"Don't you like it?" Ellis inquired.
"I think I might like it if I were drunk."
"Ah, but a poet, you see, is always drunk!"
'Well, I unfortunately, am often sober; and then I find the sponger and the venerealee anything but agreeable objects."
"Besides," said Audubon, "though it's very good of Walt Whitman to invite us all, the mere fact of dining with him, however miscellaneous the company, doesn't alter the character of the dinner."
"No," cried Leslie, "and that's just the point Ellis has missed all through. Even if it be true that the world appears to him as a work of art, it doesn't appear so to the personages of the drama. What's play to him is grim earnest to them; and, what's more, he himself is an actor not a mere spectator, and may have that fact brought home to him, any moment, in his flesh and blood."
"Of course!" replied Ellis, "and I wouldn't have it otherwise. The point of the position is that one should play one's part oneself, but play it as an artist with one's eye upon the total effect, never complaining of Evil merely because one happens to suffer, but taking the suffering itself as an element in the æsthetic perfection of the Whole."
"I should like to see you doing that," said Bartlett, rather brutally, "when you were down with a fit of yellow fever."
"Or shut up in a mad-house," said Leslie.
"Or working eight hours a day at business," said Audubon, "with the thermometer 100 degrees in the shade."