"In the end he decided to be a doctor, and went a year to the Harvard Medical School. Then he hit on the idea of keeping to the old French tradition of the family, and argued me into sending him to the Sorbonne. I did--and proudly enough, though I knew how lonely I'd be with him so far off. Would to God I hadn't! I thought he was the safest kind of a boy to be in Paris. He had a room in the Rue St. Jacques--that's near the University in the Latin Quarter--but according to his letters and his friends he didn't cut up with the gayer dogs at all. The people he knew were mostly young fellows from home--serious students and artists who thought more of their work than of striking attitudes and painting the town red. "But of course there were lots of fellows who were on a sort of dividing line between serious study and the devil: the esthetes, the decadents, experimenters in life and sensation; the Baudelaire kind of a chap. Naturally, Denis ran up against a good many of these, and saw a good deal of their life. They had all sorts of crazy circles and cults--imitation devil-worship, false Black Masses, and the like. Doubt if it did them much harm on the whole--probably most of 'em forgot all about it in a year or two. One of the deepest in this queer stuff was a fellow Denis had known at school--for that matter, whose father I'd known myself. Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of Lafcadio Hearn and Gauguin and Van Gogh--regular epitome of the yellow nineties. Poor devil--he had the makings of a great artist, at that. * * * * * "Marsh was the oldest friend Denis had in Paris; so as a matter of course they saw a good deal of each other, to talk over old times at St. Clair Academy, and all that. The boy wrote me a good deal about him, and I didn't see any especial harm when he spoke of the group of mystics Marsh ran with. It seems there was some cult of prehistoric Egyptian and Carthaginian magic having a rage among the Bohemian element on the left bank; some nonsensical thing that pretended to reach back to forgotten sources of hidden truth in lost African civilizations--the great Zimbabwe, and dead Atlantean cities in the Hoggar region of the Sahara--and that had a lot of gibberish connected with snakes and human hair. At least, I called it gibberish then. Denis used to quote Marsh as saying odd things about the veiled facts behind the legend of Medusa's snaky locks--and behind the later Ptolemaic myth of Berenice, who offered up her hair to save her husband-brother, and had it set in the sky as the constellation Coma Berenices.