The charm of the reader's voice had held us spellbound, and the poem was well received; but after the usual compliments there was a pause, and then Ideala burst out impetuously: "I am sick of those old Italian lovers," she said; "they float into everything. Their story is the essence with which two-thirds of our love literature is flavoured. We should never have received them in society; why do we tolerate them in books? I like my company to be respectable even there; and when an author asks me to admire and sympathise with such people he insults me." "They must be brought in, though, for the sake of contrast," somebody observed. "They should be kept in their proper place, then," she answered. "You may choose what you please to point a moral, but for pity's sake be careful about what you use to adorn a tale." "Moral or no moral," said the young sculptor, "I think a new poem of any kind a thing to be thankful for." "And do you call that kind of thing new?" said Ideala. "I should say it was a fine compound of all the poems of the kind, and several other kinds, that have ever been written, with a dash of the peculiarly refined immorality of our own times, from which nothing is sacred; thrown in to make weight. Such writing, Like a new disease, unknown to men, Creeps, no precaution used, among the crowd, . . . . . . . . . . . and saps The fealty of our friends, and stirs the pulse With devil's leaps, and poisons half the young. It is the feeling of the day accurately defined. Nobody sighs for love and peace now. The cry is for the indulgence of some fiery passion for an hour, and then, perdition!--if you like--since that is the recognised price of it." "Our loves are more intense than they used to be," said the sculptor, sighing. "Love!" Ideala answered. "Oh, do not desecrate 'the eternal God-word, love!' There is little enough of that in the business that goes by its name now-a-days. I am a lady--I cannot use the right word. But it is none the less the thing I mean because it calls blasphemously on God Almighty to help it to fulfil itself." "Well," said Charlie Lloyd, deprecatingly, "I didn't offer this, you know, as an admirable specimen of what our day can produce. I told you I hadn't read it, and now that I have I don't suppose any one has offered it to the public as a serious expression of sentiment." "You do not think people write books about what they really feel?" said Ideala. "I believe they do when the feeling is shameful. If you want to keep a secret, publish the exact truth in a book, and nobody will believe a word of it. I think people who publish such productions should be burned on a pile of their own works." "The writer is young, doubtless," I said, apologetically. It gives one a shock to hear a woman say harsh things. "He was evidently not too young to have bad thoughts," said Claudia, supporting her friend; "and he was certainly old enough to know better."