pleased to call viciousness?"

"That is a captious question," he replies. "A man of my constitution,
unfit for pleasures of the body, is prone to judge severely. Let me try
to be fair. I will go so far as to say that to certain natures
self-indulgence appears to be necessary as--as sunshine to flowers."

Self-indulgence, I thought. Heavily-fraught is that word; weighted with
meaning. The history of two thousand years of spiritual dyspepsia lies
embedded in its four syllables. Self-indulgence--it is what the ancients
blithely called "indulging one's genius." Self-indulgence! How debased
an expression, nowadays. What a text for a sermon on the mishaps of good
words and good things. How all the glad warmth and innocence have faded
out of the phrase. What a change has crept over us....

Glancing through a glass window not far from the hotel, I was fortunate
enough to espy a young girl seated in a sewing shop. She is decidedly
pretty and not altogether unaware of the fact, though still a child. We
have entered upon an elaborate, classical flirtation. With all the
artfulness of her years she is using me to practise on, as a dummy, for
future occasions when she shall have grown a little bigger and more
admired; she has already picked up one or two good notions. I pretend to
be unaware of this fact. I treat her as if she were grown up, and
profess to feel that she has really cast a charm--a state of affairs
which, if true, would greatly amuse her. And so she has, up to a point.
Impossible not to sense the joy which radiates from her smile and
person. That is all, so far. It is an orthodox entertainment, merely a
joke. God knows what might happen, under given circumstances. Some of a
man's most terrible experiences--volcanic cataclysms that ravaged the
landscape and left a trail of bitter ashes in their rear--were begun as