LITMIR.BIZ

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to them with a fortitude almost Christian.

      He parted his hair in the middle, but the line of division was very slight, and he left a pretty, half-curled short wisp hanging over the centre of his forehead. The wide collar that hid his short neck creased his heavy well-turned jaws, giving to his chin the appearance of being propped up. Although he was quite stout, his head was so broad and his feet so small that he appeared to taper from top to toe in a way that emphasized very forcibly his expression of blended dignity and jollity, youth and middle age, sincerity and levity. When he had finished his toilet, he sat down by the best window in the best room of Hotel Helicon, and gazed out over the dusky valley to where a line of quivering silver light played fantastically along the line of peaks that notched the delicate blue of the evening sky. The breeze came in, cool and sweet, with a sort of champagne sparkle in its freshness and purity. It whetted his appetite and blew the dust of travel out of his mind. He was glad when the dinner hour arrived.

      The long table was nearly full when he went down, and he was given a seat between Miss Moyne and little Mrs. Philpot. By that secret cerebral trick we all know, but which none of us can explain, he was aware that the company had just been discussing him. In fact, someone had ventured to wonder if he were Mr. Howells, whereupon Mr. Crane had promptly said that he knew Mr. Howells quite well, and that although in a general way the new-comer was not unlike the famous realist, he was far from identical with him.

      Laurens Peck, the bushy-bearded New England critic, whispered in someone’s ear that it appeared as if Crane knew everybody, but that the poet’s lively imagination had aided him more than his eyes, in all probability. “Fact is,” said he, “a Kentuckian soon gets so that he thinks he has been everywhere and seen everybody, whether he has or not.”

      Out of this remark grew a serious affair which it will be my duty to record at the proper place.

      Little Mrs. Philpot, who wore gold eye-glasses and had elongated dimples in her cheeks and chin, dexterously managed to have a word or two with the stranger, who smiled upon her graciously without attempting to enter into a conversation. Miss Moyne fared a little better, for she had the charm of grace and beauty to aid her, attended by one of those puffs of good luck which come to none but the young and the beautiful. Mr. B. Hobbs Lucas, a large and awkward historian from New York, knocked over a bottle of claret with his elbow, and the liquor shot with an enthusiastic sparkle diagonally across the table in order to fall on Miss Moyne’s lap.

      With that celerity which in very short and stout persons appears to be spontaneous, a sort of elastic quality, the gentleman from room 24 interposed his suddenly outspread napkin. The historian flung himself across the board after the bottle, clawing rather wildly and upsetting things generally. It was but a momentary scene, such as children at school and guests at a summer hotel make more or less merry over, still it drew forth from the genial man of room 24 a remark which slipped into Miss Moyne’s ear with the familiarity of well trained humor.

      “A deluge of wine in a free hotel!” he exclaimed, just above a whisper. “Such generosity is nearly shocking.”

      “I am sorry you mention it,” said Miss Moyne, with her brightest and calmest smile; “I have been idealizing the place. A gush of grape-juice on Helicon is a picturesque thing to contemplate.”

      “But a lap-full of claret on Mt. Boab is not so fine, eh? What a farce poetry is! What a humbug is romance!”

      The historian had sunk back in his chair and was scowling at the purple stain which kept slowly spreading through the fiber of the cloth.

      “I always do something,” he sighed, and his sincerity was obvious.

      “And always with aplomb,” remarked little Mrs. Philpot.

      “It would be a genius who could knock over a claret bottle with grace,” added Peck. “Now a jug of ale——”

      “I was present at table once with Mr. Emerson,” began the Kentucky poet, but nobody heard the rest. A waiter came with a heavy napkin to cover the stain, and as he bent over the table he forced the man from room 24 to incline very close to Miss Moyne.

      “To think of making an instance of Emerson!” he murmured. “Emerson who died before he discovered that men and women have to eat, or that wine will stain a new dress!”

      “But then he discovered so many things——” she began.

      “Please mention one of them,” he glibly interrupted. “What did Emerson ever discover? Did he ever pen a single truth?”

      “Aloft in secret veins of air

       Blows the sweet breath of song,”

      she replied. “He trod the very headlands of truth. But you are not serious——” she checked herself, recollecting that she was speaking to a stranger.

      “Not serious but emphatically in earnest,” he went on, in the same genial tone with which he had begun. “There isn’t a thing but cunning phrase-form in anything the man ever wrote. He didn’t know how to represent life.”

      “Oh, I see,” Miss Moyne ventured, “you are a realist.”

      It is impossible to convey any adequate idea of the peculiar shade of contempt she conveyed through the words. She lifted her head a little higher and her beauty rose apace. It was as if she had stamped her little foot and exclaimed: “Of all things I detest realism—of all men, I hate realists.”

      “But I kept the wine off your dress!” he urged, as though he had heard her thought. “There’s nothing good but what is real. Romance is lie-tissue. Reality is truth-tissue.”

      “Permit me to thank you for your good intentions,” she said, with a flash of irony; “you held the napkin just in the right position, but the wine never fell from the table. Still your kindness lost nothing in quality because the danger was imaginary.”

      When dinner was over, Miss Moyne sought out Hartley Crane, the Kentucky poet who knew everybody, and suggested that perhaps the stranger was Mr. Arthur Selby, the analytical novelist whose name was on everybody’s tongue.

      “But Arthur Selby is thin and bald and has a receding chin. I met him often at the—I forget the club in New York,” said Crane. “It’s more likely that he’s some reporter. He’s a snob, anyway.”

      “Dear me, no, not a snob, Mr. Crane; he is the most American man I ever met,” replied Miss Moyne.

      “But Americans are the worst of all snobs,” he insisted, “especially literary Americans. They adore everything that’s foreign and pity everything that’s home-made.”

      As he said this he was remembering how Tennyson’s and Browning’s poems were overshadowing his own, even in Kentucky. From the ring of his voice Miss Moyne suspected something of this sort, and adroitly changed the subject.

III.

       Table of Contents

      It might be imagined that a hotel full of authors would be sure to generate some flashes of disagreement, but, for a time at least, everything went on charmingly at Hotel Helicon. True enough, the name of the occupant of room 24 remained a vexatious secret which kept growing more and more absorbing as certain very cunningly devised schemes for its exposure were easily thwarted; but even this gave the gentleman a most excellent excuse for nagging the ladies in regard to feminine curiosity and lack of generalship. Under the circumstances it was not to be expected that everybody should be strictly guarded in the phrasing of speech, still so genial and good-humored was the nameless man and so engaging was his way of evading or turning aside every thrust, that he steadily won favor. Little Mrs. Philpot, whose seven year old daughter (a bright and sweet little child) had become the pet of Hotel Helicon, was enthusiastic in her pursuit of the stranger’s name, and at last she hit upon a plan that promised immediate success. She giggled all to herself, like a high-school girl, instead of like

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