“I’m not without hope of being able to make it decent enough,” he said as I went back to the subject while we turned up our heels to the sky. “At least the people who dislike my stuff—and there are plenty of them, I believe—will dislike this thing (if it does turn out well) most.” This was the first time I had heard him allude to the people who couldn’t read him—a class so generally conceived to sit heavy on the consciousness of the man of letters. A being organised for literature as Mark Ambient was must certainly have had the normal proportion of sensitiveness, of irritability; the artistic _ego_, capable in some cases of such monstrous development, must have been in his composition sufficiently erect and active. I won’t therefore go so far as to say that he never thought of his detractors or that he had any illusions with regard to the number of his admirers—he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he was popular, but I at least then judged (and had occasion to be sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have thought them over—the newspapers—night and day; the only point I make is that he didn’t show it while at the same time he didn’t strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may add that, touching his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs incontestably to “Beltraffio,” in spite of the beauty of certain parts of its successor. I quite believe, however, that he had at the moment of which I speak no sense of having declined; he was in love with his idea, which was indeed magnificent, and though for him, as I suppose for every sane artist, the act of execution had in it as much torment as joy, he saw his result grow like the crescent of the young moon and promise to fill the disk. “I want to be truer than I’ve ever been,” he said, settling himself on his back with his hands clasped behind his head; “I want to give the impression of life itself. No, you may say what you will, I’ve always arranged things too much, always smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked them in—done everything to them that life doesn’t do. I’ve been a slave to the old superstitions.” “You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You’ve the freest imagination of our day!”