"Well, I don't know. When you've once tasted New York--You wouldn't go
back to Boston, would you?"

"Instantly."

Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.




X

Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down
before the dull fire in his grate to think. It struck him there was a
dull fire in his heart a great deal like it; and he worked out a fanciful
analogy with the coals, still alive, and the ashes creeping over them,
and the dead clay and cinders. He felt sick of himself, sick of his life
and of all his works. He was angry with Fulkerson for having got him
into that art department of his, for having bought him up; and he was
bitter at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to pay some
pressing debts, and had not been able to return the check his father had
sent him. He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for
him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his
own baseness. This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands
of it. The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that
he had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that
yet. The notion amused him; he thought he might get a Satanic epigram
out of it some way. But in the mean time that girl, that wild animal,
she kept visibly, tangibly before him; if he put out his hand he might
touch hers, he might pass his arm round her waist. In Paris, in a set he