moon and promise to fill the disk. "I want to be truer than I've
ever been," he said, settling himself on his back with his hands
clasped behind his head; "I want to give the impression of life
itself. No, you may say what you will, I've always arranged things
too much, always smoothed them down and rounded them off and tucked
them in--done everything to them that life doesn't do. I've been a
slave to the old superstitions."

"You a slave, my dear Mark Ambient? You've the freest imagination of
our day!"

"All the more shame to me to have done some of the things I have!
The reconciliation of the two women in 'Natalina,' for instance,
which could never really have taken place. That sort of thing's
ignoble--I blush when I think of it! This new affair must be a
golden vessel, filled with the purest distillation of the actual; and
oh how it worries me, the shaping of the vase, the hammering of the
metal! I have to hammer it so fine, so smooth; I don't do more than
an inch or two a day. And all the while I have to be so careful not
to let a drop of the liquor escape! When I see the kind of things
Life herself, the brazen hussy, does, I despair of ever catching her
peculiar trick. She has an impudence, Life! If one risked a
fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to
believe it. You don't know yet, my dear youth. It isn't till one
has been watching her some forty years that one finds out half of
what she's up to! Therefore one's earlier things must inevitably
contain a mass of rot. And with what one sees, on one side, with its
tongue in its cheek, defying one to be real enough, and on the other
the bonnes gens rolling up their eyes at one's cynicism, the
situation has elements of the ludicrous which the poor reproducer