For a time nothing was said, and then Marsh began, "Now I've seen it, your rite of the worship of beauty. And do you know what was really there? A handful of dull, insensitive, primitive beings, hardened and calloused by manual toil and atrophied imaginations, so starved for any variety in their stupefyingly monotonous life that they welcome anything, anything at all as a break . . . only if they could choose, they would infinitely prefer a two-headed calf or a bearded woman to your flower. The only reason they go to see that is because it is a curiosity, not because of its beauty, because it blooms once a year only, at night, and because there is only one of them in town. Also because everybody else goes to see it. They go to look at it only because there aren't any movies in Ashley, nor anything else. And you know all this just as well as I do." "Oh, Mr. Welles," Marise appealed to him, "do you think that is the truth of the facts?" The old man pronounced judgment gently. "Well, I don't know that _any_thing is the truth. I should say that both of you told the truth about it. The truth's pretty big for any one person to tell. Isn't it all in the way you look at it?" He added, "Only personally I think Mrs. Crittenden's the nicest way." Marsh was delighted with this. "There! I hope you're satisfied. You've been called 'nice.' That ought to please any good American." "I wonder, Mr. Welles," Marise said in an ostentatiously casual tone, "I wonder if Mr. Marsh had been an ancient Greek, and had stood watching the procession going up the Acropolis hill, bearing the thank-offerings from field and loom and vineyard, what do you suppose he would have seen? Dullness and insensitiveness in the eyes of those Grecian farmer-lads, no doubt, occupied entirely with keeping the oxen in line; a low vulgar stare of bucolic curiosity as the country girls, bearing their woven linen, looked up at the temple. Don't you suppose he would have thought they managed those things a great deal more artistically in Persia?" "Well, I don't know much about the ancient Greeks," said Mr. Welles mildly, "but I guess Vincent would have been about the same wherever he lived." "Who is satisfied with the verdict now?" triumphed Marise. But she noticed that Marsh's attack, although she considered that she had refuted it rather neatly, had been entirely; efficacious in destroying the aura of the evening. Of the genuine warmth of feeling which the flower and the people around it had roused in her heart, not the faintest trace was left. She had only a cool interested certainty that her side had a perfectly valid foundation for arguing purposes. Mr. Marsh had accomplished that, and more than that, a return from those other centers of feeling to her preoccupation with his own personality.