Of course I became, in some degree, a source of revenue to him. Understand, there was always a genuine exchange of so much for so much; he was not a "baraseet"--oh, no!--yet he hung on. We still have, stowed somewhere, a large case of butterflies, another of splendid moths, and a smaller one of glistening beetles. Nor can I begrudge their cost, of whatever sort, even now when my delight in them is no longer a constant enthusiasm. The cases of specimens have passed from daily sight, but thenceforth, as never before, our garden was furnished with guests--pages, ladies, poets, fairies, emperors, goddesses--coming and going on gorgeous wings, and none ever a stranger more than once. My non-parasitic friend "opened a new world" to me; a world that so flattered one with its grace and beauty, its marvellous delicacy and minuteness, its glory of color and curiousness of marking, and its exquisite adaptation of form to need and function, that in my meaner depths, or say my childish shallows--I resented Mrs. Fontenette's making the same avowal for herself--I didn't believe her! I do not say she was consciously shamming; but I could see she drank in the Baron's revelations with no more true spiritual exaltation than the quivering twilight moths drew from our veranda honeysuckles. Yet it was mainly her vanity that feasted, not any lower impulse--of which, you know, there are several--and, possibly, all her vanity craved at first was the tinsel distinction of unusual knowledge. One night she got into my dreams. I seemed to be explaining to Monsieur Fontenette apologetically that this newly opened world was not at all separate from my old one, but shone everywhere in it, like our winged guests in our garden, and followed and surrounded me far beyond the Baron's company, terminology, and magnifying-glass, lightening the burdens and stress of the very counting-room and exchange. Whereat he seemed to flare up! "Ah!--you--I believe yes! But she?" he waved his hand in fierce unbelief.