"Good--excellent," she approved. "But--but what do you mean by 'in a sense'?" "Ah," said he, darkly nodding, "I mean whole worlds by that." "I don't understand," said she, her face prepared to fall. "It isn't one woman--it's a score, a century, of the dear things," he announced. Her face fell. "Oh--?" she faltered. "It's a love affair with a type," he explained. She frowned upon him. "A love affair with a type--?" "Yes," said he. She shook her head. "I give you up. In one breath you speak like a Mohammedan, in the next like--I don't know what." "With these," said John, his band stretched towards the wall. "With the type of the Quattrocento." He got upon his feet, and moved from picture to picture; and a fire, half indeed of mischief; but half it may be of real enthusiasm, glimmered in his eyes. "With these lost ladies of old years; these soft-coloured shadows, that were once rosy flesh; these proud, humble, innocent, subtle, brave, shy, pious, pleasure-loving women of the long ago. With them; with their hair and eyes and jewels, their tip-tilted, scornful, witty little noses, their 'throats so round and lips so red,' their splendid raiment; with their mirth, pathos, passion, kindness and cruelty, their infinite variety, their undying youth. Ah, the pity of it! Their undying youth--and they so irrevocably dead. Peace be to their souls! See," he suddenly declaimed, laughing, "how the sun, the very sun in heaven, is contending with me, as to which of us shall do them the greater homage, the sun that once looked on their living forms, and remembers--see how he lights memorial lamps about them," for the sun, reflected from the polished floor, threw a sheen upon the ancient canvases, and burned bright in the bosses of the frames. "Give me these," he wound up, "a book or two, and a jug of the parroco's 'included wine'--my wilderness is paradise enow." Lady Blanchemain's eyes, as she listened, had become deep wells of disappointment, then gushing fountains of reproach. "Oh, you villain!" she groaned, when he had ended, shaking her pretty fist. "So to have raised my expectations, and so to dash them!--Do you _really_ mean," still clinging to a shred of hope, she pleaded, "really, really mean that there's no--no actual woman?" "I'm sorry," said John, "but I'm afraid I really, really do." "And you're not--not really in love with any one?" "No--not really," he said, with a mien that feigned contrition. "But at your age--how old are you?" she broke off to demand. "Somewhere between twenty-nine and thirty, I believe," he laughed. "And in such a romantic environment, and not on account of a woman! It's downright unnatural," she declared. "It's flat treason against the kingly state of youth." "I'm awfully sorry," said John. "Yet, after all, what's the good of repining? Nothing could happen even if there were a woman." Lady Blanchemain looked alarmed.