The rooms of the society are well-filled to-night, and all the chief attractions in force. The people who could lead conversation, and who had strong opinions, and were able to put them cleverly, had assembled. The _habitués_ had all some distinguishing trait, some particular socialistic or anti-religious fad; no two exactly agreed on anything, except that it was of the first importance to smash up existing beliefs. Hinduism, Confucianism, Judaism, Buddhism, were all held to be much better than Christianity as systems of religious thought, but that was because they were all impossible for our age; the one thing that was possible, that had established itself by renovating society and redeeming the world, must be crushed and cast out, because it was not the outcome of the age of steam and the electric light. There was scarcely anybody in the room who did not owe his or her character and virtuous environment entirely to a Christian training, which had made them decent members of society, and which they were anxious to requite by proving its incapacity to be any longer a suitable moral system for our age. A curious and a priggish set of imperfectly educated and vain people; mostly young, impracticable, and unversed in the wants and remedies of a work-a-day world. It is worth while to be introduced to these typical folk, who are bent on substituting some of their nostrums to take the place of the old religion when it dies of age. There was a tall, dark-eyed girl on the lounge in the corner—Miss Mardall. She was a designer of high art tapestry; was lean, sallow, handsome in the æsthetic sense, not more than twenty-five, and a disciple of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. She grouped her wild flowers to make the most delightfully artistic patterns for her fabrics; but in their forms, their colours, their odours, she recognised nothing but the grossest and most material adaptation to the necessities of their existence and diffusion. Their colours meant nothing but distinguishing characteristics to aid in their fertilisation; their odours served to attract insects to brush so much pollen from their stamens and their pistils; their exquisite forms and intricacies of structure meant so many difficult passages the bees would have to knock against, and so disseminate so much fructifying material. And thus all the floral gems of the fields and woods were, in this nineteenth-century girl’s eyes, so many machines for making so much vegetable material for the furtherance of the animal world; and if they had any of the qualities one chose to term beauty, it was simply the beauty of adaptation of means to end. She was much too clever to be a poet, and was utilitarian and material to the last degree. Adelaide Rowland, her friend, sitting next to her, under the picture of the storming of the Bastille, went even further. Her pessimism was so pronounced that she thought it a mistake to continue to exist. She had no desire that the human or any