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20 thousand good-for-nothings and the commonplace. Alexis, however, was not a genius.

This is not the place for a critical article, but if you will read the more well-known productions of the deceased you cannot but agree with me that they are unnecessary to life. They are necessary to a lot of satiated people in want of diversion, but not to life, nor to us, engaged upon solving life's problems. At a time when the author, employing the power of his thought and genius, should have created new life, Saveloff clung in his books to the old, not making an effort to solve life's hidden significance. His solitary story which appealed to me, encroaching as it did upon the domain of the unexplored, was a story called "A Secret"—that was the sole exception. Worse still, Alexis was beginning to show evidence of having "written himself out," his happy existence having deprived him of his last teeth, which are so essential to the "biting into" life and to the gnawing of it. He frequently spoke