of this sort both on Jo and the Professor. She took them with
her one night to a select symposium, held in honor of several
celebrities.

Jo went prepared to bow down and adore the mighty ones whom she had
worshiped with youthful enthusiasm afar off. But her reverence for
genius received a severe shock that night, and it took her some time to
recover from the discovery that the great creatures were only men and
women after all. Imagine her dismay, on stealing a glance of timid
admiration at the poet whose lines suggested an ethereal being fed on
'spirit, fire, and dew', to behold him devouring his supper with an
ardor which flushed his intellectual countenance. Turning as from a
fallen idol, she made other discoveries which rapidly dispelled her
romantic illusions. The great novelist vibrated between two decanters
with the regularity of a pendulum; the famous divine flirted openly
with one of the Madame de Staels of the age, who looked daggers at
another Corinne, who was amiably satirizing her, after outmaneuvering
her in efforts to absorb the profound philosopher, who imbibed tea
Johnsonianly and appeared to slumber, the loquacity of the lady
rendering speech impossible. The scientific celebrities, forgetting
their mollusks and glacial periods, gossiped about art, while devoting
themselves to oysters and ices with characteristic energy; the young
musician, who was charming the city like a second Orpheus, talked
horses; and the specimen of the British nobility present happened to be
the most ordinary man of the party.

Before the evening was half over, Jo felt so completely disillusioned,
that she sat down in a corner to recover herself. Mr. Bhaer soon joined
her, looking rather out of his element, and presently several of the
philosophers, each mounted on his hobby, came ambling up to hold an
intellectual tournament in the recess. The conversations were miles
beyond Jo's comprehension, but she enjoyed it, though Kant and Hegel
were unknown gods, the Subjective and Objective unintelligible terms,
and the only thing 'evolved from her inner consciousness' was a bad
headache after it was all over. It dawned upon her gradually that the
world was being picked to pieces, and put together on new and,
according to the talkers, on infinitely better principles than before,
that religion was in a fair way to be reasoned into nothingness, and
intellect was to be the only God. Jo knew nothing about philosophy or
metaphys