I admire enormously the little delicate strokes with which he produces just enough of the sanatorium life and atmosphere to suggest how and where it impinged upon his consciousness, modifying it steadily, insensibly, in the direction of the creed held, perhaps, by most experienced inmates of such institutions—a creed which might be described as a mild and cautious form of Epicureanism, with intervals of great philosophic quietude following the excessive "spitting of rubies."
These young people draw the covers over their heads when the rumor runs that a clergyman or a pious "good woman" is coming through the corridors. And yet nothing interests them, among themselves, like exchanging free views, in absolutely free language, upon religion and metaphysics and the wider implications of science.
Nothing interests them like religion, unless it be love—playing at love, delicately, with girls of an ivory pallor, not averse to a caress in their "zero hour," or when they are lying in mortal stillness after a return from an "engagement" in the front line trenches. After one has chatted for a little with a Hungarian pessimist who gives one an aphorism on the necessity of working in order to forget one's destiny, one taps at the door of Daphne, and sits with her for a while: "I could not endure that you should be wicked with any one but me."
No, nothing interests them like love, unless it be bawdry. Their first inquiry of a newcomer is: "Have you any naughty books?" For these and their scribbled verses and their epigrams and their picturesque imprecations on the food and service of the sanatorium—imprecations to the excogitation, elaboration and artistic polishing of which they devote a morning's
