d a little.

"Do you see, Professor, yonder is instantly obvious beauty, too, really
beauty-in-itself," resumed the count, pointing to a bed full of fat
dark-red "Sultan of Zanzibar" roses, beside which his seventeen-year-old
daughter Billy was standing.

It was very pretty to see the girl standing there by the roses in her
light-blue summer dress, her round face pink and smiling and hatless.
In the blinding sunshine her hair had a deep, warm brown like old port,
and the whole picture was as richly colored as a flower-bed. Beside
Billy stood Marion Bonnechose, the daughter of the French governess,
who had been brought up with Billy; short and dark, with brown eyes too
large for her lean, somewhat yellowish face, which were looking at
Billy with watchful interest.

"Certainly," said the professor, "Countess Sibyl is indubitably very
beautiful, but the beauty-in-itself in my dream was simply a
semicircular white tablet."

The young people had disappeared in the house, and Billy and Marion
also ran toward it, their hands full of red roses. The garden grew
quiet again. The count threw his head back a little, and drew into his
long white nose the scents of the late summer flowers, of ripe plums
and early pears, with the expression of a _gourmet_ drinking a
delicious wine. From the tennis-court a last straggler came, Boris
Dangello. He walked slowly and thoughtfully with bowed head; only when
he passed the two gentlemen he saluted them and his fine pale face
smiled, but his eyes kept their brooding expression, as if they did not
wish to disturb their own sentimental beauty.

"Also beauty," remarked the professor. "Your nephew, Mr. von Dangello,
looks unusually well."

But in this there was something that put out the count. "For a young
person," he said severely, "it is not advantageous to look so well:
that diverts and detracts."

"You think so," murmured the professor, "I don't know, I have no
experience in that line."

They had now reached the end of the garden path, stood still a moment,
and looked out over the garden gate upon the stubble-fields and cropped
meadows. Behind them the woods formed a blue-black frame about the
picture, yellow in the sunshine--that dense pine forest that extended
unbroken to the Russian border.

"I do not know whether I am mistaken," the professor began again, "but
it seems to me as if good looks were more general in the present
generation than in my youth. Nowadays every one looks