quiet, courteous people, would have been delightful if they had not been so cultivated.  Culture lay about in lumps; it had never soaked in.  The result was that I felt I could never get to know any of these agreeable people at all.  One tried to talk, and one was met with a proffer of a lump of culture.  Then, as I say, it was all in pieces; it was not part of a plan or an attitude of mind; it had all been laboriously collected, and it was just as it had been discovered; it did not seem to have undergone any mental process.

And then, further, I felt that it was all too comfortable—­it was all built on a foundation of comfort; that lay really at the bottom of it all.  The house was too full of beautiful things; the dinner was too long and too good; the wine was too choice.  I am not going to pretend that I do not like comfort; but I do not like luxury, and this was luxurious.  I do not want to have a long and elaborate dinner; it should be simplex munditiis, as Horace said.  And beautiful pictures and furniture are more beautiful if there is not too much of them.  One felt, in this warm, fragrant house, with every room and wall crammed with charming objects, with every desire anticipated, the dinner-table bright with flowers and silver, with “orient liquor in a crystal glass,” as if one stifled under a load of delights; I yearned for plainer rooms and simpler fare, and for freer and more genuine talk.  One felt that the aim of the circle was satisfaction rather than beauty; to be sheltered and caressed rather than to be invigorated and tranquillised.

I was standing in a drawing-room one night before dinner, already sated with the food, the talk, the music, and the art of the day, as the guests began to arrive:  such clean, brilliant men, faultlessly appointed; such beautiful and delicate women, with a vague sense of fragrance and jewels, came stealing in.  Suddenly among the company there came stalking in a great literary man, an old friend of my own; handsome, too, and well-appointed enough, but with a touch of roughness and vigour that made him, I thought, like a chieftain among courtiers; and wearing the haggard air of the man who toils at his art, and cannot achieve his incommunicable hopes or capture his divine dreams.  He came up to me, smiling, in a secluded corner.  “Hullo,” he said, “mon vieux! who would have thought of finding you here in the island of Circe?”

“I might ask the same question,” I said.  “But perhaps I have the sacred herb, moly, the ‘small unsightly root’ in my bosom, to guard me against the spells.”

“The leaf has prickles on it,” he said, with a smile; “there is nothing prickly about our friends here.”

This was mere sword-play, of course, not real talk; and then we had five minutes’ talk which I will not put down, because I should betray secrets, and secrets too in their rough, uncut form, the gems of art, which must be cut before they are presented.  But I got more out of those five minutes than I did out of the rest of my visit.