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His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalisth--after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into tutoring English youths in Switzerland Before that, however, he had lived renier, been advised by Maupassant not to atte honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother's house He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious (having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed His situation, in fact, see, no more brilliant than Ned Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally As it was precisely of that love that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager i man who had fared so richly in his poverty

"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned journalis and private secretaryship There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one preserves one's moral freedom, e call in French one's quant a soi And when one hears good talk one can join in it without co any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the same self-abdication" He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette "Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, after all, one arret; and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is alination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest Soe Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America--in New York?"

Archer looked at hi man who had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living! He continued to stare at M Riviere perplexedly, wondering how to tell hies would be the surest hindrance to success