next morning I engaged passage for Bremen.”

“The rest I know about,” said Jacqueline looking at her watch.

9“I dare say, only I should like you to understand it from my point of view. I went to Berlin. My name was entered on the roll of students of the university. I drank a lot of beer, but I studied very little chemistry. At the end of my two years’ probation, I began to think with apprehension of my father’s parting words: ‘And a good chemist, or you needn’t trouble to come back.’

9

“And then, one day, when I was quite at a loss what to do, I received word that my mother had died suddenly. She left me a small fortune.

“I dreaded more than ever to return to my father. Why should I? I began to ask myself. Why should I? echoed my one friend.

“This friend was a wizened, eccentric, boastful little man, but with an undying enthusiasm for the rare and the beautiful. He spoke cunning words to entice me: ‘Your father’s idea of a successful life is one of work and yet more work–of tasks and habits that bind one more and more inexorably as the years go on. This is not success at all, but the direst failure. A life made up of habits and tasks that safely steer one through one’s existence, minute by minute, is a life with all the excitement and keen delight and ecstasy left out. To live such a life is to be a machine and no man.

10“‘Come,’ he said, ‘with me to Venice. I will show you how to live. Why should you go back to America and the hideous? There are millions of fools to labor doggedly–to keep the world a-going–why should you be dragged into the ranks of the slaves to the lash? There are thousands to agonize and strive, to create the beautiful–and to fail, terribly. Why should you be dragged into the ranks of those slaves to an ideal? There are hundreds to make the world better. Why should you be a slave to conscience? But there are so few to make a fine art of living. Be one of them. Enjoy perfectly. Enjoy wisely. Life may be for you something so rare and beautiful that the horrible and the vulgar shall not exist for you.’ I listened to him. I came to Venice. Here I am.”

10

“There is something rather fine about it all,” said Jacqueline wistfully. “But there’s sophistry somewhere. And it seems brutally selfish.”

“Sophistry! Selfish! How subtle the sophistry and selfishness I alone 

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