utiful--costly too--but not just costly; where all the horrid,
necessary consequences of things are taken care of without one's
bothering--where flowers are taken out of the vases when they wilt
and fresh ones put in; and dishes get themselves washed invisibly,
inaudibly--and litter just vanishes without our lifting a hand. Of
course the people who live so always, can rejoice with a clear mind in
sunsets and bright talk. That's what I meant the other day--the day
Judith came--when I said I'd arrived in Capua at last; when old Mr.
Sommerville thought me so materialistic and cynical. If _he_ did that,
on just that phrase--what must _you_ think, after all this _confession
intime d'un enfant du siecle?_" She stopped with a graceful pretense
of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had been talking
well, and read nothing but admiration in his very expressive face.

"But all this means, you extraordinary young person, that you're not
in the least an _enfant du siecle!_" he cried. "It means that you're
dropped down in this groaning, heavy-spirited twentieth century,
troubled about many things, from the exact year that was the golden
climax of the Renaissance; that you're a perfect specimen of the
high-hearted, glorious ..." he qualified on a second thought, "unless
your astonishing capacity to analyze it all, comes from the nineteenth
century?"

"No, that comes from Father," explained Sylvia, laughing. "Isn't it
funny, using the tool Father taught me to handle, against his ideas!
He's just great on analysis. As soon as we were old enough to think at
all, he was always practising us on analysis--especially of what made
us want things, or not like them. It's one of his sayings--he's always
getting it off to his University classes--that if you have once really
called an emotion or an ambition by its right name, you have it by
the tail, so to speak--that if you know, for instance, that it's your
vanity and not your love that's wounded by something, you'll stop
caring. But I never noticed that it really worked if you cared _hard_
enough. Diagnosing a disease doesn't help you any, if you keep right
on being sick with it."

"My dear! My dear!" cried the man, leaning towards her again, and
looking--dazzled--into the beauty and intelligence of her eyes, "the
idea that you are afflicted with any disease could only occur to the
morbid mind of the bluest-nosed Puritan who ever cut down a May-pole!
You're wonderfully, you're