s not your _role_. You have to think, not to enjoy."

"Then you must not invite us to Craddock Place," Professor Theobald
stipulated.

"As usual, a halting compliment."

"To take you seriously, Lady Engleton," said Professor Fortescue,
"(though I know it is a dangerous practice) one of the great advantages
of an occasional think is to enable one to relish the joys of mental
vacuity, just as the pleasure of idleness is never fully known till one
has worked."

"Ah," sighed Lady Engleton, "I know I don't extract the full flavour out
of _that_!"

"It is a neglected art," said the Professor. "After worrying himself
with the problems of existence, as the human being is prone to do, as
soon as existence is more or less secure and peaceful, a man can
experience few things more enjoyable than to leave aside all problems
and go out into the fields, into the sun, to feel the life in his veins,
the world at the threshold of his five senses."

"Ah, now you really are profound at last, Professor!"

"I thought it was risky to take you seriously."

"No, no, I am delighted. The world at the threshold of one's five
senses. One has but to look and to listen and the beauty of things
displays itself for our benefit. Yes, but that is what the artists say,
not the Professors."

"Even a Professor is human," pleaded Theobald.

Valeria quoted some lines that she said expressed Professor Fortescue's
idea.

"Carry me out into the wind and the sunshine,
Into the beautiful world!"

Lady Engleton's artistic instinct seemed to occupy itself less with the
interpretation of Nature than with the appreciation of the handiwork of
man. The lines did not stir her. Professor Theobald shared her
indifference for the poetic expression, but not for the reality
expressed.

"I quarrel with you about art," said Lady Engleton. "Art is art, and
nature is nature, both charming in their way, though I prefer art."

"Our old quarrel!" said the Professor.

"Because a wild glade is beautiful in its quality of wild glade, you
can't see the beauty in a trim bit of garden, with its delightful
suggestion of human thought and care."

"I object to stiffness," said Professor Theobald.

His proposals to improve the stately old gardens at the Priory by adding
what Lady Engleton called "fatuous wriggles to all the walks, for mere
wrigglings' sake," had led to hot discussions on the principles of art
and the relation of symmetry to the sen