“You see, I should always live my own life,” he went on, lazily.  “I worship the beautiful.  The pagans’ highest expression of beauty which moved the world was in sculpture—­cold and pure marble of divine form.  That awakened their emotions; one reads they had a number of emotions.  The Renaissance people, to take a medium time, expressed themselves by painting glorious colors on flat canvas; they also had emotions.  Those two arts now are more or less dead.  At any rate, they have ceased to influence masses of people.  Our great expression is music.  We are moved by music.  It gives us emotions en bloc—­all of us—­some by the tune of ‘Tommy Atkins,’ and others by Wagner.  Well, all these three—­sculpture, painting, and music—­give me pleasure, but I should not want my cow duchess to understand any of them.  I should want her to have numbers of chubby children and to fulfil her social duties, and never have to go into a rest-cure, or have a longing for sympathy.”

I said a few “yeses” and “reallys” during this long speech, and he continued, like a mill grinding coffee: 

“It don’t do to over-breed.  You are bound to turn out some toques if not altogether idiotic, and then my sense of beauty is outraged by the freaks that happen in our shapes—­you should see my two sisters, the plainest women in England.  Now you give me joy to look at.  You are quite beautiful, you know.  I never saw any one with a nose as straight and finely cut as yours.  Why do you keep putting your parasol so that I cannot see it?”

“One uses a parasol to keep off the sun, which is hot.  Would you wish me to get a sunstroke to oblige you?” And I put down my parasol still lower.

“You are selfish!” in an aggrieved voice.

“Of course.”

“And not the least ashamed of it!”

“Not the least.”

He moved his position deliberately so that he came to my other side, where the sun was not.

“I learned a certain amount of manoeuvring in South Africa, where I went for a month or two,” he said.  “I hope this side of your face will be as pretty.  People always have a better and a worse side.”

I laughed.  It was too hot to circumvent him again, and his looking at me could not hurt me.

“This is even prettier,” he said, presently.  “Where did you hide yourself, that we none of us ever saw you before you married?”

“I lived rather near here for a little while.”

“Now you look sad again.  I never watched any one’s face so much.  Yours is not like other people’s; you look like a cameo, you know.”

“Tell me about the people here,” I said.  “They are all strangers to me.”

“But I would much rather talk about you.”

“That does not interest me; you said I was selfish, so you do what I wish.”

“What can I tell you of them?  They are like all companies—­dull and amusing, mixed.  They are a fair specimen of most people one meets in the monde ou l’on s’amuse.  My cousin Lady Grenellen is perhaps the most interesting among them, as she had the most histories.”