During the winter Thurley tired of the hysterical hikers, since they increased in number. They did not bother with such persons as Lissa or Mark or Polly. And Hobart, who was acknowledged to be the personification of public opinion, was immune from the pest. By degrees Thurley realized why Lissa was not bothered—because Lissa herself was a hysterical hiker developed to the stage of a near-genius; such transformations are too often wrought these days. Like recognizing like, she was severely let alone. As for Mark—when Thurley thought of him she found herself sitting down in a nearby chair, deaf to the world about her. There was no denying that if Lissa’s theories regarding artists’ privileges were true and her theories of life ethical, her exponent of them, Mark, was a sorry example. Mark was rapidly becoming a selfish neurasthenic; his better self died hard, it is true, but dying it was. Although the actress part of Thurley delighted in the unwise excitement of a flirtation with some one else’s property, the real Thurley looked askance at the changes being swiftly wrought in the boy, his over-emphasis on petty detail concerning his comfort, his ill humor at minor happenings which were not as he had wished, his sluggishness regarding work—the critics began to hint he was too bulky of figure. More and more did he bask in Lissa’s salon, drink and eat unwisely, taking her raggings about the “so-great-nobody” with humorous unconcern, quite positive of his own power to fascinate and offset Lissa’s tempers. Foppish dress, lack of humdrum duties, home ties—there had been an aunt, Thurley learned, who had raised him and of whom he was now ashamed. She lived meekly retired in the little white house in Connecticut and Mark sent her money, the easiest thing in the world to send, and her name was never mentioned. His press agent had a most fetching story about his mother’s being a Turkish girl who escaped from a harem and his father a Grecian nobleman and Mark’s having been educated in Moscow and Berlin, whereas, in the real heart of the man, there was the spirit which could be reverent and proud of his aunt’s toil-worn hands with prominent purplish veins and knotted fingers, of the simple white house and the everyday living which had given him the constitution to endure the not-everyday living he now embraced.