‘I hope you won’t be angry with her for saying that,’ added Edgar apologetically, as he hastily folded the letter, feeling that he had read too much. ‘You know she means it kindly.’ ‘I know she has been ever so much more indulgent than I deserve,’ answered Daphne gaily; ‘I mean to be a most dutiful daughter-in-law, and to learn everything your mother will deign to teach me in the way of housekeeping, from hemming tea-cloths to making mincemeat. One ought to make one’s own mincemeat, ought one not, Edgar? Do you and I belong to the class who make their own mincemeat?’ ‘I think it’s rather a question of inclination than of rank, love. But I’d rather you left the pies and puddings to the cook. I’d rather have you riding across the Vale of the Red Horse with me than stoning raisins or chopping suet in the still-room.’ ‘And I would rather, too.’ ‘Do you know that there is a great deal of quiet sagacity in your mother’s gentle depreciation of Daphne’s passion for mountain scenery?’ said Gerald, his face lighting up with something of the old mischievous spirit, something of that gaiety of heart with which he had teased Daphne in the days when she was Poppæa and he was Nero! ‘This frantic admiration of snow-peaks is only a modern feeling, a mere fashion and fad of the moment, like the worship of Chippendale furniture and Adam chimney-pieces. The old Greeks knew nothing of it. The ancients never raved about their mountains. They valued them only because their tops touched the blue ether, the world peopled by the gods. Even your Shakespeare, the man of universal mind, had no passion for mountain lands.’ ‘Because he had never seen anything higher than the Wrekin, poor darling!’ said Daphne, with delicious compassion; as if she were speaking of a London Arab who had never seen a buttercup. ‘Ruskin thinks it was good for his genius to have seen so little. “No mountain passions were to be allowed to Shakespeare,” he says; “Shakespeare could be allowed no mountains—not even any supreme natural beauty. He had to be left with his kingcups and clover, pansies, the passing clouds, the Avon’s flow, and the undulating hills and woods of Warwickshire, lest it should make him in the least overrate their power on the strong, full-fledged minds of men.”’ ‘That is remarkably clever,’ said Daphne; ‘but there is a tone of calm superiority about it which makes my blood boil. Why will all the critics insist upon patronising Shakespeare, as if they knew so much more about him than ever be know about himself? Talk of vivisection indeed, vivisection is not half so atrocious as the way Shakespeare has been treated by modern criticism!’