“You have not yet decided,” reminded him the Woman of the World, “which you really are:  the gentleman we get for three and sixpence net, or the one we are familiar with, the one we get for nothing.”

“Please don’t think I am suggesting any comparison,” continued the Woman of the World, “but I have been interested in the question since George joined a Bohemian club and has taken to bringing down minor celebrities from Saturday to Monday.  I hope I am not narrow-minded, but there is one gentleman I have been compelled to put my foot down on.”

“I really do not think he will complain,” I interrupted.  The Woman of the World possesses, I should explain, the daintiest of feet.

“It is heavier than you think,” replied the Woman of the World.  “George persists I ought to put up with him because he is a true poet.  I cannot admit the argument.  The poet I honestly admire.  I like to have him about the place.  He lies on my drawing-room table in white vellum, and helps to give tone to the room.  For the poet I am quite prepared to pay the four-and-six demanded; the man I don’t want.  To be candid, he is not worth his own discount.”

“It is hardly fair,” urged the Minor Poet, “to confine the discussion to poets.  A friend of mine some years ago married one of the most charming women in New York, and that is saying a good deal.  Everybody congratulated him, and at the outset he was pleased enough with himself.  I met him two years later in Geneva, and we travelled together as far as Rome.  He and his wife scarcely spoke to one another the whole journey, and before I left him he was good enough to give me advice which to another man might be useful.  ’Never marry a charming woman,’ he counselled me.  ’Anything more unutterably dull than “the charming woman” outside business hours you cannot conceive.’”

“I think we must agree to regard the preacher,” concluded the Philosopher, “merely as a brother artist.  The singer may be a heavy, fleshy man with a taste for beer, but his voice stirs our souls.  The preacher holds aloft his banner of purity.  He waves it over his own head as much as over the heads of those around him.  He does not cry with the Master, ‘Come to Me,’ but ’Come with me, and be saved.’  The prayer ‘Forgive them’ was the prayer not of the Priest, but of the God.  The prayer dictated to the Disciples was ‘Forgive us,’ ‘Deliver us.’  Not that he should be braver, not that he should be stronger than they that press behind him, is needed of the leader, but that he should know the way.  He, too, may faint, he, too, may fall; only he alone must never turn his back.”

“It is quite comprehensible, looked at from one point of view,” remarked the Minor Poet, “that he who gives most to others should himself be weak.  The professional athlete pays, I believe, the price of central weakness.  It is a theory of mine that the charming, delightful people one meets with in society are people who have dishonestly kept to themselves gifts entrusted to them by Nature for the benefit of the whole community.  Your conscientious, hard-working humorist is in private life a dull dog.  The dishonest trustee of laughter, on the other hand, robbing the world of wit bestowed upon him for public purposes, becomes a brilliant conversationalist.”