ow how to talk to that man!"

"Thelma," says Sir Philip, "this is the celebrated author, Beaufort
Lovelace,--you have often heard me speak of him."

She extends both her hands, and her eyes deepen and flash.

"Ah! you are one of those great men whom we all love and admire!" she
says, with direct frankness,--and the cynical Beau, who has never yet
received so sincere a compliment, feels himself coloring like a
school-girl. "I am so very proud to meet you! I have read your wonderful
book, 'Azaziel,' and it made me glad and sorry together. For why do you
draw a noble example and yet say at the same time that it is impossible
to follow it? Because in one breath you inspire us to be good, and yet
you tell us we shall never become so! That is not right,--is it?"

Beau meets her questioning glance with a grave smile.

"It is most likely entirely wrong from _your_ point of view, Lady
Errington," he said. "Some day we will talk over the matter. You shall
show me the error of my ways. Perhaps you will put life, and the
troublesome business of living, in quite a new light for me! You see, we
novelists have an unfortunate trick of looking at the worst or most
ludicrous side of everything--we can't help it! So many apparently lofty
and pathetic tragedies turn out, on close examination, to be the meanest
and most miserable of farces,--it's no good making them out to be grand
Greek poems when they are only base doggerel rhymes. Besides, it's the
fashion nowadays to be _chiffonniers_ in literature--to pick up the rags
of life and sort them in all their uncomeliness before the morbid eyes
of the public. What's the use of spending thought and care on the
manufacture of a jewelled diadem, and offering it to the people on a
velvet cushion, when they prefer an _olla-podrida_ of cast-off clothing,
dried bones and candle-ends? In brief, what would it avail to write as
grandly as Shakespeare or Scott, when society clamors for Zola and
others of his school?"

There was a little group round them by this time,--men generally
collected wherever Beau Lovelace aired his opinions,--and a double
attraction drew them together now in the person of the lovely woman to
whom he was holding forth.

Marcia Van Clupp stared mightily--surely the Norwegian peasant would not
understand Beau's similes,--for they were certainly incomprehensible to
Marcia. As for his last remark--why! she had read all Zola's novels in
the secrecy of her own room, and had glo