oasis intensified the blue of the desert
sky; now a Persian bowl of hues that changed with a turn of the head or
a quiver of the lids; now a Spanish plaque gleaming with metallic,
opalescent colors, too indefinable to name, too fugitive for the eye to
transmit to memory. Later he picked up strange examples which, like
meteoric stones from another sphere, had found their mysterious way from
Chinese palaces to his grimy haunts in London, Amsterdam, or Florence,
as the case might be--a blue-and-white jar of Chia-ching, or a Han
ceremonial vessel in emerald green, incrusted from long burial, or a
celadon bowl that resembled a cup of jade, or some gorgeously decorated
bit of Famille Verte. He knew at first little or nothing of the nature
and history of these precious "finds." He saw only that they were rare
and lovely and that through beauty as a means of grace he entered into
communion with men who had neither epoch nor ideals in common with
himself.

In the end he became an authority on ceramic art by the simple process
of knowing more about it than anybody else. When the trustees of the
Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts awoke to that fact, he was an assistant
professor of Greek in the University. Under his care, in the new
position they offered him, a collection was formed of great celebrity
and value; but nothing in it was ever quite so dear to him as the modest
treasures he had acquired for himself in the days of his young
enthusiasm, when his fellow-countrymen as yet cared for none of these
things. As Olivia sat and talked her eye traveled absently from barbaric
Rouen cornucopias and cockatoos to the incrusted snails and serpents of
Bernard Palissy, resting long on a flowered jardiniere by Veuve Perrin,
of Marseilles. She had little technical knowledge of the objects
surrounding her, but she submitted to the strange and soothing charm
they never failed to work on her--the charm of stillness, of peace, as
of things which, made for common homely uses, had passed beyond that
stage into an existence of serenity and loveliness.

"When you spoke the other day," she said, after the conversation had
turned directly on her father's affairs--"when you spoke the other day
about a pillar of cloud, I suppose you meant what one might call--an
overruling sense of right."

"That might do as one definition."

"Because in that case you may like to know that I think I've seen it."

"I thought you would if you looked for it."

"I didn't