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 count on culling from Frau Stiglmayr's lips secrets that had gone up in smoke through Aunt Verona's kitchen chimney, Paul passionately regretted the necessity of disabusing his mind of the small boy's gracious fallacies. If it were merely a question of setting the small boy to rights regarding specific facts, the matter would have been simple and painless. But the correction threatened the very structure of life, its melodic line, its rhythms, and the supporting harmonies. It implied that the boy, thanks to false romantic premises, had been directing his life towards untenable conclusions. Yet, despite his nineteen-year-old conviction that reality was one thing and romance an illegitimate other, he could not quite bring himself to admit that the boy had been wrong, that his engrossed pursuit of will-o'-the-wisps had been the misapplication of energy Reason now made it out to be. After all, Romance had made life appear to be worth exerting oneself for. But for the lens, would it not have seemed prosaic and uninviting? Perhaps not. Perhaps if one had envisaged life as prose instead of poetry, a truer sense of values would have been developed in accordance with which life would have held forth more substantial lures. As it was, he reflected with the morbidness of youth, lifelong addiction to romance had undermined his constitution; and his craving for chimères was none the less strong for his knowledge of their debilitating effect.

Among the frequenters of cafés and concert-halls he tried to pick out people who might, thirty years ago or more, have sat tense and eager at the feet of Aunt Verona. In carriages and motor-cars he scanned faces for some sign of the aristocracy that had petted her. But all he found was a collection of folk who resembled their kind the world over. To think of Aunt Verona in their midst—whether the weird, broken Aunt Verona or the admirable artiste of the old musician's inscription