ids
showed inward ardour and feeling. She looked like those Florentine
pictures of the Virgin stirred by the magical salutation of the
Archangel. Clerambault saw it all and as he glanced around his little
circle his eye rested with special delight on the fair bending head
which seemed to feel his look.

On this July evening these four people were united in a bond of
affection and tranquil happiness of which the central point was the
father, the idol of the family.

He knew that he was their idol, and by a rare exception this knowledge
did not spoil him, for he had such joy in loving, so much affection
to spread far and wide that it seemed only natural that he should be
loved in return; he was really like an elderly child. After a life of
ungilded mediocrity he had but recently come to be known, and though
the one experience had not given him pain, he delighted in the other.
He was over fifty without seeming to be aware of it, for if there
were some white threads in his big fair moustache,--like an ancient
Gaul's,--his heart was as young as those of his children. Instead of
going with the stream of his generation, he met each new wave; the
best of life to him was the spring of youth constantly renewed, and he
never troubled about the contradictions into which he was led by this
spirit always in reaction against that which had preceded it. These
inconsistencies were fused together in his mind, which was more
enthusiastic than logical, and filled by the beauty which he saw all
around him. Add to this the milk of human kindness, which did not mix
well with his aesthetic pantheism, but which was natural to him.

He had made himself the exponent of noble human ideas, sympathising
with advanced parties, the oppressed, the people--of whom he knew
little, for he was thoroughly of the middle-class, full of vague,
generous theories. He also adored crowds and loved to mingle with
them, believing that in this way he joined himself to the All-Soul,
according to the fashion at that time in intellectual circles. This
fashion, as not infrequently happens, emphasised a general tendency of
the day; humanity turning to the swarm-idea. The most sensitive among
human insects,--artists and thinkers,--were the first to show these
symptoms, which in them seemed a sort of pose, so that the general
conditions of which they were a symptom were lost sight of.

The democratic evolution of the last forty years had established
popular gover