Probably you felt all this before, but didn’t know the secret of it.  Now, the traits being brought out, you perceive nothing wanting; the thing is perfect, and you’ve a reason for it.  Of course, with such an organization, I’m not nervous.  Nervous!  I should as soon fancy a dish of cream nervous.  I am too rich for anything of the kind, permeated utterly with a rare golden calm.  Girls always suggest little similitudes to me:  there’s that brunette beauty,—­don’t you taste mulled wine when you see her? and thinking of yourself, did you ever feel green tea? and find me in a crust of wild honey, the expressed essence of woods and flowers, with its sweet satiety?—­no, that’s too cloying.  I’m a deal more like Mendelssohn’s music,—­what I know of it, for I can’t distinguish tunes,—­you wouldn’t suspect it,—­but full harmonics delight me as they do a wild beast; and so I’m like a certain adagio in B flat, that Papa likes.

There now! you’re perfectly shocked to hear me go on so about myself; but you oughtn’t to be.  It isn’t lawful for any one else, because praise is intrusion; but if the rose please to open her heart to the moth, what then?  You know, too, I didn’t make myself; it’s no virtue to be so fair.  Louise couldn’t speak so of herself:  first place, because it wouldn’t be true; next place, she couldn’t, if it were; and lastly, she made her beauty by growing a soul in her eyes, I suppose,—­what you call good.  I’m not good, of course; I wouldn’t give a fig to be good.  So it’s not vanity.  It’s on a far grander scale; a splendid selfishness,—­authorized, too; and papa and mamma brought me up to worship beauty,—­and there’s the fifth commandment, you know.

Dear me! you think I’m never coming to the point.  Well, here’s this rosary;—­hand me the perfume-case first, please.  Don’t you love heavy fragrances, faint with sweetness, ravishing juices of odor, heliotropes, violets, water-lilies,—­powerful attars and extracts, that snatch your soul off your lips?  Couldn’t you live on rich scents, if they tried to starve you?  I could, or die on them:  I don’t know which would be best.  There! there’s the amber rosary!  You needn’t speak; look at it!

Bah! is that all you’ve got to say?  Why, observe the thing; turn it over; hold it up to the window; count the beads,—­long, oval, like some seaweed bulbs, each an amulet.  See the tint; it’s very old; like clots of sunshine,—­aren’t they?  Now bring it near; see the carving, here corrugated, there faceted, now sculptured into hideous, tiny, heathen gods.  You didn’t notice that before!  How difficult it must have been, when amber is so friable!  Here’s one with a chessboard on his back, and all his kings and queens and pawns slung round him.  Here’s another with a torch, a flaming torch, its fire pouring out inverted.  They are grotesque enough;—­but this, this is matchless:  such a miniature woman, one hand grasping the round rock behind, while she looks down into some gulf, perhaps, beneath, and will let herself