Florian brought down his stick on the pavement with a bang. “It’s atrocious,” he said, snorting; “I declare, quite atrocious. Here’s this exquisite creature—a banquet fit for the Gods—with her superb voice and her queenly beauty; a creature almost too ethereal for ordinary humanity to touch or handle; one that should be reserved by common consent for the delectation of the very pink and pick of the species”—and he drew himself up to his five feet nothing with a full consciousness of his own claim to be duly enrolled in that select category—“here’s this exquisite creature, who should be held in trust, as it were, for the noblest and truest and best of our kind—a Koh-i-noor among women—flung away upon a solid, stolid, three-per-cent. investing, money-grubbing, German-speaking beerhouse-keeper. Pah! It makes me sick! This Danae to a Satyr! How a Greek would have writhed at it!” “And yet I thought,” Will murmured, reflectively, with a quiet little smile, “you considered her a cow-girl, and looked upon her as just fit for gentlemen to play skittles with!” It took a great deal to abash Florian. He paused for a second, then he answered with warmth, “Now, there, Deverill! that’s just like you. You want me to be consistent! But the philosophic mind, as Herbert Spencer remarks, is always open to modification by circumstances. Consistency is the virtue of the Philistine intellect; it means, inability to march abreast with events, to readjust one’s ideas, one’s sympathies, one’s sentiments, to the ever-changing face of circumambient nature. When we saw Linnet first in the Tyrol, long ago, why, the girl was a cow-girl; a cow-girl she was, and a cow-girl I called her. I frankly recognised the facts of life as I found them—though I saw even then, with a voice like that, there was no perilous pinnacle of name or fame to which fate might not summon her. Now that she reappears in London once more, a flaming meteor of song, the cynosure of neighbouring eyes, a flashing diamond of the purest water, I recognise equally the altered facts. I allow that training, education, travel, the society of cultivated men and women, have practically made a brand-new Linnet of her. It’s that brand-new Linnet I admire and adore—that queen of the stage, not the Tyrolese cow-girl.” Will turned sharp down Craven Street “And I,” he said, with a Parthian shot, “I admire and adore the real woman herself—the same Linnet still that we knew in the Zillerthal.” Meanwhile, Andreas Hausberger, lighting a big cigar, had taken his wife down to a cab outside the supper-room. “O Andreas!” Linnet cried, in German, “you’ve called a hansom. I can’t bear those things, you know. I wanted a four-wheeler.”