orated with an honest expression. The suspicion
was lulled to rest.

"We had better have our tea," he answered slowly. "I like my absinthe
about an hour or so before dinner."

"Very well. Tea, James, and muffins."

The butler retired with fat dignity, but wondering not a little at the
unusual vagaries of his mistress. Miss Haddon and Claude, laden with
books, repaired to the drawing-room and sat down by the fire. Claude
placed himself, cross-legged, upon a cushion on the floor. The box of
rose-tipped cigarettes was in his hand. Miss Haddon regarded him
expectantly from her sofa. Her expression seemed continually exclaiming,
"What's to be done now?"

The boy felt that this was not right, and endeavoured gently to correct
it.

"Please try to be a little--a--"

"Yes?"

"A little more restrained," he said. "What we feel about life is that it
should never be crude. All extremes are crude."

"What--even extremes of wickedness?"

He hesitated.

"Well, certainly extremes of goodness, or happiness, or anything of that
kind. When one comes to think of it seriously, happiness is really
absurd, is it not? Just consider how preposterous what is called a happy
face always looks, covered with those dreadful, wrinkled things named
smiles, all the teeth showing, and so on. I know you agree with me.
Happiness drives all thought out of a face, and distorts the features in
a most painful manner. When I go out walking on a Bank Holiday, a thing
I seldom do, I always think a cheerful expression the most degrading of
all expressions. A contented clerk disfigures a whole street--really."

Miss Haddon's appearance had gradually grown very sombre during this
speech, and she did not brighten up on the approach of tea and muffins
on a wicker table whimsical with little shelves.

"Perhaps you are right," she said. "I daresay happiness is
unreasonable. Ought I to sit on the floor too?"

Claude deprecated such an act on the part of his hostess. Sitting on the
floor was one of his pet originalities, and he hated rivalry. Besides,
Miss Haddon was distinctly too stout for that sort of thing.

"I do it because I feel so Turkish," he explained. "Otherwise, it would
be an assumption, and not naive. People make a great mistake in fancying
the decadent is unnatural. If anything, he is too natural. He follows
his whim. The world only calls us natural when we do everything we
dislike. If Rossetti had played football every Saturday, his poetry