me, no! But I look only at what I do like."

"Do you mean that you've lost the noble faculty of disgust?"

"I haven't the least idea. I never try it. My dear fellow," said Gabriel
Nash, "we've only one life that we know anything about: fancy taking it
up with disagreeable impressions! When then shall we go in for the
agreeable?"

"What do you mean by the agreeable?" Nick demanded.

"Oh the happy moments of our consciousness--the multiplication of those
moments. We must save as many as possible from the dark gulf."

Nick had excited surprise on the part of his sister, but it was now
Biddy's turn to make him open his eyes a little. She raised her sweet
voice in appeal to the stranger.

"Don't you think there are any wrongs in the world--any abuses and
sufferings?"

"Oh so many, so many! That's why one must choose."

"Choose to stop them, to reform them--isn't that the choice?" Biddy
asked. "That's Nick's," she added, blushing and looking at this
personage.

"Ah our divergence--yes!" Mr. Nash sighed. "There are all kinds of
machinery for that--very complicated and ingenious. Your formulas, my
dear Dormer, your formulas!"

"Hang 'em, I haven't got any!" Nick now bravely declared.

"To me personally the simplest ways are those that appeal most," Mr.
Nash went on. "We pay too much attention to the ugly; we notice it, we
magnify it. The great thing is to leave it alone and encourage the
beautiful."

"You must be very sure you get hold of the beautiful," said Nick.

"Ah precisely, and that's just the importance of the faculty of
appreciation. We must train our special sense. It's capable of
extraordinary extension. Life's none too long for that."

"But what's the good of the extraordinary extension if there is no
affirmation of it, if it all goes to the negative, as you say? Where are
the fine consequences?" Dormer asked.

"In one's own spirit. One is one's self a fine consequence. That's the
most important one we have to do with. _I_ am a fine consequence," said
Gabriel Nash.

Biddy rose from the bench at this and stepped away a little as to look
at a piece of statuary. But she had not gone far before, pausing and
turning, she bent her eyes on the speaker with a heightened colour, an
air of desperation and the question, after a moment: "Are you then an
aesthete?"

"Ah there's one of the formulas! That's walking in one's hat! I've _no_
profession, my dear young lady. I've no _etat civil_. These things are