man who is essentially one thing should be devoting himself, however successfully, to something else.
My curiosity, however, was aroused, for I had sat once within eyeshot of Don Marquis for an hour or so; and having in surreptitious sidelong glances studied his bulk—I like to see letters represented by men and women whom the wind won't blow away—the silvery grizzle of his solid head, his tawny temperamental skin, and a certain gravity of the ensemble—a gravity illumined by occasional lambencies of smoldering eyes—I had wondered then what else he was besides the creator of the aspiring Hermione, the Red-Haired Lady and such Falstaffian poetry as the Old Soak. Something else, I was sure; for he was a visible reminder of George Meredith's discovery that all the great wits have been grave men. Several feet away one could feel that there was some one there. If I had possessed the sang-froid of the representative of the press who interviewed the sanguinary Cleopatra, in "Famous Love Affairs," idly flicking a slave, from time to time, from her roof garden to the crocodiles below as she chatted with the journalist, I might then and there have boldly accosted the daimonic mask and have plucked at the heart of his mystery, saying, "What are you, essentially?"
That sort of pike and cutlass boarding of a personality might have been attempted by Mme de Stael or by the late Amy Lowell; and, of course, if they had attempted it they would have got away with it. But I was deterred by two considerations. In the first place, the natural savage intrepidity of my character has been mollified by contact with belles-lettres: I have read "Hermione," and know what arrows its author has in his quiver for persons who go about
