There was scarce a line uttered this night, whether of recited poem or song or criticism, which was not perfect in the expression, exquisite and subtle in the phrasing. There was that air of tactful restraint and of rightness of statement which in manners are called good breeding. And if the emotions uttered were somewhat thin or exaggeratedly sad or tinged overmuch and disproportionately with the grey half-tones of the pathos of life, if vigour and the strenuous music of the bright days and the gaiety of life were almost wholly absent, there was at any rate a feeling for beauty and a sobbing appeal to the pity of the world for such as are overwhelmed by the destiny of tragedy that held something of nobility. These men and women were content, if a neglectful world so ordered it, to live here in obscurity and poverty, their sole incentive to life the worship of beauty. Upon the workaday world they turned careless shoulders--and for them the workaday world, in grim retort, had no uses, no honours. The worst sin to them was to be Philistine. Here they met together at a time when drowsy citizens were getting into their unthinking beds--here they were happy in the companionship of their fellows throughout the long night, exchanging their ideas of the beautiful, their polished gentle wit, their praises--here, shrugging contemptuous shoulders at the conventions of the world, men and women lived and loved as they listed. If the world should one day awaken to the works of their genius, so much the better for the world--if it should clamour for their poesy, their song, their works of art, well and good. They would be glad that the world had taste enough to give them fame. But the world must come to them.... It would make life easier--their clothes would be less shabby--hunger less biting, less insistent. But what had the world to give them better than the love of beauty or more pleasant than the comradeship of them that knew beauty when they saw it? The generations perhaps would greedily seek the work of their brains; fame would come if it came. So said they, gentle-mannered, shabbily attired, simple-hearted, warming their starved blood with brandy and bocks of beer and accursed brain-stealing absinthe, living on each other’s kindliness and praise and genial comradeship, living in dreams, walking on air, wayfarers in cloudland, scorning all meannesses, garnering with difficulty the poorest sustenance for daily bread, cheerful though the frost bit and the hunger thinned their already lean ribs, and penurious want made their blankets few--proud in their dignity, pitiful to every suffering thing.