the conscience of the artist; and that there must always be something painful and terrible about high perfection.  It was that way that I felt when I saw this girl’s face, and I dreamt my old dream of the sweetness and glory of a maiden’s heart.  I thought of its spotlessness and of its royal scorn of baseness; and I tell you, William, if I had found it thus I could have been content to worship and not even ask that the girl look at me.  For a man, when he has lived as I have lived, can feel towards anything more perfect than himself a quite wonderful kind of humility; I know that all the trouble with my helpless struggling is that I must be everything to myself, and cannot find anything to love, and so be at peace.  That was the way I felt when I saw this Miss Davis, all that agitation and all that yearning; and was it not enough to make a man mock at himself, to learn the real truth?  I was glad that it did not happen to me when I was young and dependent upon things about me; is it not easy to imagine how a young man might make such a woman the dream of his life, how he might lay all his prayer at her feet, and how, when he learned of her fearful baseness, it might make of him a mocking libertine for the rest of his days?”

“You think it baseness?” asked Lieutenant Maynard.

“I tried to persuade myself at first that it must be only blindness; I wondered to myself, ’Can she not see the difference between the life of these people about her and the music and poetry her aunt tells me she loves?’ I never waste any of my worry upon the old and hardened of these vulgar and worldly people; it is enough for me to know why the women are dull and full of gossip, and to know how much depth there is in the pride and in the wisdom of the men.  But it was very hard for me to give up my dream of the girl’s purity; I rememher I thought of Heine’s ‘Thou art as a flower,’ and my heart was full of prayer.  I wondered if it might not be possible to tell her that one cannot combine music and a social career, and that one cannot really buy happiness with sin; I thought that perhaps she might be grateful for the warning that in cutting herself off from the great deepening experience of woman she was consigning herself to stagnation and wretchedness from which no money could ever purchase her ransom; I thought that possibly she did not see that this man knew nothing of her preciousness and had no high thoughts about her beauty.  That was the way I argued with myself about her innocence, and you may fancy the kind of laughter that came over me at the truth.  It is a ghastly thing, William, the utter hardness, the grim and determined worldliness, of this girl.  For she knew very well what she was doing, and all the ignorance was on my part.  She had no care about anything in the world until that man came in, and the short half hour that I watched them was enough to tell her that her life’s happiness was won.  But only think of her, William, with all her God-given beauty, allowing herself to