y that you
smell the fountains of perfume that toss their spray from tier to tier;
and see the rainbow of the silk awning flapping overhead. Better than
all, you imagine you can watch the ravishing toilettes of the
Faustinas, and Fulvias and Messalinas who flirt with the handsome,
straight-nosed beaux so immensely classical in their togas; and when
their thunder-browed husbands unexpectedly step in behind, it is so
easy to conjecture the sudden change of theme, as they spread their
fans to cover the message just written on their ivory tablets, and
straightway fall to clawing the characters of all the Cornelias, and
Calpurnias, and Octavias and Julia Domnas, and other respectable wives!
All that I quite enjoyed because I understood. Eight years' campaigning
in New York, and London and Paris would teach even an idiot that
nineteenth century 'best society' can lift you so close to the
naughtiness of the golden Roman era, that one only has to strain a very
little on tip-toe, to feel at one's ease with the jeunesse doree of
dead ages. Here--what do you find in a huge stone well sunk into the
bowels of the earth? About as enticing as a plunge into a dry cistern,
suddenly unroofed? If spectres we must hunt, do let them be festive,
like those Faust danced with on the Brocken!"

"You should be ashamed, Alma! Miss Gordon is the very soul of courteous
toleration, or she would resent the teasing goad of your Philistinism,"
cried the brother, Rivers Cutting, who in his new style yachting suit
of blue cloth appeared veritably the jaunty genius of fashionable
modernity, confronting the ghost of antiquity.

"You forget, Rivers, some of the sage dicta you brought back from the
'Summer School of Philosophy', when you followed your last Boston flame
to Concord, where she went poaching on the sacred preserves of the
'Illuminati,' hunting a new sensation. 'We must be as courteous to
human beings as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the
advantage of a good light.' Now being Leo's very sincere friend, and
knowing that the supreme moment of her facial triumph is when, like a
startled fawn, she opens her eyes wide in horrified amazement at some
inconceivable heresy, do you suppose I am so recreant to loyalty as to
fail in providing her occasionally with the necessary Gorgon, ethical
or archaeolegical, as surroundings warrant?

"History was never the fetich of my girlhood, and that quartette of
dry-as-dust worthies whom Leo c