“I’ve heard people say that you were a thief, and a rascal, and a disagreeable idiot, and a poseur, and a liar, and an overwhelming egoist.” “What did you think of this dime-novel version of iniquity?” “I have been, at times, partial to crude monsters, but your work was a curious contradiction. Why do they hate you?” “Hatred is, of course, fear--fear wildly attempting to justify its presence. With most people this fear skulks within a harmless parade of adjectives, while others are compelled to fall back upon their hands. And so people commit actual murders while others slay their opponents in conversation. The former is apt to be a little more convincing than the latter, though.” Carl spoke slowly, still correcting the turbulence of his mind with a plausible display of words, and almost unconscious of what he was saying. “You’ve left out a hatred for hypocrisy,” said Olga, with the same abstracted indifference to words and the same instinctive cunning at piecing them together. “Some of the people who have been flaying you alive walked up to you to-night with outstretched hands and congratulations. And I felt the emotion of one too tired to have more than a twinge of disgust.” “It requires no effort to be stoical to this joke,” said Carl. “The masks are too exquisitely futile to become interesting unless, indeed, they attain a moment of dextrous humor.” Jenesco and Murovitch, who had been disputing in a corner of the studio, walked over and offered a belated introduction. “Sorry to interrupt love scene, but maybe you do not know names of each other,” said Murovitch in his deliberate, shattered English. “Names tell people how much like nothing they are. But maybe both of you want to be somebody, in which case it is wise to pity you.” “You have a crudely spontaneous imagination--it spies love scenes and vacuums with a truly lumbering swiftness,” said Carl, annoyed at the interruption. Murovitch laughed--he had made a religion of giving and receiving heavy blows and it made an excellent screen for his inner timidities. “I like your frankness. It reminds me of a heavy negro. It’s black and excited,” said Olga. “Felman’s complexion is a little dirty itself,” said Murovitch, defiling his saint-like face with a prearranged grin. As Carl and Olga walked to the studio where she was living with a woman friend, she told him some of the immediate facts of her life, as though clearing away an opaquely intruding rubbish.