"I think you are ten thousand times more beautiful, more captivating, than when I knew you first. But--changed? Well, yes. Is your life devoted only to the study of the Beautiful now?" She colours softly. "I think you do not quite understand," she says. "When a woman's life is empty, something she must do to fill up the void. And I do not think this pursuit is so very foolish as you seem to suppose." "Only that John Bull has not much of the Hellenic type about him," says the Colonel, _sotto voce_. "You see," she goes on, with sweet gravity, "moral beauty and physical beauty have each their worshippers. We would weld the two together, and so glorify art, literature, mind, physique--all that is about and around our daily lives. But, as I said before, like all new creeds, it is spoiled by the over-zealous, exaggerated by the foolish, ridiculed by the surface judges. It is not the cultivation of one thing only, but the cultivation of all that real æsthetics would teach; leading, subduing, elevating the spiritual and poetic capacity of our nature, and subordinating the crude and material." "That sounds more sensible," says Colonel Carlisle. "But when I heard in your rooms of symphonies of colour, and 'tones' of harmony, and worship of some special make of china, and 'living up' to peacocks' fans and feathers, I confess I thought the people were all lunatics, to say the least of it, and marvelled how you could have shared in such a lamentable creed and become a priestess of 'High Art,' as interpreted by terra-cotta gowns, sage-green furniture, and old china which seems to convert modern drawing-rooms into a memory of kitchen dressers. Life may be full of emotions and 'thrills,' as I heard a long-haired youth explaining in a dying voice, but such life as this seemed to me, I must confess, a series of absurdities such as no sensible mind could entertain." "Those are the zealots and the exaggerators," smiles Lady Etwynde amusedly. "They have spoilt much by carrying into extremes what is only tolerable in moderation; by dragging in without warning what really requires delicate and gradual preparation." "I am glad that you are only moderate then," says her companion. "Some one once said that there was a sphinx in our souls who was perpetually asking us riddles. I confess I thought there was one in mine when I met you to-night under such changed auspices." "And what was the riddle?" asks Lady Etwynde. He bends a little closer. "The _reason_, of course! You told me a few moments ago that when a woman's life was empty she must do something to fill up the void. Was yours so empty?"