So,--to go back,--I can criticize none of these later books with any feeling of security. But of one thing I am wholly certain. It is to the Hergesheimer I never knew that I now have large cause to be grateful,--to the younger Hergesheimer of those seemingly wasted fourteen years, which, far from being wasted, were given over to establishing the fact that at least one other novelist then wrote primarily to divert himself; and that, for at least one other person, the craft of the creating romanticist stayed all this while a game at which the artist played, regardful always of his high and joyous gaming and of nothing else. Nor, very naturally, does he play with those ideas--any more than does M. Anatole France,--in which he crudely "believes." I glance back, for example, over the novels of which I have just spoken. Well! the author of _Mountain Blood_ and _The Lay Anthony_ is, I consider, as rational as most of us about atoning for his misdeeds or about preserving one's physical chastity: I would trust him as utterly as I would myself never in private life to evince upon either topic any embarrassing fanaticism. And it is equally gratifying to record that the man who wrote _The Three Black Pennys_ and _Linda Condon_ is neither the dazed slave of carnal passion nor of any continual high evaluation of his own physical loveliness. The "ideas" of these novels, in fine, are not his idols but his playthings; and are the diverting toys with which the anchorite has entertained his stay in that withdrawn queer lonely country to which also I recently referred. And such, I repeat, is the ultimate and lean, but real, value of all human ideas. So I applaud the wisdom of Joseph Hergesheimer. I applaud too, because of the joy I have got out of it, his talent. Yet I in part applaud because of my pleased consciousness that this fine talent seems, like all considerable creative talent, a form of self-indulgence which has become beneficent to other persons almost by chance. For I think that through the haze of those "wasted" fourteen years one glimpses, clearly enough, the artist who labors primarily to divert himself. VIII THE DELTA OF RADEGONDE "The same mode of teaching was not adopted by all, nor, indeed, did individuals always confine themselves to the same system, but each varied his plan of instruction according to circumstances. For they were accustomed, in stating their argument with the utmost clearness, to use figures and apologies, and to put cases as circumstances required; and these might be either cases which came under trial in the courts or fictitious cases." _8._ _The Delta of Radegonde_ § 72