it up toward the light and gazed upon it desperately and raptly.
"I am never without this!" he said. "It is my means of escape. I will not be taken unawares! I carry it always. At night it is beneath my pillow. The day it happens—the moment I feel myself in the grip of Popularity——"
I caught his hand; in his excitement he was raising the poison to his lips.
"What I cannot understand, Fothergil," I said, "is why a Poet of the Virile, a Reincarnation of the Cave Man—excuse me, but that is what you are being this year, is it not?—should give way to Fear. Is it not more in character to meet this Beast and slay It ? Is there not a certain contradiction between your profession and your practice?"
"More than a contradiction," he said eagerly. "It is more than contradictory! It is paradoxical!"
I eliminate much that followed. When Fothergil gets started on the paradox, time passes. He is never really interested in things until he has discovered the paradoxical quality in them. Some times I think that his enthusiasm over himself is due to the fact that he discovered early in life that he himself was a paradox—and sometimes I think that discovery is the explanation of his enthusiasm for the paradox.
"What," said Fothergil, "is the most paradoxical
[41]
