arked Amarinth. "Herkomer
has become intentional, and so he has taken to painting the directors of
railway companies. The great picture of this year's exhibition is
intentional. The great picture of the year always is. It presents to us
a pretty milkmaid milking her cow. A gallant, riding by, has dismounted,
and is kissing the milkmaid."

Madame Valtesi blinked at him for a moment in silence. Then she said
with an air of indescribable virtue--

"What a bad example for the cow!"

"Ah! I never thought of that!" cried Mrs. Windsor.

"One seldom does think how easily proper cows--and people--are put to
confusion. That is why they so often flee from the plays of London to
those of Paris. They can be confused there without their relations
knowing it."

"Why are old men who have seen the world always so proper?" asked Lord
Reggie. "The other day I was staying with an old general at Malta, and
he took Catulle Mendez' charming and delicate romance, 'Mephistophela,'
out of my bedroom and burnt it. Yet his language on parade was really
quite artistically blasphemous. I think it is fatal to one's personality
to see the world at all."

"Then I must be quite hopeless," said Lady Locke, "for I have spent
eight years in the Straits Settlements."

"Dear me!" murmured Madame Valtesi. "Where is that? It sounds like one
of the places where that geographical little Henry Arthur Jones sends
the heroes of his plays to expiate their virtues."

"It is quite a mistake to imagine that the author or the artist should
stuff his beautiful, empty mind with knowledge, with impressions, with
facts of any kind," said Amarinth. "I have written a great novel upon
Iceland, full of colour, of passion, of the most subtle impurity, yet I
could not point you out Iceland upon the map. I do not know where it
is, or what it is. I only know that it has a beautiful name, and that I
have written a beautiful thing about it. This age is an age of
identification, in which our god is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and our
devil the fairy tale that teaches nothing. We go to the British Museum
for culture, and to Archdeacon Farrar for guidance. And then we think
that we are advancing. We might as well return to the myths of Darwin,
or to the delicious fantasies of John Stuart Mill. They at least were
entertaining, and no one attempted to believe in them."

"We always return to our first hates," said Lord Reggie, rather
languidly.

"Do have some more tea, Madam