"I am an essentially selfish man," he would say--"I have met selfishness everywhere among my fellow men and women, and have imbibed it as a sponge imbibes water. I've had a fairly hard time, and I've experienced the rough side of human nature, getting more kicks than halfpence. Now that the kicks have ceased I'm in no mood for soft soap. I know the humbug of so-called 'friendship'--the rarity of sincerity--and as for love!--there's no such thing permanently in man, woman or child. What is called 'love' is merely a comfortable consciousness that one particular person is agreeable and useful to you for a time--but it's only for a time--and marriage which seeks to bind two people together till death is the heaviest curse ever imposed on manhood or womanhood! Devotion and self-sacrifice are merest folly--the people you sacrifice yourself for are never worth it, and devotion is generally, if not always, misplaced. The only thing to do in this life is to look after yourself,--serve yourself--please yourself! No one will do anything for you unless they can get something out of it for their own advantage,--you're bound to follow the general example!" Notwithstanding this candid confession of cynical egotism, the man had greatness in him, and those who knew his works readily recognised his power. The impression he had made on Innocent's guileless and romantic nature was beyond analysis,--she did not try to understand it herself. His name and the connection he had with the old French knight of her childhood's dreams and fancies had moved and roused her to a new interest in life--and just as she had hitherto been unwilling to betray the secret of her literary authorship, she was now eager to have it declared--for one reason only,--that he might perhaps think well of her. Whereby it will be seen that the poor child, endowed with a singular genius as she was, knew nothing of men and their never-failing contempt for the achievements of gifted women. Delicate of taste and sensitive in temperament she was the very last sort of creature to realise the ugly truth that men, taken en masse, consider women in one only way--that of sex,--as the lower half of man, necessary to man's continuance, but always the mere vessel of his pleasure. To her, Amadis de Jocelyn was the wonderful realisation of an ideal,--but she was very silent concerning him,--reserved and almost cold. This rather surprised good Miss Lavinia Leigh, whose romantic tendencies had been greatly stirred by the story of the knight of Briar Farm and the discovery of a descendant of the same family in one of the most admired artists of the day. They visited Jocelyn's studio together--a vast, bare place, wholly unadorned by the tawdry paraphernalia which is sometimes affected by third-rate men to create an "art" impression on the minds of the uninstructed--and they had stood lost in wonder and admiration before a great picture he was painting on commission,