doctor.

“Oh, he’s making a mint of money now, but no name.”

“In literature?”

“Yes.  He writes advertisements on salary,” returned the Idiot.  “He is writing now a recommendation of tooth-powder in Indian dialect.”

“Why didn’t he try writing an epic?” said the Bibliomaniac.

[Illustration:  “‘HE GAVE UP JOKES’”]

“Because,” replied the Idiot, “the one aim of his life has been to be original, and he couldn’t reconcile that with epic poetry.”

At which remark the landlady stooped over, and recovering the Idiot’s bill from under the table, called the maid, and ostentatiously requested her to hand it to the Idiot.  He, taking a cigarette from his pocket, thanked the maid for the attention, and rolling the slip into a taper, thoughtfully stuck one end of it into the alcohol light under the coffee-pot, and lighting the cigarette with it, walked nonchalantly from the room.

IX

“I’ve just been reading a book,” began the Idiot.

“I thought you looked rather pale,” said the School-master.

“Yes,” returned the Idiot, cheerfully, “it made me feel pale.  It was about the pleasures of country life; and when I contrasted rural blessedness as it was there depicted with urban life as we live it, I felt as if my youth were being thrown away.  I still feel as if I were wasting my sweetness on the desert air.”

“Why don’t you move?” queried the Bibliomaniac, suggestively.

“If I were purely selfish I should do so at once, but I am, like my good friend Mr. Whitechoker, a slave to duty.  I deem it my duty to stay here to keep the School-master fully informed in the various branches of knowledge which are day by day opened up, many of which seem to be so far beyond the reach of one of his conservative habits; to assist Mr. Whitechoker in his crusades against vice at this table and elsewhere; to give the Bibliomaniac the benefit of my advice in regard to those precious little tomes he no longer buys—­to make life worth the living for all of you, to say nothing of enabling Mrs. Smithers to keep up the extraordinarily high standard of this house by means of the hard-earned stipend I pay to her every Monday morning.”

“Every Monday?” queried the School-master.

“Every Monday,” returned the Idiot.  “That is, of course, every Monday that I pay.  The things one gets to eat in the country, the air one breathes, the utter freedom from restraint, the thousand and more things one enjoys in the suburbs that are not attainable here—­it is these that make my heart yearn for the open.”

[Illustration:  “’A LITTLE GARDEN OF MY OWN, WHERE I COULD RAISE AN OCCASIONAL CAN OF TOMATOES’”]