Montague deemed himself able to stand a good deal by this time.  He went, and found Mrs. Vivie and her Count (Mr. Vivie had apparently not been invited) and also the young poet of Diabolism, whose work was just then the talk of the town.  He was a tall, slender youth with a white face and melancholy black eyes, and black locks falling in cascades about his ears; he sat in an Oriental corner, with a manuscript copied in tiny handwriting upon delicately scented “art paper,” and tied with passionate purple ribbons.  A young girl clad in white sat by his side and held a candle, while he read from this manuscript his unprinted (because unprintable) verses.

And between the readings the young poet talked.  He talked about himself and his work—­apparently. that was what he had come to talk about.  His words flowed like a swift stream, limpid, sparkling, incessant; leaping from place to place—­here, there, quick as the play of light upon the water.  Montague laboured to follow the speaker’s ideas, until he found his mind in a whirl and gave it up.  Afterward, when he thought it over, he laughed at himself; for Strathcona’s ideas were not serious things, having relationship to truth—­they were epigrams put together to dazzle the hearer, studies in paradox, with as much relation to life as fireworks.  He took the sum-total of the moral experience of the human race, and turned it upside down and jumbled it about, and used it as bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.  And the hearers would gasp, and whisper, “Diabolical!”

The motto of this “school” of poets was that there was neither good nor evil, but that all things were “interesting.”  After listening to Strathcona for half an hour, one felt like hiding his head, and denying that he had ever thought of having any virtue; in a world where all things were uncertain, it was presumptuous even to pretend to know what virtue was.  One could only be what one was; and did not that mean that one must do as one pleased?

You could feel a shudder run through the company at his audacity.  And the worst of it was that you could not dismiss it with a laugh; for the boy was really a poet—­he had fire and passion, the gift of melodious ecstacy.  He was only twenty, and in his brief meteor flight he had run the gamut of all experience; he had familiarized himself with all human achievement—­past, present, and future.  There was nothing any one could mention that he did not perfectly comprehend:  the raptures of the saints, the consecration of the martyrs—­yes, he had known them; likewise he had touched the depths of depravity, he had been lost in the innermost passages of the caverns of hell.  And all this had been interesting—­in its time; now he was sighing for new worlds of experience—­say for unrequited love, which should drive him to madness.