dukes, and when she wished to fix these figures in her mind's eye she
thought of her boy. She had often told me she was carried away by
her own creations, and she was certainly carried away by Leolin. He
vivified, by potentialities at least, the whole question of youth and
passion. She held, not unjustly, that the sincere novelist should
feel the whole flood of life; she acknowledged with regret that she
had not had time to feel it herself, and it was a joy to her that the
deficiency might be supplied by the sight of the way it was rushing
through this magnificent young man. She exhorted him, I suppose, to
let it rush; she wrung her own flaccid little sponge into the
torrent. I knew not what passed between them in her hours of
tuition, but I gathered that she mainly impressed on him that the
great thing was to live, because that gave you material. He asked
nothing better; he collected material, and the formula served as a
universal pretext. You had only to look at him to see that, with his
rings and breastpins, his cross-barred jackets, his early embonpoint,
his eyes that looked like imitation jewels, his various indications
of a dense, full-blown temperament, his idea of life was singularly
vulgar; but he was not so far wrong as that his response to his
mother's expectations was not in a high degree practical. If she had
imposed a profession on him from his tenderest years it was exactly a
profession that he followed. The two were not quite the same,
inasmuch as HIS was simply to live at her expense; but at least she
couldn't say that he hadn't taken a line. If she insisted on
believing in him he offered himself to the sacrifice. My impression
is that her secret dream was that he should have a liaison with a
countess, and he persuaded her without difficulty that he had one. I
don't know what countesses are capable of, but I have a clear notion
of what Leolin was.