the facts. I have lost the faculty of dreaming. I can cheat myself no more; that is all. We have trained ourselves, at least we are told so, to look upon even moderate drunkenness as a vice, but at heart we have a humorous toleration for the peccant convivialist, and it is only for the secret drinker that every one reserves his genuinely righteous wrath. Well, I am a secret drinker, or, at most, I have one companion of my sombre orgy. When I drink in company, I despise them all, and they instinctively feel repulsion to me. I never remember when it was not so. My impulses of love and admiration therefore have gone out to those who I felt were of my species. The brigand, the ruffian, alone appeals to me personally. I prefer Benvenuto Cellini to Francis of Assisi, and Dick Turpin to John Howard the philanthropist. If I had been a modern French writer, I would sooner have written Le Rouge et le Noir than all the novels of Balzac and Zola, so completely do I feel my youth expressed in Julien Sorel. Possibly I should like to be different. But it is the sheerest folly to speculate. Life justifies the individualist—the poor devil you have been jumping upon as "the man of talent"—quite as much as the socialist. I venture to believe that a large proportion of humanity is made up of secret drinkers, in some shape or other, and that proportion would reach to the half, I dare say, of the
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