“Now that,” said Mayburn, drawing up to the tea-table with an appreciative glance for the simple but inviting fare spread upon it--“now that is just where I always must argue with you. Don’t you agree with me, Palairet, that life is beautiful--that it’s only in terms of beauty that it has significance?” “If you happen to see it so,” Gavan ambiguously assented. “Exactly; I accept your amendment--if you happen to have the good fortune to see it so; if you have the faculty that gives the vision; if, like Siegfried, the revealing dragon’s-blood has touched your lips. Eppie has the gift and shouldn’t wilfully atrophy it. She shouldn’t refuse to share the vision of the Supreme Artist, to whom all horror and tragedy are parts of the picture that his eternal joy contemplates; she should not refuse to listen with the ear of the Supreme Musician, to whom all the discords that each one of us is, before we taste the dragon’s-blood,--for what is man but a dissonance, as our admirable Nietzsche says,--to whom all these discords melt into the perfect phrase. All art, all truth is there. I’m rather dithyrambic, but, in your more reticent way, you agree with me, don’t you, Palairet?” Eppie’s eye, during this speech, had turned with observant irony upon Gavan. “How do you like your echo, Gavan?” she inquired, and she answered for him: “Of course he agrees, but in slightly different terms. He doesn’t care a fig about the symphony or about the Eternal Goya. There isn’t a touch of the ‘lyric rapture’ about him. Now pray don’t ask him to define his own conceptions, and drink your tea. And don’t say one word to me, either, about your gigantic, Bohemian deity. You have spoken of Nietzsche, and I know too well what you are coming to: the Apollonian spirit of the world of Appearances in which the Dionysiac spirit of Things-in-Themselves mirrors its vital ecstasy. Spare me, I’m not at all in the humor to see horror in terms of loveliness.” “_Ay de mi!_” Mayburn murmured, “you make me feel that I’m still a dissonance when you talk like this.” “A very wholesome realization.” “You are cross with life to-day, and therefore with me, its poor little appreciator.” “I’m never cross with life.” “Only with me, then?” “Only with you, to-day.” Mayburn, folding his slice of bread-and-butter, took her harshness with Apollonian serenity. “At least let me know that I’ve an ally in you,” he appealed to Gavan, while Eppie refilled her cup with the business-like air of stoking an engine that paused for a moment near wayside trivialities. Gavan had listened to the dithyrambics with some uneasiness, conscious of Eppie’s observation, and now owned that he felt little interest in the Eternal Goya.