"You laugh at my enthusiasm for Culture," answers Lady Etwynde; "but that really is the only way to reform the abuses that disfigure an age so advanced and refined as ours. Invention and science have never done so much for any period as for this, and yet men and women shut themselves out from intellectual pleasures, and demand scarce anything but frivolity, excitement, and amusement--not even well-bred amusements either. The gold of the millionaire gilds his vulgarity, and lifts him to the level of princes. Good birth and refinement, and purity and simplicity, are treated as old-fashioned prejudices. We are all pushing and scrambling in a noisy bewildering race. We don't want to think or to reason, or to be told of our follies in the present, or of retribution in the future. Gilt and gloss is all we ask for, no harsh names for sins, no unpleasant questioning about our actions. Ah me! it is very sad, but it is also very true. Society is a body whose members are all at variance as to the good, and agreed as to the evil. The passions, the absurdities, the interests, the relations of life are either selfishly gratified, or equally selfishly ignored. It is not of the greatest good to the greatest number that a man or woman thinks now; but just the greatest amount of possible gratification to their respective selves. With much that should make this age the most highly-cultured the world has known, there is, alas! much more that renders it hopelessly and vulgarly abased." "And there is no remedy?" "My dear, there are many. But Society hugs its disease, and cries out at the physic. It knows of the cancer, but will not hear of the operator's knife. Perhaps, after all, it is right. Think of the trouble of being highly bred, highly educated, pure in thought and tone, sparkling and not vulgar, amusing and yet refined, dignified yet never offending, proud yet never contemptuous. Why, it would be a complete revolution. Fancy forsaking artifice, living in a real Palace of Truth, where everything was honest, definite, straightforward! Think of our poor pretty painted butterflies, forsaking their rose gardens and beaten by the storms and cold winds of stern prejudices and honestly-upheld faiths. Ah, no! It is simply preaching a crusade against infidels, who are all the more vindictive in opposition because civilization, instinct, and reason tell them they are in the wrong... Why, here we are almost at the lodge, and here comes baby to meet us. Ah, Lauraine, thank God after all, that we are women. Would a child's smile and broken prattle be a volume of such exquisite poetry to any other living creature?" Two little eager feet are toddling to meet Lauraine, two tiny arms clasp her neck as she runs forward and snatches up the little figure. A thrill of sweet, pure joy flies through her heart. "Heaven has not left me comfortless," she thinks. CHAPTER XIII "I have loved," she said, "Man is weak--God is dread."