Fair Margaret: A Portrait

by F. Marion Crawford

'If you expect to have such neighbours as those—"in the biblical sense"——'

'I have one,' said Logotheti, 'and that's enough.'

Margaret had received many compliments of a more or less complicated nature, but she did not remember that any one had yet compared her to two Venuses, the Psyche and the Samothrace Nikê in a single breath.

'That's nonsense!' she exclaimed, blushing a little, and not at all indignant.

'No,' Logotheti answered, imperturbably. 'Besides, neither the Victory nor the Venus of Syracuse has a head, so I am at liberty to suppose yours on their shoulders. Take the Victory. You move exactly as she seems to be moving, for she is not flying at all, you know, though she has wings. The wings are only a symbol. The Greeks knew perfectly well that a winged human being could not fly straight without a feathered tail two or three yards long!'

'How absurd!'

'That you should move like the Victory? Not at all. The reason why I love my neighbour as myself is that my neighbour is the most absolutely satisfactory being, from an artistic point of view. I don't often make compliments.'

'They are astonishing when you do!'

'Perhaps. But I was going on to say that what satisfies my love of the beautiful, can only be what satisfies my love of life itself, which is enormous.'

'In other words,' said Margaret, wondering how he would go on, 'I am your ideal!'