llen is arranging it for me. I have not seen her yet--I
mean the heiress."

"If I were a man I think I should keep my freedom and--and--work," I
faltered.

He looked at me, perfectly astonished.

"But what can I do?" he asked. "Only go into the city, and that is
quite played out now. I have no head for business, and it would seem
to me to be rather mean just to trade upon my name to get unsuspecting
people to take shares in concerns; whereas if I marry an heiress it is
a square game--I at least give her some return for her money."

"There is a great deal in what you say," I agreed.

"I told Cordelia--she is a cousin of mine, you know--I told her I
would not have a very ugly one, and I should prefer that she should be
a good, healthy brewer's daughter. Our family is over-well bred. You
see, if you are going to sacrifice yourself to keep up your name,
you may as well choose some one that will be of some ultimate use to
it. Now we want a strain of thick red blood in our veins; ours is a
great deal too blue. We are becoming reedy shaped, and more or less
idiotic."

He said all this quite gravely. He had evidently studied the
subject, and as I looked at him I felt he was perfectly right. If he
represented the type of his race, it had certainly grown effete.

"I won't have an American," he continued. "They are intellectual
companions before marriage, and they are generally so agreeable you
don't notice how nervous and restless they are really, but I would not
contemplate one as a wife. I must have a solid English cow-woman."

He stretched himself by my side and began pulling a bit of grass to
pieces. His hands look transparent, and he has the most beautifully
shaped filbert nails; his ears, on the contrary, are not perfect, but
stick out like a monkey's.

"You see, I should always live my own life," he went on, lazily. "I
worship the beautiful. The pagans' highest expression of beauty which
moved the world was in sculpture--cold and pure marble of divine form.
That awakened their emotions; one reads they had a number of emotions.
The Renaissance people, to take a medium time, expressed themselves by
painting glorious colors on flat canvas; they also had emotions. Those
two arts now are more or less dead. At any rate, they have ceased to
influence masses of people. Our great expression is music. We are
moved by music. It gives us emotions _en bloc_--all of us--some by
the tune of 'Tommy Atkins,' and others by Wagner