certain homage which beauty
ever commands and receives, so potent is its inspiration to the hearts
of men.

On revision, that word "beauty" scarcely stands its own in this
connection, and for this reason. We three, deriving our entire
sustenance from art in some guise or other, had widely divergent
opinions upon the indispensable attributes of beauty _per se_. From my
experience of artists, this condition of things is not unusual. We
always agreed to differ, Bill rapturous among her flowers and revelling
in their colour; Mac catching with a fine enthusiasm and assured
technique the fugitive tints of a sunrise through a tracery of leaves
and twigs; and I, quiescently receptive, pondering at intervals upon the
sublime mystery of the human form, especially the grandiose renderings
of it in the works of Michael Angelo. Thus it will be seen that I alone
was unprejudiced in my predilections, and qualified, however
inadequately, to do justice to Mrs. Carville. Mac was annoyed because
she had cut down a tree. That it was her own tree made no difference. To
cut down a living tree was, in Mac's view, a sacrilege. Bill had an
additional grievance in the fact that Mrs. Carville not only grew no
flowers herself, but permitted her chickens to wander deleteriously
among ours.

A brief and passing glance from the street would have given a stranger
no inkling of the state of affairs. Indeed, Mrs. Carville's domain and
ours were un-American in the fact that there had at one time been a
fence between us. Even now it is a good enough fence in front; but it
gradually degenerated until, at the bottom of the yards, it was a mere
fortuitous concourse of rotten and smashed palings through which
multitudinous armies of fowls came at unseasonable hours and against
which all Bill's ladylike indignation was vented in vain. As we watched
behind the curtains a Dorking stepped through and began to prospect
among the sumach and stramonium that Bill had encouraged along our
frontiers, under an illusion that plants labelled "poisonous" in her
American gardening book would decimate the fowls.

"I wish they wouldn't," said Bill sadly, and added, "It's rotten, you
know. I shall speak to them about it one of these days."

For myself, though trained habit enabled me to make note of the Dorking,
my whole conscious attention was riveted upon the little group round the
_scaldino_ on the back porch. Mrs. Carville was, as I have said,
stooping over the brazi