I like you, Van Vechten, my host began at last, and I've got to talk to somebody. My work has just begun and there's so much to say about it. Tell me to stop when you get tired.... In a way, I want to know what you think; in another way, it helps me merely to talk, in the working out of my ideas. But who was there to talk to, I mean before you came? I can see that you may be interested in what I am trying to do, good God! in what I _will_ do! I've done a lot already.... You have begun your book then? Well, you might say so, but I haven't written a line. I've collected the straw; the bricks will come. I've not been idle. You see those catalogues? I nodded. He fumbled them over. Then, without a break, with a strange glow of exhilaration on his pale ethereal face, his eyes flashing, his hands gesticulating, his body swaying, marching up and down the room, he recited with a crescendo which mounted to a magnificent fortissimo in the coda: Perfumery catalogues: Coty, Houbigant, Atkinson, Rigaud, Rue de la Paix, Bond Street, Place Vendôme, Regent Street, Nirvana, Chypre, Sakountala, Ambre, Après l'Ondée, Quelques Fleurs, Fougère Royale, Myrbaha, Yavahnah, Gaudika, Délices de Péra, Cœur de Jeannette, Djer Kiss, Jockey-Club, and the Egyptian perfumes, Myrrh and Kyphy. Did you know that Richelieu lived in an atmosphere heavily laden with the most pungent perfumes to inflame his sexual imagination? Automobile catalogues: Mercedes, Rolls-Royce, Ford, tires, self-starters, limousines, carburettors, gas. Jewellery catalogues: heaps of 'em, all about diamonds and platinum, chrysoprase and jade, malachite and chalcedony, amethysts and garnets, and the emerald, the precious stone which comes the nearest to approximating that human manifestation known as art, because it always has flaws; red jasper, sacred to the rosy god, Bacchus, the green plasma, blood-stone, cornelian, cat's-eye, amber, with its medicinal properties, the Indian jewels, spinels, the reddish orange jacinth, and the violet almandine. Did you know that the Emperor Claudius used to clothe himself in smaragds and sardonyx stones and that Pope Paul II died of a cold caught from the weight and chill of the rings which loaded his aged fingers? Are you aware that the star-topaz is as rare as a Keutschacher Rubentaler of the year 1504? Yonder is a volume which treats of the glyptic lore. In it you may read of the Assyrian cylinders fashioned from red and green serpentine, the Egyptian scarabei, carved in steaschist; you may learn of the seal-cutters of Nineveh and of the Signet of Sennacherib, now preserved in the British Museum. Do you know that a jewel engraved with Hercules at the fountain was deposited in the tomb of the Frankish King Childeric at Tournay? Do you know of Mnesarchus, the Tyrrhene gem-cutter, who practised his art at Samos? Have you seen the Julia of Evodus, engraved in a giant aquamarine, or the Byzantine topaz, carved