“It is a barren faith to me,” said Nellie.

“Then I do not express it well,” said Geisner.  “But is it more barren-sounding than utter Negation?  Besides, where do we differ really?  All of us who think at all agree more or less.  We use different terms, pursue different lines of thought, that is all.  It is only the dullard, who mistakes the symbol for the idea, the letter for the spirit, the metaphor for the thought within, who is a bigot.  The true thinker is an artist, the true artist is a thinker, for Art is the expression of thought in thing.  The highest thought, as Connie rightly told us before you came, is Emotion.”

“I recollect the Venus in the Louvre,” interjected Harry.  “When I saw it first it seemed to me most beautiful, perfect, the loveliest thing that ever sculptor put chisel to.  But as I saw it more I forgot that it was beautiful or perfect.  It grew on me till it lived.  I went day after day to see it, and when I was glad it laughed at me, and when I was downhearted it was sad with me, and when I was angry it scowled, and when I dreamed of Love it had a kiss on its lips.  Every mood of mine it changed with; every thought of mine it knew.  Was not that Art, Nellie?”

“The artist in you,” she answered.

“No.  More than that.  The artist in the sculptor, breathing into the stone a perfect sympathy with the heart of men.  His genius grasped this, that beauty, perfect beauty, is the typifying not of one passion, one phase of human nature, but of the aggregation of all the moods which sway the human mind.  There is a great thought in that.  It is ’the healthy mind in the healthy body,’ as the sculptor feels it.  And ’the healthy mind in the healthy body’ is one of the great thoughts of the past.  It is a thought which is the priceless gift of Greek philosophy to the world.  I hold it higher than that of the Sphinx, which Ford admires so.”

“What does the Sphinx mean?” asked Ned.

“Much the same, differently expressed,” answered Ford.  “That Life with us is an intellectual head based on a brutish body, fecund and powerful; that Human Nature crouches on the ground and reads the stars; that man has a body and a mind, and that both must be cared for.”

“They had a strange way of caring for both, your Egyptians,” remarked Nellie.  “The people were all slaves and the rulers were all priests.”

At this criticism, so naive and pithy and so like Nellie, there was a general laugh.

“At least the priests were wise and the slaves were cared for,” retorted Ford, nothing abashed.  “I recollect when I was a little fellow in England.  My people were farm labourers, west of England labourers.  We lived in a little stone cottage that had little diamond-paned windows.  The kitchen floor was below the ground, and on wet days my mother used to make a little dam of rags at the door to keep the trickling water back.  We lived on bread and potatoes and broad beans, and not too much of that.  We got