Forgive my sensuousness, dear reader; remember it was the first time I breathed the soft Southern air, the first time I saw orange trees; remember I am a poet, a modern Jason in search of a golden fleece. "Is this the garden of the Hesperides?" I asked myself, for nothing seemed more unreal than the golden fruit hanging like balls of yellow worsted among dark and sleek leaves; it reminded me of the fruit I used to see when I was a child under glass shades in lodging-houses, but I knew, nevertheless, that I was looking upon orange trees, and that the golden fruit growing amid the green leaves was the fruit I used to pick from the barrows when I was a boy; the fruit of which I ate so much in boyhood that I cannot eat it any longer; the fruit whose smell we associate with the pit of a theatre; the fruit that women never grow weary of, high and low. It seemed to me a wonderful thing that at last I should see oranges growing on trees; I so happy, so singularly happy, that I am nearly sure that happiness is, after all, no more than a faculty for being surprised. Since I was a boy I never felt so surprised as I did that morning. The _valet de chambre_ brought in my bath, and while I bathed and dressed I reflected on the luck of him who in middle age can be astonished by a blue sky, and still find the sunlight a bewitchment. But who would not be bewitched by the pretty sunlight that finds its way into the gardens of Plessy? I knew I was going to walk with Doris by a sea blue as any drop-curtain, and for a moment Doris seemed to be but a figure on a drop-curtain. Am I very cynical? But are we not all figures on drop-curtains, and is not everything comic opera, and "La Belle Hélène" perhaps the only true reality? Amused by the idea of Jason or Paris or Menelaus in Plessy, I asked Doris what music was played by the local orchestra, and she told me it played "The March of Aïda" every evening. "Oh, the cornet," I said, and I understood that the mission of Plessy was to redeem one from the coil of one's daily existence, from Hebrew literature and its concomitants, bishops, vicars, and curates--all these, especially bishops, are regarded as being serious; whereas French novels and their concomitants, pretty girls, are supposed to represent the trivial side of life. A girl becomes serious only when she is engaged to be married; the hiring of the house in which the family is reared is regarded as serious; in fact all prejudices are serious; every deflection from the normal, from the herd, is looked upon as trivial; and I suppose that this is right: the world could not do without the herd nor could the herd do without us--the eccentrics who go to Plessy in quest of a golden fleece instead of putting stoves in the parish churches (stoves and organs are always regarded as too devilishly serious for words).