"_C'est juste!_ I mustn't meddle--which will be all the easier as I'm dining out and must go and dress. You two make yourselves at home and fight it out here." "Do you _leave_ me?" asked Vendemer, still with his strange look. "My dear fellow, I've only just time." "We will dine together--he and I--at one of those characteristic places, and we will look at the matter in its different relations," said Heidenmauer. "Then we will come back here to finish--your studio is so good for music." "There are some things it _isn't_ good for," Vendemer remarked, looking at our companion. "It's good for poetry--it's good for truth," smiled the composer. "You'll stay _here_ and dine together," I said; "my servant can manage that." "No, no--we'll go out and we'll walk together. We'll talk a great deal," Heidenmauer went on. "The subject is so comprehensive," he said to Vendemer, as he lighted another cigar. "The subject?" "Of your drama. It's so universal." "Ah, the universe--_il n'y a que ça!_" I laughed, to Vendemer, partly with a really amused sense of the exaggerated woe that looked out of his poetic eyes and that seemed an appeal to me not to forsake him, to throw myself into the scale of the associations he would have to stifle, and partly to encourage him, to express my conviction that two such fine minds couldn't in the long run be the worse for coming to an agreement. I might have been a more mocking Mephistopheles handing over his pure spirit to my literally German Faust. When I came home at eleven o'clock I found him alone in my studio, where, evidently, for some time, he had been moving up and down in agitated thought. The air was thick with Bavarian fumes, with the reverberation of mighty music and great ideas, with the echoes of that "universe" to which I had so mercilessly consigned him. But I judged in a moment that Vendemer was in a very different phase of his evolution from the one in which I had left him. I had never seen his handsome, sensitive face so intensely illumined. "_Ça y est--ça y est!_" he exclaimed, standing there with his hands in his pockets and looking at me. "You've really agreed to do something together?" "We've sworn a tremendous oath--we've taken a sacred engagement." "My dear fellow, you're a hero." "Wait and see! _C'est un très-grand esprit._" "So much the better!" "_C'est un bien beau génie._ Ah, we've risen--we soar; _nous sommes dans les grandes espaces!_" my friend continued with his dilated eyes. "It's very interesting--because it will cost you something." "It will cost me everything!" said Félix Vendemer in a tone I seem to hear at this hour. "That's just the beauty of it. It's the chance of chances to testify for art--to affirm an indispensable truth." "An indispensable truth?" I repeated, feeling myself soar too, but into the splendid vague. "Do you know the greatest crime that can be perpetrated against it?" "Against it?" I asked, still soaring.