essential only to poets and artists. The most real side of every
life, from the earliest dawn of mind in the infant, is the romantic."

"When the child is weaving flower-chains, chasing butterflies, or
sitting apart and dreaming what it will do in the future, is not that
the child's real life, and yet is it not also the romantic?"

"But there comes a time when we weave no flower-chains, and chase no
butterflies."

"Is it so?--still on one side of life, flowers and butterflies may be
found to the last; and at least to the last are there no dreams of the
future? Have you no such dreams at this moment? and without the romance
of such dreams, would there be any reality to human life which could
distinguish it from the life of the weed that rots on Lethe?"

"Alas, Mademoiselle," said De Mauleon, rising to take leave, "your
argument must rest without answer. I would not, if I could, confute the
beautiful belief that belongs to youth, fusing into one rainbow all
the tints that can colour the world. But the Signora Venosta will
acknowledge the truth of an old saying expressed in every civilised
language, but best, perhaps in that of the Florentine--'You might as
well physic the dead as instruct the old.'"

"But you are not old!" said the Venosta, with Florentine politeness,--
"you! not a grey hair."

"'Tis not by the grey of the hair that one knows the age of the heart,"
answered De Mauleon, in another paraphrase of Italian proverb, and he
was gone.

As he walked homeward, through deserted streets, Victor de Mauleon
thought to himself, "Poor girl, how I pity her! married to a Gustave
Rameau--married to any man--nothing in the nature of man, be he the best
and the cleverest, can ever realise the dream of a girl who is pure and
has genius. Ah, is not the converse true? What girl, the best and the
cleverest, comes up to the ideal of even a commonplace man--if he ever
dreamed of an ideal!"

Then he paused, and in a moment or so afterwards his thought knew such
questionings no more. It turned upon personalities, on stratagems and
plots, on ambition. The man had more than his share of that
peculiar susceptibility which is one of the characteristics of his
countrymen--susceptibility to immediate impulse--susceptibility to
fleeting impressions. It was a key to many mysteries in his character
when he owned his subjection to the influence of music, and in music
recognised not the seraph's harp, but the siren's song. If you coul