ief. You
praise her with almost hysterical gratitude. But if, as is far more
likely, her beauty proves to be of that kind which exists only in the eyes
of a single beholder, what a plight is yours! How you strive to look as if
she were a new Helen, and how hopelessly unconvincing is your weary
expression--as unconvincing as one's expression when, having weakly
pretended acquaintance with a strange author, we feign ecstatic
recognition of some passage or episode quoted by his ruthless admirer.
There is this hope in the case of the photograph: that its amorous
possessor will probably be incapable of imagining any one insensitive to
such a Golconda of charms, and you have always in your power the revenge
of showing him your own sacred graven image.

Is it not curious that the very follies we delight in for ourselves should
seem so stupid, so absolutely vulgar, when practised by others? The last
illusion to forsake a man is the absolute belief in his own refinement.

A test experience in other people's poetry is to sit in the pit of a
theatre and watch 'Arry and 'Arriet making love and eating oranges
simultaneously. 'Arry has a low forehead, close, black, oily hair, his
eyes and nose are small, and his face is freckled. His clothes are
painfully his best, he wears an irrelevant flower, and his tie has escaped
from the stud and got high into his neck, eclipsing his collar. 'Arriet
has thick unexpressive features, relying rather on the expressiveness of
her flaunting hat, she wears a straight fringe low down on her forehead,
and endeavours to disguise her heavy _ennui_ by an immovable simper. This
pair loll one upon each other. Whether lights be high or low they hold
each other's hands, hands hard and coarse with labour, with nails bitten
down close to the quick. But, for all that, they, in their strange uncouth
fashion, would seem to be loving each other. 'Not we alone have passions
hymeneal,' sings an aristocratic poet. They smile at each other, an
obvious animal smile, and you perhaps shudder. Or you study them for a
realistic novel, or you call up that touch of nature our great poet talks
of. But somehow you cannot forget how their lips will stick and smell of
oranges when they kiss each other on the way home. What is the truth about
this pair? Is it in the unlovely details on which, maybe, we have too much
insisted--or behind these are we to imagine their souls radiant in
celestial nuptials?

Mr. Chevalier may be said