"And you have no other work to offer a musician like myself?" "A musician like you?" said Hecht ironically and cuttingly. "Other musicians at least as good as yourself have not thought the work beneath their dignity. There are men whose names I could give you, men who are now very well known in Paris, have been very grateful to me for it." "Then they must have been--swine!" bellowed Christophe.--(He had already learned certain of the most useful words in the French language)--"You are wrong if you think you have to do with a man of that kidney. Do you think you can take me in with looking anywhere but at me, and clipping your words? You didn't even deign to acknowledge my bow when I came in.... But what the hell are you to treat me like that? Are you even a musician? Have you ever written anything?... And you pretend to teach me how to write--me, to whom writing is life!... And you can find nothing better to offer me, when you have read my music, than a hashing up of great musicians, a filthy scrabbling over their works to turn them into parlor tricks for little girls!... You go to your Parisians who are rotten enough to be taught their work by you! I'd rather die first!" It was impossible to stem the torrent of his words. Hecht said icily: "Take it or leave it." Christophe went out and slammed the doors. Hecht shrugged, and said to Sylvain Kohn, who was laughing: "He will come to it like the rest." At heart he valued Christophe. He was clever enough to feel not only the worth of a piece of work, but also the worth of a man. Behind Christophe's outburst he had marked a force. And he knew its rarity--in the world of art more than anywhere else. But his vanity was ruffled by it: nothing would ever induce him to admit himself in the wrong. He desired loyally to be just to Christophe, but he could not do it unless Christophe came and groveled to him. He expected Christophe to return: his melancholy skepticism and his experience of men had told him how inevitably the will is weakened and worn down by poverty. * * * * *