Everyone who goes to Charleston in the spring, soon or late, visits Magnolia Gardens. A painter of flowers and trees myself, I specialise in gardens, and freely assert that none in the world is so beautiful as this. Even before the magnolias come out it consigns the Boboli at Florence, the Cinnamon Gardens of Colombo, Concepcion at Malaga, Versailles, Hampton Court, the Generaliffe at Granada, and La Mortola to the category of ‘also ran.’ Nothing so free, gracious, so lovely and wistful, nothing so richly coloured, yet so ghostlike, exists planted by the sons of men. It is a kind of paradise which has wandered down, a miraculously enchanted wilderness. Brilliant with azaleas, or magnolia-pale, it centres round a pool of water overhung by tall trunks festooned with the grey Florida moss. Beyond anything I have ever seen it is other-worldly. And I went there day after day, drawn as one is drawn in youth by visions of the Ionian Sea, of the East, or the Pacific Isles. I used to sit paralysed by the absurdity of putting brush to canvas in front of that dream-pool. I wanted to paint of it a picture like that of the fountain, by Helleu, which hangs in the Luxembourg. But I knew I never should. I was sitting there one sunny afternoon with my back to a clump of azaleas watching an old coloured gardener--so old that he had started life as an ‘owned’ negro they said, and certainly still retained the familiar suavity of the oldtime darkie--I was watching him prune the shrubs when I heard the voice of Rupert K. Vaness say, quite close: “There’s nothing for me but beauty, Miss Monroy.” The two were evidently just behind my azalea clump, perhaps four yards away, yet as invisible as if in China. “Beauty is a wide, wide word. Define it, Mr. Vaness.” “An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory--it stands before me.” “Come now, that’s just a get-out. Is beauty of the flesh or of the spirit?” “What is the spirit as you call it? I’m a Pagan.” “Oh! So am I. But the Greeks were Pagans.” “Well, spirit is only the refined side of sensual appreciations.” “I wonder!” “I have spent my life in finding that out.” “Then, the feeling this garden rouses in me is purely sensuous?” “Of course. If you were standing there blind and deaf, without the powers of scent and touch, where would your feeling be?” “You are very discouraging, Mr. Vaness.” “No, madam--I face facts. When I was a youngster I had plenty of fluffy aspiration towards I didn’t know what--I even used to write poetry.” “Oh! Mr. Vaness, was it good?” “It was not, and I very soon learned that a genuine sensation was worth all the uplift in the world.” “What is going to happen when your senses strike work?” “I shall sit in the sun and fade out.” “I certainly do like your frankness.”