gaily, 'Oh, dear madam, what an imagination you have, what an intellectual sweep! I am a poor devil of a man of letters who lives from day to day. How can I take palaces by the year? My existence is precarious. I don't know whether six months hence I shall have bread to put in my mouth. I have treated myself for once; it has been an immense luxury. But when it comes to going on———!'
'Are your rooms too dear? if they are you can have more for the same money,' Juliana responded. 'We can arrange, we can combinare, as they say here.'
'Well yes, since you ask me, they are too dear,' I said. 'Evidently you suppose me richer than I am.'
She looked at me in her barricaded way. 'If you write books don't you sell them?'
'Do you mean don't people buy them? A little—not so much as I could wish. Writing books, unless one be a great genius—and even then!—is the last road to fortune. I think there is no more money to be made by literature.'
'Perhaps you don't choose good subjects. What do you write about?' Miss Bordereau inquired.
'About the books of other people. I'm a critic, an historian, in a small way.' I wondered what she was coming to.
'And what other people, now?'
'Oh, better ones than myself: the great writers mainly—the great philosophers and poets of the past; those who are dead and gone and can't speak for themselves.'
'And what do you say about them?'
'I say they sometimes attached themselves to very clever women!' I answered, laughing. I spoke
