r of
course.

Still, when she did come to think of it, she was not so very sure. There
was another world, and saints and angels and eternity; yes, of
course--but how on earth would all those baccarat people ever fit into
it? Who could, by any stretch of imagination, conceive Madame Mila and
Maurice des Gommeux in a spiritual existence around the throne of Deity?

And as for punishment and torment and all that other side of futurity,
who could even think of the mildest purgatory as suitable to those poor
flipperty-gibbet inanities who broke the seventh commandment as gaily as
a child breaks his indiarubber ball, and were as incapable of passion
and crime as they were incapable of heroism and virtue?

There might be paradise for virtue and hell for crime, but what in the
name of the universe was to be done with creatures that were only all
Folly? Perhaps they would be always flying about like the souls Virgil
speaks of, "suspensae ad ventos," to purify themselves; as the sails of a
ship spread out to dry. The Huron Indians pray to the souls of the fish
they catch; well, why should they not? a fish has a soul if Modern
Society has one; one could conceive a fish going softly through shining
waters for ever and for ever in the ecstasy of motion; but who could
conceive Modern Society in the spheres?

* * *

"One grows tired of everything," she answered with a little sigh.

"Everything that is artificial, you mean. People think Horace's love of
the rural life an affectation. I believe it to be most sincere. After
the strain of the conventionality and the adulation of the Augustan
court, the natural existence of the country must have been welcome to
him. I know it is the fashion to say that a love of Nature belongs only
to the Moderns, but I do not think so. Into Pindar, Theocritus,
Meleager, the passion for Nature must have entered very strongly; what
_is_ modern is the more subjective, the more fanciful feeling which
makes Nature a sounding-board to echo all the cries of man."

"But that is always a northern feeling?"

"Inevitably. With us Nature is too _riante_ for us to grow morbid about
it. The sunshine that laughs around us nine months of every year, the
fruits that grow almost without culture, the flowers that we throw to
the oxen to eat, the very stones that are sweet with myrtle, the very
sea sand that is musical with bees in the rosemary, everything we grow
up amongst from infancy, makes ou