apable of materialisation, as a landscape picture
seen by candle-light is different from the glorious reality of the scene
it represents. Therefore, when Claudius felt the awakening touch, and
saw his ideal before him, urging him, by her very existence which made
it possible, to begin the fight, he felt the blood run quickly in his
veins, and his blue eyes flashed again, and the words came flowing
easily and surely from his lips. But he wondered at his own eloquence,
not seeing yet that the divine spark had kindled his genius into a broad
flame, and not half understanding what he felt.

It is late in the day to apostrophise love. It has been done too much by
people who persuade themselves that they love because they say they do,
and because it seems such a fine thing. Poets and cynics, and good men
and bad, have had their will of the poor little god, and he has grown so
shy and retiring that he would rather not be addressed, or described, or
photographed in type, for the benefit of the profane. He is chary of
using pointed shafts, and most of his target practice is done with heavy
round-tipped arrows that leave an ugly black bruise where they strike,
but do not draw the generous blood. He lurks in out-of-the-way places
and mopes, and he rarely springs out suddenly on unwary youth and maid,
as he used to in the good old days before Darwin and La Rochefoucauld
destroyed the beauty of the body and the beauty of the soul,--or man's
belief in them, which is nearly the same. Has not the one taught us to
see the animal in the angel, and the other to detect the devil in the
saint? And yet we talk of our loves as angels and our departed parents
as saints, in a gentle, commonplace fashion, as we talk of our articles
of faith. The only moderns who apostrophise love with any genuine
success are those who smack their lips sensuously at his flesh and
blood, because they are too blind to see the lovely soul that is
enshrined therein, and they have too little wit to understand that soul
and body are one.

Mr. Barker, who seemed to have the faculty of carrying on one
conversation and listening to another at the same time, struck in when
Claudius paused.

"The Professor, Countess," he began, "is one of those rare individuals
who indulge in the most unbounded enthusiasm. At the present time I
think, with all deference to his superior erudition, that he is running
into a dead wall. We have seen something of the 'woman's rights'
question