"Ah!" sighs Lady Etwynde. "And you have forgotten all he says about artistic excellence and beauty; the relations of all physical and moral and intellectual life to what is most perfect and intelligent; how life should be filled with grace and dignity, the mind cultured to its utmost capability, the body beautified by vital activity and ennobled by a healthy and carefully taught appreciation of all that is conducive to physical and mental perfection."
"Has it taken you thirteen years to learn all this?" asks Colonel Carlisle softly, as he leans forward and looks into her eyes in the silver haze of the lamplight.
She starts a little.
"You think I am so—changed?" she says, in her natural voice, and discarding æsthetic languor.
"I think you are ten thousand times more beautiful, more captivating, than when I knew you first. But—changed? Well, yes. Is your life devoted only to the study of the Beautiful now?"
She colours softly.
"I think you do not quite understand," she says. "When a woman's life is empty, something she must do to fill up the void. And I do not think this pursuit is so very foolish as you seem to suppose."
"Only that John Bull has not much of the Hellenic type about him," says the Colonel, sotto voce.
"You see," she goes on, with sweet gravity, "moral beauty and physical beauty have each their worshippers. We would weld the two together, and so glorify art, literature, mind, physique—all that is about and around our daily lives. But, as I said before, like all new creeds, it is spoiled by the over-zealous, exaggerated by the foolish, ridiculed by the surface judges. It is not the cultivation of one thing only, but the cultivation of all that real æsthetics would teach; leading, subduing, elevating the spiritual and poetic capacity of our nature, and subordinating the crude and material."
"That sounds more sensible," says Colonel Carlisle. "But when I heard in your rooms of symphonies of colour, and 'tones' of harmony, and worship of some special make of china, and 'living up' to peacocks' fans and feathers, I confess I thought the people were all lunatics, to say the least of it, and marvelled how you could have shared in such a lamentable creed and become a priestess of 'High Art,' as interpreted by terra-cotta gowns, sage-green furniture, and old china which seems to convert modern drawing-rooms into a memory of kitchen dressers. Life may be full of emotions and 'thrills,' as I heard a long-haired youth explaining in a dying voice, but such life as this seemed to me, I must confess, a series of absurdities such as no sensible mind could entertain."