'Don't you want to sit down?' Vida called out to the girl, drawing aside her gown.

'What?' said Hermione, though she had heard quite well. Slowly she retraced her steps down the grass path as if to have the words repeated.

But if Miss Levering's idea had been to change the conversation, she was disappointed. There was nothing Paul Filey liked better than an audience, and he had already the impression that Miss Heriot was what he would have scorned to call anything but 'simpatica.'

'I'm sure you've shown the new garden to dozens already,' Miss Levering said to the niece of the house. 'Sit down and confess you've had enough of it!'

'Oh, I don't think,' began Hermione, suavely, 'that one ever gets too much of a thing like that!'

'There! I'm glad to hear you say so. How can we have too much beauty!' exclaimed Filey, receiving the new occupant of the seat as a soul worthy of high fellowship. Then he leaned across Miss Heriot and said to the lady in the corner, 'I'm making that the theme of my book.'

'Oh, I heard you were writing something.'

'Yes, a sort of plea for the æsthetic basis of society! It's the only cure for the horrors of modern civilization—for the very thing we were talking about at tea! What is it but a loss of the sense of beauty that's to blame?' Elbows on knees, he leaned so far forward that he could see both faces, and yet his own betrayed the eye turned inward—the face of the one who quotes. The ladies knew that he was obliging them with a memorized extract from 'A Plea for the Æsthetic Basis.' 'Nothing worse can happen to the world than loss of its sense of Beauty. Men, high and low alike, cling to it still as incarnated in women.' (Hermione crossed her pointed toes and lowered her long eyelashes.) 'We have made Woman the object of our deepest adoration! We have set her high on a throne of gold. We have searched through the world for jewels to crown her. We have built millions of temples to our ideal of womanhood and called them homes. We have fought and wrought and sung for her—and all we ask in return is that she should tend the sacred fire, so that the light of Beauty might not die out of the world.' He was not ill-pleased with his period. 'But women'—he leaned back, and illustrated with the pliant white hands that were ornamented with outlandish rings—'women are not content with their high and holy office.'

'Some women,' amended Hermione, softly.

'There are more and more every day who are not content,' he said sternly; then, for an instant unbending and craning a little forward, 'Of course I don't mean you—you are exceptions—but of women in the mass! Look at them! They force their way into men's work, they crowd into the universities—yes, yes' (in vain Hermione tried to reassure him by 'exceptions')—'Beauty is nothing to them! They fling aside their delicate, provocative draperies, they cast off their scented sandals. They pull on brown boots and bicycling skirts! They put man's yoke of hard linen round their ivory throats, and they scramble off their jewelled thrones to mount the rostrum and the omnibus!'