From beginning to end of this piece there was not a single line of real humor, a spark of human sentiment, a gleam of intelligence; it was a kind of delirium tremens of the drama. To Thyrsis it seemed as if a whole civilization, with all its resources of science and art--its music and painting and costumes, its poets and composers, its actors, singers, orchestra, and audience--had all at once fallen victims to an attack of St. Vitus’ dance. He sat and listened, while the theatre full of people roared and howled its applause; while the family beside him--mother and father and daughters--laughed over jokes that made him ashamed to turn and look at them. In the end the realization of what this scene meant--not only the break-down of a civilization, but the trap in which his own spirit was caught--made him sick and faint all over. He had to ask to be excused, and went out and sat in the lobby until the “show” was done. The family found him there, and the bride-to-be inquired if he “felt better”; then, looking at his pale face, an idea occurred to her, and after a bit of hesitation, she asked him if he would not stay to dinner. In her mind was the conflict between pity for this poor boy, and doubt as to the fitness of his costume; and Thyrsis, having read her mind in a flash, was divided between his humiliation, and his desire for some food. In the end the baser motive won; he buried his pride, and went to dinner.--And so, as the fates had planned it, the impulse to his next book was born. Section 6. There came another guest to the meal--the rector of the fashionable church which the family attended at home. He was a young man, renowned for the charm of his oratory; smooth-shaven, pink-and-white-cheeked, exquisite in his manners, gracious and insinuating. His ideas and his language and his morals were all as perfectly polished as his finger-nails; and never before in his life had Thyrsis had such a red rag waved in his face. But he had come there for the dinner, and he attended to that, and let Dr. Holland provide the flow of soul; until at the very end, when the doctor was sipping his _demi-tasse_. The conversation had come, by some devious route, to Vegetarianism; and the clergyman was disapproving of it. That made no difference to Thyrsis, who was not a vegetarian, and knew nothing about it; but how he hated the arguments the man advanced! For that which made the doctor an anti-vegetarian was an attitude to life, which had also made him a Republican and an Imperialist, a graduate of Harvard and a beneficiary of the Apostolic Succession. Because life was a survival of the fittest, and because God had intended the less fit to take the doctor’s word as their sentence of extermination.