o that self-abandonment which
follows materialism and moral skepticism, an announcement that
happiness lay in a religion of the senses, in becoming, indeed,
"divinely animal."

As she laid down the book, there returned to her the words that a young
Roman had poured into her ears one night on Lake Como:

"The splendors of this world and our acceptance of them. Not to
question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours that a thousand
generations have made so complex."

Of a sudden New York rose before her, bathed in the glitter from its
lights, ringing with music and laughter. She saw the multitudes of
pleasure seekers streaming hither and thither, immersing themselves in
startling hues and sounds, in abnormal spectacles and freshly
discovered impulses, which the priests of this new-old cult provided
for them benignly in ever more exacerbating forms and combinations.
There, possibly, amid those emotions gradually approaching a Dionysiac
frenzy, was the logical Mecca of her long pilgrimage, the end of all
this hunger for sensuous reactions--for the pleasures that came from
strange fragrances and harmonies, from contacts with precious fabrics
and the patina of perfect porcelains, from the perception of matchless
color in painted canvas and gems, or from the grace that was fluent in
the moving bodies of human beings and beasts?

She rose, turning away from those books, and from the room full of
objects whose textures were finer and more lasting than flesh.
Crossing the hall, she entered the fernery, where palms rose against
the stone arches of the windows, and hanging baskets overflowed with
long tendrils above a wicker couch that was covered with red cushions.
It was the last refuge of the flowers. Beyond the leaded panes some
snowflakes were floating down upon the flagstone paths of the garden.

Her gaze was attracted to some potted roses languishing in a corner.

She recalled having read somewhere, "The color is in us, not in the
rose." She fell to wondering about the miracle of sight, in fact of
all the senses, through which one derived from vibrations a seeming
impression of surrounding things, and called this impression reality.

Of what nature were those vibrations? Did they truly explain the
objects from which they issued? Suppose the senses caught only the
least of them, or misinterpreted them? In that case one might be
surrounded by things wholly different from what one believed them to
be, awesome t