"It sounds cogent—but I should feel that I had taken a selfish advantage of your generosity."
"Isn't that my lookout? If I have faith in you, you can't have less. Besides, are you so sure I'm not at heart an 'all or nothing' man? What if my idealism can only be expressed in such ways as the material furtherance of other men's idealistic efforts—will you obstruct it?"
There was a pregnant pause. "Do you realize what a thankless mission you're setting yourself?" asked the poet.
"Perhaps some day you'll ask yourself the same question."
The youth sighed. "I've even done so already."
"Eh bien, trève d'explications! If you'll be here at this hour to-morrow I'll have the money for you."
Two days later Paul made the following entry in a fitful diary he had begun to keep:
"Saw George Paddon, the poet, off to Vienna. His haggardness gone, his eyes lit up with a prodigious expectancy, poor devil! But at least he won't expect to find gold cobblestones there, as I did. Strange that, of all the questions he might with profit have asked, he asked none; and strange that he, like most others, should choose the one question I will never answer: 'What is your nationality?'"
For the next three years the diary continued at irregular intervals to reflect Paul's life. No mention was made of his routines, his readings and his return to a half intensive, half dilettantish preoccupation with music, nor of his donations to the needy students, painters, musicians, and writers who kept crossing his path. The entries mirrored picturesque elements in his surround-
