ee and admire--admire and
confess your admiration."

He shook them at Anthony's face. But as Anthony looked at them with
composure, and only muttered, "H'm," "Oh, my little scarlet starlets,"
he purred and chirped to the blossoms, "_would n't_ the apathetic man
admire you?"

And he clasped them to his bosom with a gesture that was reminiscent of
the grateful prima-donna.

"They look exactly as if I had plucked them from the foreground of a
Fifteenth Century painting, don't they?" he went on, holding them off
again. "Florentine, of course. Ah, in those days painting was a fine
art, and worth a rational being's consideration,--in those days, and in
just that little Tuscan corner of the world. But you," he pronounced
in deep tones, mournfully, "how cold, how callous, you are. Have you
no soul for the loveliness of flowers?"

Anthony sighed. He was a tall young man, (thirty, at a guess), tall
and well set-up, with grey eyes, a wholesome brown skin, and a nose so
affirmatively patrician in its high bridge and slender aquilinity that
it was a fair matter for remark to discover it on the face of one who
actually chanced to be of the patrician order. Such a nose, perhaps,
carried with it certain obligations--an obligation of fastidious
dressing, for example. Anthony, at any rate, was very fastidiously
dressed indeed, in light-grey tweeds, with a straw hat, and a tie that
bespoke a practised hand beside a discerning taste. But his general
air, none the less,--the expression of his figure and his motions, as
well as of his face and voice,--was somehow that of an indolent
melancholy, a kind of unresentful disenchantment, as if he had long ago
perceived that cakes are mostly dough, and had accommodated himself to
the perception with a regret that was half amusement.

His friend, by contrast, in loose white flannels, with a flannel shirt
and a leather belt, with yellowish hair, waving, under a white flannel
cricket-cap, a good inch longer than the conventional cut, was plainly
a man who set himself above the modes: though, in his plump, pink way
debonair and vivacious, not so tall as Anthony, yet tall enough never
to be contemned as short, and verging upon what he was fain to call
"the flower of a sound man's youth, the golden, gladsome, romantic age
of forty," he looked delightfully fresh, and wide-awake, and cheerful,
and perfectly in the scheme of the blue day and the bird-notes and the
smiling country. Permit me