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some people indecent, by others Gothic—of the really deplorable condition of Paris before hygiene was introduced, and nature had its way up to the knees. And just above what you mustn’t mention, a bird flew carrying a streamer on which was incised, ‘
Garde tout!
’ I asked him why all this barbarity; he answered he loved beauty and would have it about him.”
    “Are you acquainted with Vienna?” Felix inquired.
    “Vienna,” said the doctor, “the bed into which the common people climb, docile with toil, and out of which the nobility fling themselves, ferocious with dignity—I do, but not so well but that I remember some of it still. I remember young Austrian boys going to school, flocks of quail they were, sitting out their recess in different spots in the sun, rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed, with damp rosy mouths, smelling of the herd childhood, facts of history glimmering in their minds like sunlight, soon to be lost, soon to be forgotten, degraded into proof. Youth is cause, effect is age; so with the thickening of the neck we get data.”
    “I was not thinking of its young boys, but of its military superiority, its great names,” Felix said, feeling that the evening was already lost, seeing that as yet the host had not made his appearance and that no one seemed to know it or to care and that the whole affair was to be given over to this volatile person who called himself a doctor.
    “The army, the celibate’s family!” nodded the doctor. “His one safety.”
    The young woman, who was in her late twenties, turned from the group, coming closer to Felix and the doctor. She rested her hands behind her against the table. She seemed embarrassed. “Are you both really saying what you mean, or are you just talking?” Having spoken, her face flushed, she added hurriedly, “I am doing advance publicity for the circus; I’m Nora Flood.”
    The doctor swung around, looking pleased. “Ah!” he said, “Nora suspects the cold incautious melody of time crawling, but,” he added, “I’ve only just started.” Suddenly he struck his thigh with his open hand. “Flood, Nora, why, sweet God, my girl, I helped to bring you into the world!”
    Felix, as disquieted as if he were expected to “do something” to avert a catastrophe (as one is expected to do something about an overturned tumbler, the contents of which is about to drip over the edge of the table and into a lady’s lap), on the phrase “time crawling” broke into uncontrollable laughter, and though this occurrence troubled him the rest of his life he was never able to explain it to himself. The company, instead of being silenced, went on as if nothing had happened, two or three of the younger men were talking about something scandalous, and the Duchess in her loud empty voice was telling a very stout man something about the living statues. This only added to the Baron’s torment. He began waving his hands, saying, “Oh, please! please!” and suddenly he had a notion that he was doing something that wasn’t laughing at all, but something much worse, though he kept saying to himself, “I am laughing, really laughing, nothing else whatsoever!” He kept waving his arms in distress and saying, “Please, please!” staring at the floor, deeply embarrassed to find himself doing so.
    As abruptly he sat straight up, his hands on the arms of the chair, staring fixedly at the doctor who was leaning forward as he drew a chair up exactly facing him. “Yes,” said the doctor, and he was smiling, “you will be disappointed!
In questa tomba oscura
—oh, unfaithful one! I am no herbalist, I am no Rutebeuf, I have no panacea, I am not a mountebank—that is, I cannot or will not stand on my head. I’m no tumbler, neither a friar, nor yet a thirteenth-century Salome dancing arse up on a pair of Toledo blades—try to get any lovesick girl, male or female, to do that today! If you don’t believe such things happened in the long back of yesterday look up the