“And no wonder,” riposted John, with a flowery bow.

“You’re very good—­but you confuse the issue,” said she.  “In my time the world was young and romantic.  In this age of prose and prudence—­is it a woman?”

“The world is still, is always, young and romantic,” said John, sententious.  “I can’t admit that an age of prose and prudence is possible.  The poetry of earth is never dead, and no more is its folly.  The world is always romantic, if you have the three gifts needful to make it so.”

“Is it a woman?” repeated Lady Blanchemain.

“And the three gifts are,” said he, “Faith, and the sense of Beauty, and the sense of Humour.”

“And I should have thought, an attractive member of the opposite sex,” said she. “Is it a woman?”

“Well,” he at last replied, appearing to take counsel with himself, “I don’t know why I should forbid myself the relief of owning up to you that in a sense it is.”

“Hurray!” cried she, moving in her seat, agog, as one who scented her pet diversion.  “A love affair!  I’ll be your confidante.  Tell me all about it.”

“Yes, in a sense, a love affair,” he confessed.

“Good—­excellent,” she approved.  “But—­but what do you mean by ’in a sense’?”

“Ah,” said he, darkly nodding, “I mean whole worlds by that.”

“I don’t understand,” said she, her face prepared to fall.

“It isn’t one woman—­it’s a score, a century, of the dear things,” he announced.

Her face fell.  “Oh—?” she faltered.

“It’s a love affair with a type,” he explained.

She frowned upon him.  “A love affair with a type—?”

“Yes,” said he.

She shook her head.  “I give you up.  In one breath you speak like a Mohammedan, in the next like—­I don’t know what.”

“With these,” said John, his band stretched towards the wall.  “With the type of the Quattrocento.”

He got upon his feet, and moved from picture to picture; and a fire, half indeed of mischief; but half it may be of real enthusiasm, glimmered in his eyes.

“With these lost ladies of old years; these soft-coloured shadows, that were once rosy flesh; these proud, humble, innocent, subtle, brave, shy, pious, pleasure-loving women of the long ago.  With them; with their hair and eyes and jewels, their tip-tilted, scornful, witty little noses, their ‘throats so round and lips so red,’ their splendid raiment; with their mirth, pathos, passion, kindness and cruelty, their infinite variety, their undying youth.  Ah, the pity of it!  Their undying youth—­and they so irrevocably dead.  Peace be to their souls!  See,” he suddenly declaimed, laughing, “how the sun, the very sun in heaven, is contending with me, as to which of us shall do them the greater homage, the sun that once looked on their living forms, and remembers—­see how he lights memorial lamps about them,” for the sun, reflected from the polished floor, threw a sheen upon the ancient canvases, and burned bright in the bosses of the frames.  “Give me these,” he wound up, “a book or two, and a jug of the parroco’s ’included wine’—­my wilderness is paradise enow.”