e
hurricane rising like a horse snorting for war, and all that is known to
man who goes down to the great deep in ships? Passion and the sea are
like one another. Words shall not tell them, nor colour portray them.
The kiss that burns, and the salt spray that stings--let the poet excel
and the painter endeavour, yet the best they can do shall say nothing to
the woman without a lover; and the landsman who knows not the sea. If
you would live--love. You will live in an hour a lifetime; and you will
wonder how you bore your life before. But as an artist all will be over
with you--that I think."

* * *

What is the use of railing against Society? Society, after all, is only
Humanity _en masse_, and the opinion of it must be the opinion of the
bulk of human minds. Complaints against Society are like the lions'
against the man's picture. No doubt the lions would have painted the
combat as going just the other way, but then, so long as it is the man
who has the knife or the gun, and the palette and the pencil, where is
the use of the lions howling about injustice? Society has the knife and
the pencil; that's the long and the short of it; and if people don't
behave themselves they feel 'em both, and have to knock under. They're
knifed first, and then caricatured--as the lions were.

* * *

"Excelling!--it is rather a Dead Sea apple, I fear. The effort is
happiness, but the fruit always seems poor."

Lady Cardiff could not patiently hear such nonsense.

"There you are again, my dear feminine Alceste," she said irritably,
"looking at things from your solitary standpoint on that rock of yours
in the middle of the sea. _You_ are thinking of the excelling of genius,
of the possessor of an ideal fame, of the 'Huntress mightier than the
moon' and _I_ am thinking of the woman who excels in Society--who has
the biggest diamonds, the best _chef_, the most lovers, the most _chic_
and _chien_, who leads the fashion, and condescends when she takes tea
with an empress. But even from your point of view on your rock, I can't
quite believe it. Accomplished ambition must be agreeable. To look back
and say, 'I have achieved!'--what leagues of sunlight sever that proud
boast from the weary sigh, 'I have failed!' Fame must console."

"Perhaps; but the world, at least, does its best that it should not. Its
glory discs are of thorns."

"You mean that superiority has its attendant shadow, which is calumny