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has indulged every passion with discrimination; he burns always with the required gem-like flame, and he has philosophically sampled its every scorching. There is no emotion which has not been tested and described handsomely by Smirt.”
        “Indeed I have it upon the very best authority,” said Senora Etcetera, “that forgery, arson, rape, barratry, plagiarism, driving while under the influence of intoxicants, manslaughter, piracy on the high seas, false income tax returns, and offences against the person, against property (either with or without violence) and offences against the currency also—I have heard, I repeat, that such matters are the daily diversion of Smirt.”
        “That is as it should be,” stated Lady Ampersand, “for these naughty doings enrich the mind, and they broaden the point of view of a writer, besides adding to the interest of his biography.”
        “The biography of Smirt, my friends,” said Anon, “will never be printed in anything like a complete state. The fact is well known that he has his dinner jackets tailored with two outside pockets so as to keep contraceptives always handy; and his own relatives admit he has done everything which makes a person sophisticated. These matters are familiar to all Richmond-in-Virginia.”
        “You need add no more,” remarked Ibid, “for, as a writer who am myself pretty widely quoted, I know that such enormities cannot be mentioned in any biography intended for school and college use. Yet genius creates its own laws.”
        “You may well say that,” the world and his wife agreed comfortably. “There is really nothing like genius.”
        “I think his books are perfectly wonderful,” declared Mrs. Murgatroyd; “and whenever I see Smirt I simply cannot imagine what it was I saw in Murgatroyd.”

V. RATIONALITY INTERVENES
     
        Now the provoker of all this adulation was not listening any longer to the public at large. Instead he was wondering why these persons, who in every other respect spoke with tact, courtesy, intelligence, and discrimination, should all be emulating that uncivil black dog by calling him Smirt, when the fact stayed almost certain his name was not Smirt. It seemed an odd thing, too, that for the moment he could not recall his real name; but he had not any doubt this name would come back to him by-and-by.
        “Meanwhile let us respect public opinion,” he exhorted himself. “These persons can see in me but Smirt, a supreme genius who is in every way superb and enviable. With what inadequacy do they comprehend me! The truth as to this being whom they erroneously call Smirt is far more great and more profound and more strange, I now perceive. It is undeniable that this truth eludes me for the present. I perceive its existence, but I do not grasp its connection with anything else. Yet this truth relates, I know, to an eternal questing which is not yet finished. Since I cannot well be the Wandering Jew, who was circumcised, it would seem to follow in plain logic that Ahasuerus may have his complement in the Errant Christian. To put the matter even more precisely, I am no doubt the Peripatetic Episcopalian.”
        For an urbane person, he reflected, must naturally be an Episcopalian, taking his beliefs not too seriously, as luxuries rather than as necessities. Between piety and atheism, then, the Peripatetic Episcopalian would go his discreet way, admiring the fervors of both now and again, but admiring them, as one does the flowers in a public park, without touching either. To believe, absolutely and indissuadably, as did such quaint persons as Methodists and Free-thinkers, that you yourself knew the truth as to religion, or as to anything else, must always be for the Peripatetic Episcopalian an unattainable naïveté. At odd times you might almost desire such naïveté.
        Meanwhile the Peripatetic Episcopalian had his unrivalled Book of Common Prayer, he had his one