"_Well!_" commented the old gentleman.

Mr. Marsh had not been interested in this episode and had stood gazing
admiringly up at the huge pine-tree, divining its bulk and mass against
the black sky.

"Like Milton's Satan, isn't it?" was his comment as they walked on,
"with apologies for the triteness of the quotation."

For a time nothing was said, and then Marsh began, "Now I've seen it,
your rite of the worship of beauty. And do you know what was really
there? A handful of dull, insensitive, primitive beings, hardened and
calloused by manual toil and atrophied imaginations, so starved for any
variety in their stupefyingly monotonous life that they welcome
anything, anything at all as a break . . . only if they could choose, they
would infinitely prefer a two-headed calf or a bearded woman to your
flower. The only reason they go to see that is because it is a
curiosity, not because of its beauty, because it blooms once a year
only, at night, and because there is only one of them in town. Also
because everybody else goes to see it. They go to look at it only
because there aren't any movies in Ashley, nor anything else. And you
know all this just as well as I do."

"Oh, Mr. Welles," Marise appealed to him, "do you think that is the
truth of the facts?"

The old man pronounced judgment gently. "Well, I don't know that
_any_thing is the truth. I should say that both of you told the truth
about it. The truth's pretty big for any one person to tell. Isn't it
all in the way you look at it?" He added, "Only personally I think Mrs.
Crittenden's the nicest way."

Marsh was delighted with this. "There! I hope you're satisfied. You've
been called 'nice.' That ought to please any good American."

"I wonder, Mr. Welles," Marise said in an ostentatiously casual tone, "I
wonder if Mr. Marsh had been an ancient Greek, and had stood watching
the procession going up the Acropolis hill, bearing the thank-offerings
from field and loom and vineyard, what do you suppose he would have
seen? Dullness and insensitiveness in the eyes of those Grecian
farmer-lads, no doubt, occupied entirely with keeping the oxen in line;
a low vulgar stare of bucolic curiosity as the country girls, bearing
their woven linen, looked up at the temple. Don't you suppose he would
have thought they managed those things a great deal more artistically in
Persia?"

"Well, I don't know much about the ancient Greeks," said Mr. Welles
mildly, "but I guess Vincen