desolation, a barren landscape, burnt and faintly scented with the sea.
Fame and wealth shall slip like sand from him. She may be set aside for
the cadence of a rhyme, for the flowing line of a limb, but when the
passion of art has raged itself out, she shall return to blight the
peace of the worker.

A terrible malady is she, a malady the ancients knew of and called
nympholepsy--a beautiful name evocative and symbolic of its ideal
aspect, "the breasts of the nymphs in the brake." And the disease is not
extinct in these modern days, nor will it ever be so long as men shall
yearn for the unattainable; and the prosy bachelors who trail their
ill-fated lives from their chambers to their clubs know their malady,
and they call it--the woman of thirty.




VIII


A Japanese dressing-gown, the ideality of whose tissue delights me, some
fresh honey and milk set by this couch hung with royal fringes; and
having partaken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack, my great
python crawling about after a two months' fast. I tie up a guinea-pig to
the _tabouret_, pure Louis XV., the little beast struggles and squeaks,
the snake, his black, bead-like eyes are fixed, how superb are the
oscillations...now he strikes; and with what exquisite gourmandise he
lubricates and swallows.

Marshall is at the organ in the hall, he is playing a Gregorian chant,