for the first glimpse of the last picture that emerges
from the custom-house; for a bouquet of the newest rose that took the
prize at the London Show. In season, coaching parties, tally ho! Then
fox hunting minus the fox, and later, boating and bathing and lawn
tennis!--and--always--everywhere heart-burnings, vapid formalities;
beaux setting belles at each other like terriers scrambling after a
mouse; mothers lying in wait, as wise cats watching to get their paws
on the first-class catch they know their pretty kittens cannot manage
successfully. Oh! Don't I know it all! I dare say my world is the very
best possible of its kind; and I am not cynical, but oh Lord! I am so
deadly tired of everything, and everybody."

"No wonder, unless you mercilessly calumniate it; but you have only
yourself to blame. You made social success your aim, fashionable life
your temple of worship, sham your only God. If you habitually drink
poppy juice, can you fail to be drowsy?"

"Oh bless you! I have been polytheistic as any other well-read pagan of
my day, and changed the heads and the labels of the fetiches on my
altar almost as often as my ball wardrobe. I aspired to 'culture' in
all the 'cults', and I improved diligently my opportunities. One year
the stylish craze was sesthetics, and I fought my way to the front of
the bedlamites raving about Sapphic types, 'Sibylla Palmifera' and
'Astarte Syriaca'; and I wore miraculously limp, draggled skirts, that
tangled about my feet tight as the robes of Burne Jones' 'Vivien.' Next
season the star of ceramics and bric-a-brac was in the ascendant, and I
ran the gamut of Satsuma, Kyoto, de la Robbia, Limoge and Gubbio; of
niello, and millchori glass, of Queen Anne brass and Japanese bronze;
while my snuff boxes and my 'symphony in fans' graced all the loan
exhibitions. Soon after, a celebrated scientist from England who had
bowled over all the pins set up by his predecessors, lectured in our
Bojotia; and fired with zeal for truth, I swept aside all my costly
idealistic rubbish into a 'doomed pyramid of the vanities', and swore
allegiance to the Positive, the 'Knowable', whose priests handled
hammers, spectroscopes, electric batteries--and who set up for me a
whole Pantheon of science fetiches. I bought a microscope and peered
into tissues, pollen cells, diatoms, ditch ooze; and pitied my clever
and very talented grandmother who died ignorant of the family secrets
revealed by 'totemism', ignorant o