of sacred things. Intellectual prejudices, or even downright dumbness, would not blackball you, but a moral prejudice or any sign of aesthetic insensibility classed you as a bore. Even if you brought a refreshingly quick wit and a sharp tongue you were under suspicion until it was shown beyond doubt that your senses came in for a commensurate amount of exercise. In other words, to find favor in the eyes of these rare spirits, you must have lived up to the hilt, which meant that you must have given a free rein to a number of urges that Grover Thanet, for one, had held piously in check. Consequently, an hour or two before fulfilling an engagement with the man who had sponsored him in this society, he had an acute problem to face.
If he were to go on satisfying his curiosity about them he must either "live" a bit, or prove clever enough to conceal the purely intellectual quality of his cleverness. Imagination, in the latter case, would have to fill in the lacunae. So far, imagination had served him well, indeed rather too well, but whether under an extreme test it would furnish enough material to serve as foundation for an attitude toward life that the true bohemians attained only as the result of picking life up in handfuls and tactually examining it, he couldn't predict.
He had seen that to know them one must be, in some sense, of them; and to be of them implied commitments in theory, if not in deed, that would, if not
