school. Weak imitations
of Alma Tadema. Nero admiring his mother's corpse; Claudius interrupting
Messalina's marriage with her lover Silus; Clodius disguised among the
women of Caesar's household; Pyrrha's grotto. Lady Kirkbank expatiated
upon all the pictures, and generally made unlucky guesses at the
subjects of them. Classical literature was not her strong point.

Mr. Meander, the poet, discovered that all the beautiful heads were
like Miss Fitzherbert. 'It is the same line,' he exclaimed, 'the line of
lilies and flowing waters--the gracious ineffable upward returning
ripple of the true _retrousse_ nose, the divine _flou_, the loveliness
which has lain dormant for centuries--nay, was at one period of debased
art scorned and trampled under foot by the porcine multitude, as akin to
the pug and the turn-up, until discovered and enshrined on the altar of
the Beautiful by the Boticelli Revivalists.'

Miss Fitzherbert simpered, and accepted these remarks as mere statements
of obvious fact. She was accustomed to hear of Boticelli and the early
Italian painters in connection with her own charms of face and figure.

Lesbia, whose faultless features were of the aquiline type, regarded the
bard's rhapsody as insufferable twaddle, and began to think Mr. Smithson
almost a wit when he made fun of the bard.

Smithson was enchanted when she laughed at his jokelets, even although
she did not scruple to tell him that she thought his favourite pictures
detestable, and looked with the eye of indifference on a collection of
jade that was worth a small fortune.

Mr. Meander fell into another rhapsody over those classic cups and
shallow little bowls of absinthe-coloured jade.

'Here if you like, are colour and beauty,' he murmured, caressing one of
the little cups with the roseate tips of his supple fingers. 'These,
dearest Smithson, are worth all the rest of your collection; worth
vanloads of your cloisonne enamels, your dragon-jars in blood-colour and
blue. This cloudy indefinable substance, not crudely transparent nor yet
distinctly opaque, a something which touches the boundary line of two
worlds--the real and the ideal. And then the colour! Great heaven, can
anything be lovelier than this shadowy tint which is neither yellow nor
green; faint, faint as the dawn of newly-awakened day? After the siege
of blood-bedabbled Delhi, Baron Rothschild sent a special agent to India
to buy him a little jade tea-pot which had been the joy of