d spiritualities from flowerets of every faith!'
Fancy my crass ignorance, when I assure you that I actually laughed
over that verbal syllabub, thinking it intended as a famous bit of
satire."

"Then it is pathetically true that reverence for the Renaissance has
not crossed the Atlantic?" asked one of the "Albatross" party, who with
his sketch book half open, was surreptitiously making an
"impressionist" view of Leo's profile, as she stood listening to Alma's
persiflage, and mechanically arranging her lilac acanthus blossoms.

"Devoted British colporteurs have philanthropically scattered a few art
primers and tracts, and there is a possibility that in the near future,
our people may search the maps for Orvieto, and the dictionaries for
Campo Santo, to compass the mysteries of the 'Triumph of Death', and of
'Symmetria Prisca'. Some of us have even heard of 'Aucassin et
Nicolette', and of 'Nencia da Barberino', picking salad in her garden;
and I am almost sure a Vassar girl once spoke to me of Delia Quercia's
Ilaria; but with all my national pride, candor compels me to admit
that it is a 'far cry' to the day when we can devoutly fall on our
knees before the bronze Devil of Giovanni da Bologna. Aesthetic
paupers, we sit on the lowest bench at the foot of the class, in your
Dame's Art School, to learn the alphabet of the wonderful Renaissance;
and in our chastened and reverent mood, it almost takes our breath away
when your high-priestess unrolls the last pronunciamento, and tells us
her startling story of 'Euphorion!' Why? Ah!--don't you know? The
Puritan leaven of prudery, and the stern, stolid, phlegmatic decorum of
Knickerbockerdom mingle in that consummate flower of the nineteenth
century occident, the 'American Girl', who pales and flushes at sight
of the carnival of the undraped--in English art and literature. Here,
Leo, take your anemones; red, are they not, as the blood once chilled
down yonder, in that huge stone kennel? Dr. Douglass has the ivy root;
and he and I have concluded, that after all, Syracuse was not more
cruel here in the Latomia, than some States in America, where convicts
are leased to mining companies, and kept quarrying coal, without even
the sweet consolation of staring up at this magical blue sky. We leave
hideous moral and physical leprosy at home, and come here to shed
dilettante tears over classic tatters twenty-five centuries old! O
immortal and ubiquitous Tartufe!"

As Leo walked with h