To him in his grey loneliness came, as fairy to brooding Cinderella, lighting the sordid gloom of his toil, fitful flashes of the girl’s face in his day-dreams. Betty still held vague possession of his affections. But youth is not content to clutch at thin air. Noll cudgelled his wits at the desk of his lonely room, in vain. The masterpiece would not come. Then the youth decided that he was making a mistake--he was keeping himself too much to himself. He would go deep into the literary world. He was convinced that a literary man can do nothing unless he be in the Literary Swim. A letter from Horace was his confirmation. Horace was fascinated by the student-life of Paris--its free-handed comradeship, its gaiety, its good-fellowship in all things, its frank acceptance of nature, its rebellion against the rigid conventions, its freedom from cant, its glory in the joy of life. He had decided to give up his life of wealth at home for a few years, to be a poor student in Paris for awhile, to put aside the boredoms of the pampered rich, and, like the strenuous man, to live life largely. He thought, on the whole, he would keep his valet on--but Jonkin was to dress like himself, as a student, corduroy trousers, black coat, slouch hat and all. There was to be no tomfoolery in it--he was going to be the poor student right through. And the girls of the Latin quarter, heavens! he kissed his hand to them.... Within a month, Noll was elected to a literary club--one of those places where men turn in to wash their hands on the way to the _Athenæum_. At the first entry into this club, the youth felt that he was come amongst the very wits. But the minor critic Fosse fussed about him, and took the earliest confidential opportunity to whisper to him with wink and nod that it was owing to _his_ interest in him that Noll had been elected over the heads of men who had been waiting for years at the portals in vain. The thrill trickled out of the glamour of his election a little as each of several others confided to Noll that it was owing to _his_ exertions and _his_ following that his election had been so speedily secured--and that everyone else in the gathering was but mediocre and painstaking. His conceit in his honours slowly leaked away. Then Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre, though kind, at once roused uneasiness and soul-searchings in the youth. He pointed out that the man of genius was the type of his time, the outward and visible as much as the inward and spiritual; that in our age the face of genius wore a moustache--Bismarck and Rhodes and Whistler all wore the moustache. Quogge Myre himself wore a moustache.... As the glamour of initiation wore off, the youth was oppressed with the barrenness of the land--the petty jealousies, the tittle-tattle, the spites, the little treacheries.