There is something weird in the idea. A slug that
started at its own shadow. Here is tea! Oh, Mrs. Windsor, where are the
tents to be for the school treat to-morrow?"

"At the end of the croquet lawn. Mr. Smith says the children are
terribly excited about it. Esme, you must address the children before
they sing their hymn on going away. They always end with a hymn. Mr.
Smith thinks it quiets them."

"I wonder if singing a hymn would quiet me when I am excited," said
Esme, musing over his tea-cup.

"Are you ever excited?" asked Lady Locke.

"Sometimes, when I have invented a perfect paradox. A perfect paradox is
so terribly great. It makes one feel like a trustee. Can you understand
the sensation? Have you ever felt like a trustee?"

"I don't think I have," Lady Locke said, laughing.

"Then, dear lady, you have never yet really lived. To-morrow I shall
feel like a trustee, for I am going to invent some marvellous pale
paradoxes for the children--paradoxes like early dewdrops with the sun
upon them. Mrs. Windsor, I shall address the children upon the art of
folly, upon the wonderful art of being foolishly beautiful. After they
are tired with their games and their graceful Arcadian frolics, gather
them in an irregular group under that cedar tree, and while the absurd
sun goes down, endeavouring, as the sun nearly always does in country
places, to imitate Turner's later pictures, I will speak to them
wonderful words of strange and delicate meaning, words that they can
easily forget. The only things worth saying are those that we forget,
just as the only things worth doing are those that the world is
surprised at!"

"The world is surprised at nearly everything," said Lord Reggie. "It was
surprised when Miss Margot Tennant married only a Home Secretary! A
world that could be surprised at that could be surprised at anything.
The world is surprised at Esme because he does not know how to make a
pun, and because he dares to show the French what can be done with their
drama. The world is surprised at me because I never go to Hurlingham,
and because I have never read Mrs. Humphrey Ward's treatises! The world
is even surprised when Mr. Gladstone is found to have been born in
several places at the same time--as if he would be born at different
times!--and M. Zola turns out to be crazily respectable. When is the
world not surprised?"

"Virtue in any form astonishes the world," Madame Valtesi said. "I once
did a good action