-strip in
the gorgeous yellow carpet spread out before them.

'Don't you want to sit down?' Vida called out to the girl, drawing aside
her gown.

'What?' said Hermione, though she had heard quite well. Slowly she
retraced her steps down the grass path as if to have the words repeated.

But if Miss Levering's idea had been to change the conversation, she was
disappointed. There was nothing Paul Filey liked better than an
audience, and he had already the impression that Miss Heriot was what he
would have scorned to call anything but 'simpatica.'

'I'm sure you've shown the new garden to dozens already,' Miss Levering
said to the niece of the house. 'Sit down and confess you've had enough
of it!'

'Oh, I don't think,' began Hermione, suavely, 'that one ever gets too
much of a thing like that!'

'There! I'm glad to hear you say so. How can we have too much beauty!'
exclaimed Filey, receiving the new occupant of the seat as a soul worthy
of high fellowship. Then he leaned across Miss Heriot and said to the
lady in the corner, 'I'm making that the theme of my book.'

'Oh, I heard you were writing something.'

'Yes, a sort of plea for the aesthetic basis of society! It's the only
cure for the horrors of modern civilization--for the very thing we were
talking about at tea! What is it but a loss of the sense of beauty
that's to blame?' Elbows on knees, he leaned so far forward that he
could see both faces, and yet his own betrayed the eye turned
inward--the face of the one who quotes. The ladies knew that he was
obliging them with a memorized extract from 'A Plea for the AEsthetic
Basis.' 'Nothing worse can happen to the world than loss of its sense of
Beauty. Men, high and low alike, cling to it still as incarnated in
women.' (Hermione crossed her pointed toes and lowered her long
eyelashes.) 'We have made Woman the object of our deepest adoration! We
have set her high on a throne of gold. We have searched through the
world for jewels to crown her. We have built millions of temples to our
ideal of womanhood and called them homes. We have fought and wrought and
sung for her--and all we ask in return is that she should tend the
sacred fire, so that the light of Beauty might not die out of the
world.' He was not ill-pleased with his period. 'But women'--he leaned
back, and illustrated with the pliant white hands that were ornamented
with outlandish rings--'women are not content with their high and holy
office.'

'_Some