would rather talk than do anything else, and had a lot of what seemed to be accurate information and original ideas on any subject that happened to come up, so long as it was out of the ordinary.
"Mr. Fitzstephan says to come right up, sir," the boy said.
His apartment was on the sixth floor. He was standing at its door when I got out of the elevator.
"By God!" he said, holding out a lean hand, "it is you."
"None other."
We went into a room where half a dozen bookcases and four tables left little room for anything else. Magazines and books in various languages, papers, clippings, proof sheets, were scattered everywhere—all exactly as it had been in his New York rooms.
We sat down, found places for our feet between table-legs, and accounted, more or less roughly, for our lives since we had last seen one another. He had been in San Francisco a little less than a year. He liked the city, he said, but he wouldn't oppose any movement to give the West back to the Indians.
"How's the literary grift go?" I asked.
He looked at me sharply, demanded:
"You haven't been reading me?"
"No. Where'd you get that idea?'
"There was something in your tone, something proprietary, as in the voice of one who had bought an author for two dollars and a half. I haven't met it often enough to be used to it. Good God! Remember once I offered to give you a set of my books?"
"You were drunk," I said.
"On sherry—Elsa Donne's sherry. Remember Elsa? She showed us a picture she had just finished and you said it was pretty. Whoops, wasn't she furious! You said it so vapidly, and sincerely? Remember? She put us out, But I had already got tight on her sherry, and so had you. But you weren't plastered enough to accept the books."
"I was afraid I'd read them and understand them," I explained, "and then you'd have felt insulted,"
A Chinese boy brought us cold white wine. Fitzstephan said;
"It's queer we should have been in the same city for a year without running into one another. How did you finally come across me?'"
"Watt Halstead gave me your address, after he'd told me you knew Edgar Leggett."
A gleam pushed through the sleepiness in the novelist's gray eyes.
"Leggett's been up to something?" he drawled, sitting a little higher in his chair.
"Why do you say that?"
"I didn't say it." He sank back lazily in his chair, but the gleam was still in his eyes. "I asked it. Come—out with it. I'm a novelist. My business is with souls and what goes on in them. What's Leggett been up to?"
"We don't do it that way. We trade information. How long have you known him?"
"Nearly a year. I met him soon after I came here, I think at Marquard's—the sculptor, not the restaurant. He interested me. There's something obscure in him, something dark and inviting. Physically ascetic—neither smoking nor drinking—eating meagerly, a vegetarian, sleeping only four hours a night, I'm told. Mentally sensual—does that mean anything?—to the point of decadence. You think I like the fantastic—you should know him. His friends—he hasn't any. His choice in companions are those who have the most outlandish ideas to offer—the wildest, most maniac, brutal, degenerate, abnormal. Marquard, with his insane figures that are not figures but boundaries of the portions of space which are the real figures; Denbar Curt, with his algebraism; crazy Laura Joines; Farnham—"
"And you," I put in, "with your explanations and descriptions that explain and describe nothing, I hope you don't suppose that what you've said so far means anything to me."
