"No: I lie. You can't call it idling when you sit--say in the Bois, on any chance bench anywhere--seeing nothing, letting the carriages go by like an idle show of phenomena, but with your whole soul thrilling to a new idea, drinking it in, pushing out new fibres which grow as they suck in more of it through small new ducts, with a ripple and again a choke and yet again a gurgle, which you orchestrate into a sound of deep waters combining as you draw them home. . . . Oh, yes--you may laugh: but I know now what conception is: what Shakespeare felt like when he sat one night, in a garden, and the great plot of _Othello_ came teeming. . . . "Please bear one thing in mind, my dear Roddy, You are never, now or hereafter, to pity me. _Qualis artifex_. . . . I used to smile to myself in a cocksure youthful way when great men hinted in great books that one had to make burnt-sacrifice of the eye's delight, the heart's desire; the lust of the flesh, the pride of the intellect; see them all consumed to a handful of dust, and trample out even the last spark of that, before the true phoenix sprang; that only when half-gods go the gods arrive. But it's true, Roddy! It's true! "I won't grow dithyrambic--not just yet. I was so sure of my man that it seemed quite worth while to tumble out at Avignon--a place I had never inspected--and fool away another spell among Roman remains, and Petrarch and the rival Popes, and the opening scenes of the Revolution, and just thinking--thinking. "So I reached Monte Carlo next day, a little after noon; took a bath and a siesta; sauntered into the Casino there, a good forty-eight hours behind time; and caught my man, sitting. "Are you superstitious, Roddy? Of course you are: and so are all of us who pretend that we are not. . . . Monte Carlo is the hell of a hole. I had never seen it before: but as I went into the Casino, all of a sudden I had a queer recollection--of a breakfast-party at Cambridge in young La Touche's rooms, in King's (he was killed in the South African War), and of his saying solemnly as we lit cigarettes that he'd had a dream overnight. He dreamed that he walked into the Casino at Monte Carlo, went straight to the first table on the left, put down a five-franc piece on Number 17, and came out a winner of prodigious sums.