Gerald answered: “I, who have left the Marches of Antan forever, have bought freedom from the ever-meddling magic of the Two Truths. At my first sight of no other female body which is not positively deformed will I become enraptured. I have bought feet too old for errancy, ears that are deaf to the high gods, and to the heart-stirring music of great myths, and to the soft wheedling of women also, and I have bought eyes too dim to note whether or not Antan still gleams on the horizon. It is a good bargain.” Then he took up again the pages of that thirty-year-old romance. That too remains, he reflected, unfinished, like all else which I have ever undertaken.... Some day it will be completed by other hands than the thin wrinkled hands before me. Somebody else,—not born, as yet, it may be,—will be writing out,—intelligibly, anyhow,—the story of Poictesme and of the Redeemer of Poictesme and of his fine followers and many children,—but not half so splendidly as I was going to write it. Somebody else will, by and by, be beleaguering and entering into—by means of the little, yet the not wholly despicable, art of letters,—that wonder-haunted province which—yes, that also,—was a part of my appointed kingdom.... Somebody else will be laying open the fair ways to Bellegarde and to Amneran and to Storisende, and will be making free these ways to every person, so that, through the lean lesser art of letters, Poictesme may become in some sort another Antan,—an Antan perhaps considerably abated in splendor, but graced at least with easy accessibility.... Yet not even such slight triumphs were to be won by aged feet, and by ears no longer acute, and by dimming eyes, and by pulses which would not be riotous ever any more. He tore up the pages one by one, just as, he recollected now, in the land of Lytreia, Evaine had torn up the sacred fig-leaves. Glaum had said that the fig-leaf was the true symbol of romance. Gerald meditatively dropped the destroyed fragments of his romance into the waste-basket. Gerald spoke then without any too great hopefulness. “Has my body, during your inhabitancy of it, my dear fellow, escaped from Evelyn Townsend? and gone free from the unmerited blessing of a good woman’s love?” The red-headed boy before him replied, discreetly: “Your body and the body of your Cousin Evelyn have always been such good friends!” And Gerald smiled. “I recognize that phrase. So throughout thirty years Lichfield has never once forgotten its polite formula for exorcising the inadmissible!” “It has been generally felt,” the youngster answered, “that a prominent man of letters was entitled to his Egeria. Of recent years, to be sure, your friendship has not been—we will say,—so ardent nor so frequently manifested. But there has been, to hold you two together, the boy begotten by your body upon her body. There has been the long usage to hold you two together. So your friendship has remained unshattered.”