Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/91

, a promise of further progress towards perfection. It tells of one who "had entered that dark defile of our earthly descent in which some one dies every day "—one, the keynote of whose nature was constancy—one who could forgive all except betrayal. So, in the recesses of his heart, he reared an altar to the memory of "the Others," as he called the dead. For a time this sufficed, but one day he chanced to enter "a temple of the old persuasion," and the idea struck him of dedicating a material altar to those with whose memory he would some day link his own. So it came to be a great joy to him to see the faithful participating in his devotion for the Others, although none but he knew what souls they were in memory of whose mortal life the tapers burned, the flowers bloomed. Soon his altar boasted a devotee even more constant than himself—a woman came to kneel there whose devotion to the others was more absorbing than his. The altar grew more and more radiant as the founder's friends grew fewer; the woman still came to kneel there, and one day the founder learned that her thoughts were all of One, and that One the only friend of his who, proving false, had never been commemorated by flower or taper.

Again and again does Mr. James recur to the fatal effect of importunate society upon talent, an effect not always the less fatal when the claims of society are tempered by those of domesticity. Neil Faraday, "the Lion," is hustled to his grave by interviewers and ladies eager for prey as any Tartarin; Henry St. George, "the Master," squanders his talent by writing for money with which to meet his wife's housekeeping expenses and his boys' school-bills; Mark Ambient, "the author of ' traffio,