o thoughts which the other side of him was incapable of comprehending.
He did not consciously pretend that he was better than he was, and he
really believed the truths which he preached; but when the gods serve
their nectar in earthen vessels, the vessels are apt to get more credit
than they deserve, and the gods less.

To Elisabeth, Cecil was extremely interesting; and she
understood--better than most women would have done--the difference
between himself and his art, and how the one must not be measured by the
other. The artist attracted her greatly; she had so much sympathy with
his ways of looking at life and of interpreting truth; as for the man,
she had as yet come to no definite conclusion in her mind concerning
him; it was not easy for mankind to fascinate Elisabeth Farringdon.

"I have come to see my mother-confessor," he said to her one Sunday
afternoon, when he dropped in to find her alone, Grace Cobham having
gone out to tea. "I have been behaving horribly all the week, and I want
you to absolve me and help me to be better and nicer."

Elisabeth was the last woman to despise flattery of this sort; an appeal
for help of any kind never found her indifferent.

"What have you been doing?" she asked gently.

"It isn't so much what I have been doing as what I have been feeling. I
found myself actually liking Lady Silverhampton, simply because she is a
countess; and I was positively rude to a man I know, called Edgar Ford,
because he lives at the East End and dresses badly. What a falling-off
since the days when you and I worshipped the gods together at Philae,
and before money and rank and railways and bicycles came into fashion!
Help me to be as I was then, dear friend."

"How can I?"

"By simply being yourself and letting me watch you. I always feel good
and ideal and unworldly when I am near you. Don't you know how dreadful
it is to wish to do one thing and to want to do another, and to be torn
asunder between the two?"

Elisabeth shook her head. "No; I have never felt like that. I can
understand wanting to do different things at different times of one's
life, but I can not comprehend how one person can want to do two
opposing things at the same time."

"Oh! I can. I can imagine doing a thing, and despising one's self at the
time for doing it, and yet not being able to help doing it."

"I have heard other people say that, and I can't understand it."

"Yet you are so complex; I should have thought you