The Bacillus of Beauty A Romance of To-day. I am going to set down as calmly and fully as I can a plain statement of all that has happened since I came to New York. I shall not trim details, nor soften the facts to humour my own amazement, nor try to explain the marvel that I do not pretend to understand. I begin at the beginning--at the plunge into fairy tale and miracle that I made, after living twenty-five years of baldest prose, when I met Helen Winship here. Why, I had dragged her to school on a sled when she was a child. I watched her grow up. For years I saw her nearly every day at the State University in the West that already seems so unreal, so far away, I loved her.