I will not attempt to repeat everything that passed between us, or to explain just how it was that, every moment I spent in his company, Mark Ambient revealed to me more and more that he looked at all things from the standpoint of the artist, felt all life as literary material There are people who will tell me that this is a poor way of feeling it, and I am not concerned to defend my statement, having space merely to remark that there is something to be said for any interest which makes a man feel so much. If Mark Ambient did really, as I suggested above, have imaginative contact with “all life,” I, for my part, envy him his _arriere-pensée_. At any rate it was through the receipt of this impression of him that by the time we returned I had acquired the feeling of intimacy I have noted. Before we got up for the homeward stretch, he alluded to his wife’s having once--or perhaps more than once--asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read _Beltraffio_. I think he was unconscious at the moment of all that this conveyed to me--as well, doubtless, of my extreme curiosity to hear what he had replied. He had said that he hoped very much Dolcino would read all his works--when he was twenty; he should like him to know what his father had done. Before twenty it would be useless; he would n’t understand them. “And meanwhile do you propose to hide them,--to lock them up in a drawer?” Mrs. Ambient had inquired. “Oh, no; we must simply tell him that they are not intended for small boys. If you bring him up properly, after that he won t touch them.” To this Mrs. Ambient had made answer that it would be very awkward when he was about fifteen; and I asked her husband if it was his opinion in general, then, that young people should not read novels.