"

"I don't know.... Considering what we are to become to each other--I
thought--perhaps the prejudices of your friends--"

He turned a dull red, said nothing for a moment, then, looking up at
her, suddenly laid his hand over hers where it rested on the table's
edge.

"The world must take us as it finds us," he said.

"I know; but is it quite fair to seek it?"

"You adorable girl! Didn't the Countess seek us--or rather you?--and
torment you until you promised to go to the up-to-date doings of her
bally club! It's across to her, now. And as half of society has
exchanged husbands and half of the remainder doesn't bother to, I don't
think a girl like you and a man like myself are likely to meet very many
people as innately decent as ourselves."

* * * * *

A reception at the Five-Minute Club was anything but an ordinary affair.

It was the ultra-modern school of positivists where realism was on the
cards and romance in the discards; where muscle, biceps, and
thumb-punching replaced technical mastery and delicate skill; where
inspiration was physical, not intellectual; where writers called a spade
a spade, and painters painted all sorts of similar bucolic instruments
with candour and an inadequate knowledge of their art; where composers
thumped their pianos the harder, the less their raucous inspiration
responded, or maundered incapably into interminable incoherency, hunting
for themes in grays and mauves and reds and yellows, determined to find
in music what does not belong there and never did.

In spite of its apparent vigour and uncompromising modernity, one
suspected a sub-stratum of weakness and a perversity slightly vicious.

Colour blindness might account for some of the canvases, strabismus for
some of the draughtmanship; but not for all. There was an ugly
deliberation in the glorification of the raw, the uncouth; there was a
callous hardness in the deadly elaboration of ugliness for its own sake.
And transcendentalism looked on in approval.

A near-sighted study of various masters, brilliant, morbid, or
essentially rotten, was the basis of this cult--not originality. Its
devotees were the devotees of Richard Strauss, of Huysmans, of Manet, of
Degas, Rops, Louis Le Grand, Forain, Monticelli; its painters painted
nakedness in footlight effects with blobs for faces and blue shadows
where they were needed to conceal the defects of impudent drawing; its
composers maundered wit