re talking as much nonsense as could be talked to the
minute, for there was nothing we liked to talk better, nothing that
served us so well to disguise the emotion we thought out of place in the
world in which so obviously the self-respecting man's business was to
fight. But if I had not felt the beauty it would not now, so many years
after, remain as my most vivid impression of the day.

We had Versailles to ourselves at first. We were alone in the park,
alone in the alleys and avenues, alone in the gardens,--and the palace
and its paintings could not tempt us in out of the sunshine. But such
good luck naturally did not last and while we were loitering near the
great fountain we saw a party of women with the eager, harassed,
conscientious look that marks the personally-conducted school-ma'am on
tour, bearing briskly down upon us, each with a red book in one hand, a
pencil in the other, all engrossed in the personally-conducted
school-ma'am's holiday task of checking off the sight disposed of,
pigeon-holing the last guide-book fact verified. Their methodical
progress was an offence to us in the mood we were in, would be an
offence on a May day to the right-minded in any mood. I admit they could
have turned upon us and asked what we were, anyway, but tourists as,
after a fashion, no doubt we were. But they could not have accused us of
the horrible conscientiousness, the deadly determination to see the
correct things and to think the correct thoughts about them that dulls
the personally-conducted to the world's real beauty and its meaning--the
same tendency of the multitude to follow like sheep the accepted leader
and never venture to explore fresh fields for themselves, that drove
Hugo to writing his _Hernani_, and Gautier to wearing his red
waistcoat, and all the other Romanticists to their favourite pastime of
shocking the _bourgeois_. Versailles was so wonderful on the face of it
that we resented the presence of people who needed a book to tell them
so and to explain why; and we made our protest against the _bourgeois_
in our own fashion or, to be exact, in Furse's fashion. He was then
blessedly young, fresh from the schools and not yet sobered by Academic
honours, though already a youthful member of the New English Art Club,
from whom an attitude of general defiance was required. He raged and
raved in his big booming voice, declared that tourists ought to be wiped
off the face of the earth, that the women were a hideo