w
on paper. I think of her as a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood woman,
whom I have actually known. I can see her before me now--I can see
her eyes, full of mystery and mischief--I can see her exquisite little
teeth, as she smiles--I can see her hair, her hands--I can almost catch
the perfume of her garments. I 'm utterly infatuated with her--I could
commit a hundred follies for her."

"Mercy!" exclaimed the Duchessa. "You are enthusiastic."

"The book's admirers are so few, they must endeavour to make up in
enthusiasm what they lack in numbers," he submitted.

"But--at that rate--why are they so few?" she puzzled. "If the book is
all you think it, how do you account for its unpopularity?"

"It could never conceivably be anything but unpopular," said he. "It has
the fatal gift of beauty."

The Duchessa laughed surprise.

"Is beauty a fatal gift--in works of art?"

"Yes--in England," he declared.

"In England? Why especially in England?"

"In English-speaking--in Anglo-Saxon lands, if you prefer. The
Anglo-Saxon public is beauty-blind. They have fifty religions--only one
sauce--and no sense of beauty whatsoever. They can see the nose on one's
face--the mote in their neighbour's eye; they can see when a bargain is
good, when a war will be expedient. But the one thing they can never see
is beauty. And when, by some rare chance, you catch them in the act of
admiring a beautiful object, it will never be for its beauty--it will be
in spite of its beauty for some other, some extra-aesthetic interest it
possesses--some topical or historical interest. Beauty is necessarily
detached from all that is topical or historical, or documentary or
actual. It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate
values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence,
suggestion. It is also absolute, unrelated--it is positive or negative
or superlative--it is never comparative. Well, the Anglo-Saxon public
is totally insensible to such things. They can no more feel them, than a
blind worm can feel the colours of the rainbow."

She laughed again, and regarded him with an air of humorous meditation.

"And that accounts for the unsuccess of 'A Man of Words'?"

"You might as well offer Francois Villon a banquet of Orient pearls."

"You are bitterly hard on the Anglo-Saxon public."

"Oh, no," he disclaimed, "not hard--but just. I wish them all sorts of
prosperity, with a little more taste."

"Oh, but surely," she cau