ts to bad
enough, or if she doesn't want to get married worse."

Ludlow winced. "Isn't there something a little vulgar in that notion of
ours that a woman always wishes first and most of all to get married?"

"My dear boy," said Wetmore, with an affectionate hand on Ludlow's
shoulder, "I never denied being vulgar."

"Oh, I dare say. But I was thinking of myself."

Ludlow sent word to Charmian at the Synthesis that he should not ask
her to sit to him that afternoon, and in the evening he went to see
Wetmore. It was eleven o'clock, and he would have been welcome at
Wetmore's any time between that hour of the night and two of the
morning. He found a number of people. Mrs. Westley was there with Mrs.
Rangeley; they had been at a concert together. Mrs. Wetmore had just
made a Welsh rabbit, and they were all talking of the real meaning of
the word "beautiful."

"_I_ think," Mrs. Rangeley was saying, "that the beautiful is whatever
pleases or fascinates. There are lots of good-looking people who are
not beautiful at all, because they have no atmosphere: and you see
other people, who are irregular, and quite plain even, and yet you come
away feeling that they are perfectly beautiful." Mrs. Rangeley's own
beauty was a little irregular. She looked anxiously round, and caught
Wetmore in a smile. "What are you laughing at?" she demanded in rueful
deprecation.

"Oh, nothing, nothing!" he said. "I was thinking how convincing you
were!"

"Nothing of the kind!" said one of the men, who had been listening
patiently till she fully committed herself. "There couldn't be a more
fallacious notion of the meaning of beauty. The thing exists in itself,
independently of our pleasure or displeasure; they have almost nothing
to do with it. If you mix it with them you are lost, as far as a true
conception of it goes. Beauty is something as absolute as truth, and
whatever varies from it, as it was ascertained, we'll say, by the Greek
sculptors and the Italian painters, is unbeautiful, just as anything
that varies from the truth is untrue. Charm, fascination, atmosphere,
are purely subjective; one feels them and another doesn't. But beauty
is objective, and nobody can deny it who sees it, whether he likes it
or not. You can't get away from it, any more than you can get away from
the truth. There it is!"

"Where?" asked Wetmore. He looked at the ladies as if he thought one of
them had been indicated.

"How delightful to have one's ideas ju