No fruit is so worthless as the fruit with the bloom upon it."

"Yes," said Esme. "The face must be young, but the soul must be old. The
face must know nothing, the soul everything. Then fascination is born."

"Perhaps merely an evil fascination," said Lady Locke.

"Fascination is art. I recognise no good or evil in art," Esme answered.
"In England we have no art, just because we do recognise good and evil.
Glasgow thinks it is shameful to be naked; yet even the Bible declares
that the ideal condition is to be naked and unashamed; and Glasgow,
being in Scotland, naturally gives the lead to England. We have no art.
We have only the Royal Academy, which is remarkable merely for the
badness of its cuisine, and the coiffure of its well-meaning President.
Our artists, as they call themselves, are like Mr. Grant Allen: they say
that all their failures are 'pot-boilers.' They love that word. It
covers so many sins of commission. They set down their incompetence as
an assumption, which makes it almost graceful, and stick up the struggle
for life as a Moloch requiring the sacrifice of genius. And then people
believe in the travesty. Mr. Grant Allen could have been Darwin, no
doubt; but Darwin could never have been Mr. Grant Allen. But what is the
good of trying to talk about what does not exist. There is no such thing
as art in England."

"Shall we talk of the last new novel?" said Madame Valtesi.
"Unfortunately I have not read it. I am told it is full of improper
epigrams, and has not the vestige of a plot. So like life!"

"Some one said to me the other day that life was like a French farce,"
said Mrs. Windsor--"so full of surprises."

"Not the surprises of a French farce, I hope," said Madame Valtesi.
"Esme, I am quite stiff from knitting so long. Take me to the
drawing-room and sing to me a song of France. Let us try to forget
England."

"Lady Locke, will you come for a stroll in the yew tree walk?" said
Reggie. "I see Mrs. Windsor is trying to read 'Monsieur, Madame, et
Bebe!' She always reads that on Sunday!"

Lady Locke assented.

XIV.

When Lord Reggie asked Lady Locke to come with him into the yew tree
walk that Sunday afternoon, he fully intended to tell her that he would
be glad to marry her. It seemed to him that Sunday was a very
appropriate day for such a confession, and would give to his remarks a
solemnity that they might otherwise lack. But somehow the conversation
became immediately unmanagea