My only defence lay in the magnitude of my sin. I had sinned thoroughly, out-and-out, and with a will. It had been the only respectable way--Andriaovsky's own way when he had cut the company of an Academician to hobnob with a vagabond. I had at least instituted no comparison, lowered no ideal, was innocent of the accursed attitude of facing-both-ways that degrades all lovely and moving things. I was, by a paradox, too black a sinner not to hope for redemption.... I fell into a long musing on these things.... Had any of the admirers of _Martin Renard_ entered the library of his author that night he would have seen an interesting thing. He would have seen the creator of that idol of clerks and messenger-lads and fourth-form boys frankly putting the case before a portrait propped up on a chair. He would have heard that popular author haranguing, pleading, curiously on his defence, turning the thing this way and that. "If _you'd_ gone over, Michael," that author argued, "you'd have done precisely the same thing. If I'd stuck it out, we were, after all, of a kind; We've got to be one thing or the other--isn't that so, Andriaovsky? Since I made up my mind, I've faced only one way--only one way. I've kept your ideal and theirs entirely separate and distinct. Not one single beautiful phrase will you find in the _Martin Renards;_ I've cut 'em out, every one. I may have ceased to worship, but I've profaned no temple.... And think what I _might_ have done--what they all do! They deal out the slush, but with an apologetic glance at the Art Shades; _you_ know the style!--'Oh, Harrison; he does that detective rubbish, but that's not Harrison; if Harrison liked to drop that he could be a fine artist!'--I _haven't_ done that. I _haven't_ run with the hare and hunted with the hounds. I _am_ just Harrison, who does that detective rubbish!... These other chaps, Schofield and Connolly, _they're_ the real sinners, Michael--the fellows who can't make up their minds to be one thing or the other ('artists of considerable abilities'--ha! ha!).... Of course you know Maschka's going to marry that chap? What'll _they_ do, do you think? He'll scrape up a few pounds out of the stew where I find thousands, marry her, and they'll set up a salon and talk the stuff the chairs talked that night, you remember!... But you wait until I finish your 'Life.'..." I laid it all before him, almost as if I sought to propitiate him. I might have been courting his patronage for his own "Life." Then, with a start, I came to, to find myself talking nonsense to the portrait that years before Andriaovsky had refused to sell me. IV