ht he. "The red of it--the curves it
takes--and those incredible little white teeth, like snow shut in a
rose."

"And this is a morning meet for pretty words, is it not?" he suggested.
"It might strike an unprejudiced observer as rather a pretty morning."

"Oh, I should be less reticent," said Susanna. "If the unprejudiced
observer had his eyes open, would n't it strike him as a perfectly
lovely morning?"

"We must not run the risk of spoiling it," Anthony cautioned her,
diminishing his voice, "by praising it too warmly to its face."

She gave another light trill of laughter.

"Her laugh is like rainbow-tinted spray. It is a fountain-jet of
musical notes, each note a cut gem," thought the infatuated fellow.

"I trust," he hazarded, "that you will not condemn me for a swaggerer,
if I lay claim to share with you a singularity. The morning is a
morning like another. God is prodigal of lovely mornings. But we two
are singular in choosing to begin it at its sweeter end."

"Yes," Susanna assented, "that is a singularity--in England. But in
Italy, or in the part of Italy where my habits were formed, it is one
of our lazy customs. We like always to be abroad in time to enjoy what
we call 'the hours immaculate,'--_l'ure immacolae_, in our dialect."

"The hours immaculate? It is an uncommonly fine description," approved
Anthony. "They will be a race of poets in your part of Italy?"

The graver underglow in Susanna's eyes eclipsed, for an instant, their
dancing surface lights.

"They _were_ a race of poets," she said regretfully, "before they
learned how to read and write. But now, with the introduction of
popular education,"--she shook her head,--"the poetry is dying out."

"Ah," said Anthony, with a meaning flourish of his stick, "there it is.
The poetic spirit always dies at the advance of that ghastly fetich."
Then he spoke sententiously. "Popular education is a contrivance of
the devil, whereby he looks to extinguish every last saving grace from
the life of the populace. Not poetry only, but all good things and all
good feelings,--religion, reverence, courtesy,--sane contentment,
rational ambition,--the right sort of humility, the right sort of
pride,--they all go down before it: whilst, in the ignorance which it
disseminates, blasphemy, covetousness, bumptiousness, bad taste (and
bad art and bad literature, to gratify it), every form of
wrong-headedness and wrong-heartedness flourish like the seven p