Idealism is our perversion, and the Soul depraves us. We are drinking the dregs of the immaterial and have touched the dingiest bottoms of purity. The relativity of the object has turned our heads, and we are soul-mad. Apotheosis of soul and annihilation of body, the only seemly pegs on which well-thinking “jeunes” can now hang their periods, which once the bait-hook of “analytical observation” alone could catch, are the principles of our disintegration. Their work is swift, for the fear of lagging in the race for modernity speeds it, and it is wholesale. Nature and common-sense crumble, and sincerity has long since withered away. Cabaret conversations are of the stupidity of sex, and small-talk in drawing-rooms runs on the idiocy of love. Mating is a platitude, begetting an absurdity, and motherhood has the quaintness of things obsolete. The abolition of sex is the new crusade, and the last religion is of the future, when the aristocracy of the intellect shall, Jupiter-like, eschew animality, and engender its children in a thought. Literature foretells the time, and art paints the soul with daring straightforwardness on canvas, using microscopic brushes dipped in gold and devoting years to the task, for psychic delineation is minute and precious. Soul gives form, and the ethereal must take outward shape. Hence the new attitude. A virginal appearance and the candor of an “enfant de chœur” are its necessary conditions. The hair, dark for women, preferably golden for men, is long, forlorn, and parted. Complexions are of wax when feminine; when masculine, of pale peach-blossom! A cherub’s smile plays on the lips, and eyes must, within the bounds of feasibility, show the vacuity of an infant’s. In voice and gesture, being more easily practised, is the new puerility most felicitously expressed. The secret lies in the suppression of both. The voice must be “white,” and every accent, every shade of tone that gives but the faint image of a color, is a flaw. A still grosser imperfection would be aught of hasty or unmeasured in gesture or movement. In small-talk anent the Soul, as in the impressive elocution of nursery rhymes, carnal oblivion must be insured by immovableness of limb, and further than the uplifting of a finger the soulful do not venture. The golden-haired youth, lisping with the “voix blanche” of white-robed “premières communiantes,” pictures the perversion of purity.