"Come, now,"--and the young fellow was looking at me rather like a troubled cow,--"come, now, sir, but you don't really mean I am going to be possessed by a devil?" "Some people will put it that way, only a bit less politely. But I would say, by a dæmon. Socrates had one, you may remember." "Yes, but this one--?" "You," I replied, "will call him the desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings. Other persons will call him quite different things. Anyhow, with time, you will fall into a sort of bedrugging dæmon-worship, and you will go the way he commands you, without resisting any longer. It will be most deplorable. So Professor Henry A. Beers[16] will have, after all, to dismiss your literary claims from the pale of serious consideration, because you are not of Colonial stock--" The boy viewed this as urgent. "But, sir, my father's people came in 1727, and my mother's in 1619--" "That will not matter. Facts are but reeds in the wind of moral indignation. And Maurice Hewlett must become very cuttingly sarcastic about your being a Jew brought up on the Talmud--" "Me, sir?" "Most certainly, you. And a transfigured Richard Le Gallienne,[17] purified by his intellectual death and descent into the helotage of reviewing, will be compelled to unmask you as a moral and spiritual hooligan with a diminutive and unkempt and unsavory ego. And an enterprising young person named Bierstadt[18] will, on the strength of having twice had luncheon with you, write out for The Bookman a remarkably intimate account of how partial you are to provoking tragedies and throwing flesh-pots at people's heads. And there will be others,--oh, quite a number of others.... So that, altogether, you perceive, you will get, through this dæmon-worship, into some trouble." Very rarely have I seen any young man more unaffectedly appalled. "But look here, sir! I don't want to get into any trouble. I simply want to contribute to the best magazines, and write some wholesome and nice entertaining books, that will sell like _The Cardinal's Snuff-Box_ and _The Prisoner of Zenda_." "I know. It is rather funny that you should begin with just those goals in view. You will not ever attain them. That will not matter so much--after a while. But what will very vitally matter--to you, anyhow,--is that, having once meddled with the desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings, you will not ever be able to forswear your dæmon. And such folly is, of course, enough to set every really well-thought-of person in America braying. So that in time--who knows--you too may come to be a chancre-laden rat, and a German Jew with a soul in hell and simmered ancestors and a notoriously unkempt ego, and may otherwise help out with the week's literary gossip." Whereon the young man rose; and he remarked, with a perhaps not wholly unwarranted uncertainty, "Then you advise me, sir--?"