“No,” Gerald protested, “no, really, you must not tempt me with such eloquence! It suffices that during the thirty years that you have sat here theorizing,—and have, as it were, blossomed forth with all these delightful books,—these half-magics have led me day after day from one affair to its twin; they have led me into more or less jealously guarded lowlands, which were not markedly dissimilar; they have led then from one valley to another valley which looked and felt and, for that matter, smelt very much the same; finally they led me to the fair breasts of Maya. And I fell away into domesticity, I went no farther. But I was wholly content there.... So I do not complain. I have lost through these half-magics my appointed kingdom in Antan,—or so, at least, it appears to me, in a world wherein perhaps nothing is indisputable except, of course, historical and scientific truths. Yet the losing of my kingdom has, none the less, been pleasant. I have had, under the harryings of these half-magics—always, I mean, upon the whole,—an agreeable time. To-night the half-magics whose appointed duty it is to keep all us romantics from attaining to Antan have ceased bothering about me. After to-night I am no longer formidable. I am, in a word, now that I approach sixty, almost middle-aged. It follows that Antan does not concern me any longer: and I shall think no more about Antan, wherein, for one reason and another, I have found nothing.” With that, gray Gerald Musgrave dipped his pen. He put the boy quite out of mind. And the well-thought-of old scholar began to write, just where his natural body had left off a bit earlier in the evening, setting down decorously the historical and scientific truth as to the rules governing pre-nuptial intercourse in the bedchambers of New Guinea and the Tonga Islands. 50. Exodus of Glaum THE boy waited, looking down at this old fellow who sat there making small scratches upon paper, the most of which he presently canceled with yet other scratches, all the while with the air of a person who is about something intelligent and of actual importance. Then the boy shrugged. For, as always, to an onlooker the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation.