Hoprig smiled, benevolently as always, but not in the least repentantly, and Hoprig said: “Why, after all, I have seen quite as much of this modern world as interests a saint in the prime of life; this halo certainly is, in ways we need not go into, sometimes in inconvenience; and there is no real pleasure in being ministered unto by unwilling angels. So that I am ready to leave it to the lady.” Now Melior arose from beside the cradle, wherein the child was now once more asleep. And Melior looked at Florian, without saying anything: but she was smiling rather sadly; and Florian knew that nowhere in this world, at any time, had there been any person more lovely than was his disenchanted princess. And Florian said: “A pest! but, in the name of earth and sky and sea, in the name of Heaven and all the fiends, let this be done! For the moment you are again a legend, madame, I shall recapture the dear misery of my love for you and for that perfect beauty which should be seen and not heard.” “Indeed,” she replied, “I daresay that is the truth. So, for all our sakes, Hoprig and I will go back to the time before I married you: and then, on account of the baby, I suppose I will have to marry Hoprig, who at least takes women as he finds them.” “You speak, I assume, metaphorically,” observed the saint, “but, in any case, I believe you exhibit good sense. So let us be going.” Then Florian said farewell to Melior and to Hoprig also. Florian had put aside his dapper look: he had quite lost his usual air of tolerating a mixture of vexation and mirth: and for that moment he did not show in anything as a jaunty little person of the very highest fashion. “Now that you two,” said Florian, “become again a legend and a symbol, I can believe in and love and worship you once more. It is in vain, it is with pitiable folly, that any man aspires to be bringing beauty and holiness into his daily living. These things are excellent for dilettanti to admire from afar. But they are not attainable, in any quantity that suffices. We needs believe in beauty: and there needs always flourish the notion that beauty exists in human living, so long as memory transfigures what is past, and optimism what is to come. And sometimes one finds beauty even in the hour which is passing, here and there, at wide intervals: but it is mixed—as inextricably as is mixed your speaking, bright-colored enemy of all romance,—with what is silly and commonplace and trivial.” “It seems so very vexatious,” Melior stated, as if from depths of long deliberation, “when you can distinctly remember having brought your hat, to be quite unable—Yes, go on talking, Florian. It is on the peg by the door, and we are all listening.”