I was sitting there one sunny afternoon, with my back to a clump of azaleas, watching an old coloured gardener--so old that he had started life as an "owned" negro, they said, and certainly still retained the familiar suavity of the old-time darky--I was watching him prune the shrubs when I heard the voice of Rupert K. Vaness say, quite close: "There's nothing for me but beauty, Miss Monroy." The two were evidently just behind my azalea clump, perhaps four yards away, yet as invisible as if in China. "Beauty is a wide, wide word. Define it, Mr. Vaness." "An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory: it stands before me." "Come, now, that's just a get-out. Is beauty of the flesh or of the spirit?" "What is the spirit, as you call it? I'm a pagan." "Oh, so am I. But the Greeks were pagans." "Well, spirit is only the refined side of sensuous appreciations." "I wonder!" "I have spent my life in finding that out." "Then the feeling this garden rouses in me is purely sensuous?" "Of course. If you were standing there blind and deaf, without the powers of scent and touch, where would your feeling be?" "You are very discouraging, Mr. Vaness." "No, madam; I face facts. When I was a youngster I had plenty of fluffy aspiration towards I didn't know what; I even used to write poetry." "Oh! Mr. Vaness, was it good?" "It was not. I very soon learned that a genuine sensation was worth all the uplift in the world." "What is going to happen when your senses strike work?" "I shall sit in the sun and fade out." "I certainly do like your frankness." "You think me a cynic, of course; I am nothing so futile, Miss Sabine. A cynic is just a posing ass proud of his attitude. I see nothing to be proud of in my attitude, just as I see nothing to be proud of in the truths of existence." "Suppose you had been poor?" "My senses would be lasting better than they are, and when at last they failed, I should die quicker, from want of food and warmth, that's all." "Have you ever been in love, Mr. Vaness?" "I am in love now." "And your love has no element of devotion, no finer side?" "None. It wants." "I have never been in love. But, if I were, I think I should want to lose myself rather than to gain the other." "Would you? Sabine, _I am in love with you_." "Oh! Shall we walk on?" I heard their footsteps, and was alone again, with the old gardener lopping at his shrubs. But what a perfect declaration of hedonism! How simple and how solid was the Vaness theory of existence! Almost Assyrian, worthy of Louis Quinze! And just then the old negro came up. "It's pleasant settin'," he said in his polite and hoarse half-whisper; "dar ain't no flies yet." "It's perfect, Richard. This is the most beautiful spot in the world."