"He is too much of a genius to please me. He is a man with only one idea in his head, and that is Art. On any topic outside that circle he is mute. You think he admires your beauty, whereas he is thinking only what a good model you would make. He stands enraptured at the sunshine, and you cry, 'What a lover of nature!' whereas he is only thinking of the effect it would make on a canvas. He would paint a rose and swear that the copy was more lovely than the original. In everything Art comes first with him. According to him Art was not made for the world, but the world for Art. The world is only a place to paint in, to obtain pictorial effects from. Ask him to choose between living forever in this lovely valley of Rivoli and living forever in his studio studying a picture of it, and he would choose the canvas daub in preference to the reality. He is a monomaniac. I _do_ like a man to have a comprehensive breadth and depth of mind." An excellent way this of detracting from a man's abilities! Mr. A. is a great poet: exactly, but he knows nothing of science. Mr. B. is a great scientist: exactly, but he knows nothing of literature. Estimate a man, not by what he knows, but by what he does _not_ know, and you can draw up a formidable indictment against him: as though, forsooth, it were possible for one mind to master the whole of the cyclopædia! "In short," I concluded, "his conversation smells too much of the brush. He talks of nothing but 'shop.' I hate a fellow who is always talking 'shop.'" Daphne evidently did not know how to reply to this tirade. She merely said: "You did not speak a single word to him at breakfast." "Well, you see," I replied in an injured tone, "when a fellow has been a lady's companion for five months, he naturally feels that he has some claim upon her attention and he doesn't like being ignored." "Did I ignore you?" she replied in a conciliatory tone; and then with a pensive, retrospective air she added. "Five months! And is it so long since we left England? It was too good of you to leave your university----" "Where I was earning quite a reputation," I murmured. It would have puzzled me to say for what. "--In order to escort me through Europe. I am sorry for my neglect of you this morning." The look that came into Daphne's eyes was so pretty, wistful, pleading, that I, who had really no cause of complaint against her, began to feel what a hard-hearted tyrant Love sometimes makes of his votaries. I was just wondering whether she would object were I to seal our little concordat with a kiss, when my uncle and Angelo chanced to look back, so I could but give her arm a significant pressure in token of my magnanimous resolution to forgive her.