And so the pleasant facile days went by in idly roving, idly writing, meeting interrogatively his predestinate experience and setting the more presentable answers down. Where answer there was none, he aped the older men, whom he called "Masters," and made shift with more or less cynical guesses. It was these last that brought him his little meed of precocious success. He had not originality enough to see that the cynicism was not his own. He was not, and seemingly was not to be, of the stature that can wear simple sincerity in the grand manner. That writer, young or old, must have something of true greatness in him who can hold out long in these days against the flattering temptation of hinting that he is laughing in his sleeve at all solemn persons. And yet no doubt seriousness was the dominant note in the young American's character, a seriousness that still looked askance at itself, and smiled oftener at its own gravity than at any other wrinkle in the tragi-comic mask of humanity. He had seen something of what people in London and Paris called "society," had been very well amused, but not enamoured of it. When men who made letters a profession--perhaps one should say trade--admonished him: "Never refuse a swagger invitation. Your opportunities, considering you're a foreigner, are simply unheard of. Go everywhere, see everything. You must know life before you can write about it," Ethan would say, half impatiently: "As if you could escape from life! As if art kept her treasures in the jewel-cases of the aristocracy, and never displayed them except at social functions!" Even in indulgent Paris he was a good deal chaffed about his success with the fair. It is a thing other men reconcile themselves to with difficulty. Some one said once to Ethan's old school friend, De Poincy: "No one but a woman has any business to be as good-looking as that fellow Gano. I couldn't trust a man with a face like that." "Oh, you may trust him right enough," De Poincy answered. "And as to his face--look at that jaw of his." "Anything the matter with his jaw?" "There's 'man' enough in that to relieve your mind. Oh, he's a stubborn brute, Gano is; but you can trust him." And people did trust him. But not only did he tire presently of the gay and flaunting aspect of social life, his fastidiousness by-and-by turned aside as well from those less presentable experiences that dog the rich and idle youth of capitals.