Did you ever carry out your scheme of writing a series of sonnets embodying all the great epochs of art?”

            “No,” said Birkton, indifferently.

            “It seems a pity, after such a fine beginning. Now just listen to this—listen to it as if it had been written by somebody else:

            “‘Strange hour of art’s august ascendency

            When Sin and Beauty, the old lovers, met

            In a new paradise, still sword-beset

            With monkish terrors, but wherein the tree

            Of knowledge held its golden apples free

            To lips unstayed by hell’s familiar threat;

            And men, grown mad upon the fruit they ate,

            Dreamed a wild dream of lust and liberty;

            Strange hour, when the dead gods arose in Rome

            From altars where the mass was sacrificed,

            When Phryne flaunted on the tiaraed tomb

            Of him who dearly sold the grace unpriced,

            And, twixt old shames and infamies to come,

            Cellini in his prison talked with Christ!’

 

 

            “There now, don’t you call that a very happy definition of the most magical moment the world has ever known?”

            “Don’t,” said Birkton, with an impatient gesture. “You’re very good, old man, but don’t go on.”

            Helfenridge, with a sigh, replaced the loose sheets on the desk.

            “Well,” he repeated, “I can’t understand it. But the tide’s got to turn, Maurice—it’s got to. Don’t forget that.”

            Birkton laughed drearily.

            “Haven’t you had a single opening—not one since I saw you?”

            “Not one; at least nothing to speak of,” said Birkton, reddening. “I’ve had one offer, but what do you suppose it was? Do you remember that idiotic squib that I wrote the other day about Mrs. Tolquitt’s being seen alone with Dick Blason at Koster & Bial’s? The thing I read that night in Bradley’s rooms after supper?”

            Helfenridge nodded.

            “Well, I’m sorry I read it now. Somebody must have betrayed me (of course, though no names are mentioned, they all knew who was meant), for who should turn up yesterday but Baker Buley, the editor of the Social Kite, with an offer of a hundred and fifty dollars for my poem.”

            “You didn’t, Maurice—?”

            “Hang you, Helfenridge, what do you take me for? I told him to go to the devil.”

            There was a long pause, during which Helfenridge relit his pipe. Then he said, “But the book reviews in the Symbolic keep you going, don’t they?”

            “After a fashion,” said Birkton, with a shrug. “Luckily my mother has had a tremendous lot of visiting-lists to make up lately, and she has written the invitations for half the balls that have been given this winter, so that between us we manage to keep Annette and ourselves alive; but God knows what would happen if one of us fell ill.”

            “Something else will happen before that. You’ll be offered a hundred and fifty dollars for one of those,” said Helfenridge, pointing to the pile of verses.

            “I wish you were an editor!” Birkton retorted.

            Helfenridge rose, picking up his battered gray hat, and slipping his pipe into his pocket. “I’m not an editor and I’m no good at all,” he said, mournfully.

            “Don’t say that, old man. It’s been the saving of me to be believed in by somebody.”

            Their hands met closely, and with a quick nod and inarticulate grunt Helfenridge turned from the room.

            Maurice, left alone, dropped the smile which he had assumed to speed his friend, and sank into the nearest chair. His eyes, the sensitive eyes of the seer whom Beauty has anointed with her mysterious unguent, travelled painfully about the little room. Not a detail of it but was stamped upon his mind with a morbid accuracy—the yellowish-brown paper which had peeled off here and there, revealing the discolored plaster beneath; the ink-stained desk at which all his poems had been written; the rickety wash-stand of ash, with a strip of marbled oil-cloth nailed over it, and a cracked pitcher and basin; the gas-stove in which a low flame glimmered, the blurred looking-glass, and the book-case which held his thirty or forty worn volumes; yet he never took note of his sordid surroundings without a fresh movement of disgust.

            “And this is our best room,” he muttered to himself.

            His mother and sister slept in the next room, which opened on an air-shaft in the centre of the house, and beyond that was the kitchen, drawing its ventilation from the same shaft, and sending its smells with corresponding facility into the room occupied by the two women.

            The apartment in which they lived, by courtesy called a flat, was in reality a thinly disguised tenement in one of those ignoble quarters of New York where the shabby has lapsed into the degraded. They had moved there a year earlier, leaving reluctantly, under pressure of a diminished purse, the pleasant little flat up-town, with its three bedrooms and sunny parlor, which had been their former home. Maurice winced when he remembered that he had made the change imperative by resigning his clerkship in a wholesale warehouse in order to give more leisure to the writing of the literary criticisms with which he supplied the Symbolic Weekly Review. His mother had approved, had even urged his course; but in the unsparing light of poverty it showed as less inevitable than he had imagined. And then, somehow, the great novel, which he had planned to write as soon as he should be released from his clerical task, was still in embryo. He had time and to spare, but his pen persisted in turning to sonnets, and only the opening chapters of the romance had been summarily blocked out. All this was not very satisfactory, and Maurice was glad to be called from the contemplation of facts so unamiable by the sound of his mother’s voice in the adjoining room.

            “Maurice, dear, has your friend gone?” Mrs. Birkton asked, advancing timidly across the threshold. She had the step and gesture of one who has spent her best energies in a vain endeavor to propitiate fate, and her small, pale face was like a palimpsest on which the record of suffering had been so deeply written that its original lines were concealed beyond recovery.

            “If you are not writing, Maurice,” she continued, “I might come and finish Mrs. Rushingham’s list and save the gas for an hour longer. The light is so good at your window.”

            “Come,” said Maurice, sweeping the poems into his desk and pushing a chair forward for his mother.

            Mrs. Birkton, as she seated herself and opened her neat blank-book, glanced up almost furtively into her son’s face.

            “No news, dear?” she asked, in a low tone.

            “None,” said Maurice, briefly. “I tried the editor of the Inter Oceanic when I was out just now, and he likes The Old Odysseus and Boulterby Ridge very much, but they aren’t exactly suited to his purpose. That’s their formula, you know.”

            Mrs. Birkton dipped her fine steel pen into the inkstand, and began to write, in a delicate copperplate hand:

            Mrs. Albert Lowbridge, 14 East Seventy-fifth Street.

            Mrs. Charles M. McManus, 910 Fifth Avenue.

            The Misses McManus, 910 Fifth Avenue.

            Mr. & Mrs. Hugh Lovermore, 30 East Ninety-Sixth Street.

 

 

            She wrote on in silence, but Maurice, who had seated himself near her, saw a glimmer of tears on her thin lashes as her head moved mechanically to and fro with the motion of the pen.

            “Well,” he said, trying for a more cheerful note, “your literary productions are always in demand, at all events. Mrs. Stapleton’s ball ought to bring you in a very tidy little sum. Some one told me the other day that she was going to send out two thousand invitations.”

            “Oh, Maurice—the Stapleton ball! Haven’t you heard?”

            “What about it?”

            “Mr. Seymour Carbridge, Mrs.