savages by selling them junk.  And I thought he just wasted his breath by swearing at the savages for not knowing about the value of gold.  There I was hitting at him! He’s spoiled his digestion, hating the way people are made.  And Professor Kennedy said something nasty and neat (he’s awfully clever) about that being rather a low occupation for a civilized being—­taking advantage of the idiocies of savages—­he meant me, of course—­and he’s right, it is a mean business; I hate it.  And that’s why I’ve always wanted to get on another island—­not an uninhabited island, like the one Father and Mother have—­but one where—­well, this is one!” she waved her hand about the lovely room, “this is just one!  Where everything’s beautiful—­costly too—­but not just costly; where all the horrid, necessary consequences of things are taken care of without one’s bothering—­where flowers are taken out of the vases when they wilt and fresh ones put in; and dishes get themselves washed invisibly, inaudibly—­and litter just vanishes without our lifting a hand.  Of course the people who live so always, can rejoice with a clear mind in sunsets and bright talk.  That’s what I meant the other day—­the day Judith came—­when I said I’d arrived in Capua at last; when old Mr. Sommerville thought me so materialistic and cynical.  If he did that, on just that phrase—­what must you think, after all this confession intime d’un enfant du siecle?” She stopped with a graceful pretense of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had been talking well, and read nothing but admiration in his very expressive face.

“But all this means, you extraordinary young person, that you’re not in the least an enfant du siecle!” he cried.  “It means that you’re dropped down in this groaning, heavy-spirited twentieth century, troubled about many things, from the exact year that was the golden climax of the Renaissance; that you’re a perfect specimen of the high-hearted, glorious ...” he qualified on a second thought, “unless your astonishing capacity to analyze it all, comes from the nineteenth century?”

“No, that comes from Father,” explained Sylvia, laughing.  “Isn’t it funny, using the tool Father taught me to handle, against his ideas!  He’s just great on analysis.  As soon as we were old enough to think at all, he was always practising us on analysis—­especially of what made us want things, or not like them.  It’s one of his sayings—­he’s always getting it off to his University classes—­that if you have once really called an emotion or an ambition by its right name, you have it by the tail, so to speak—­that if you know, for instance, that it’s your vanity and not your love that’s wounded by something, you’ll stop caring.  But I never noticed that it really worked if you cared hard enough.  Diagnosing a disease doesn’t help you any, if you keep right on being sick with it.”

“My dear!  My dear!” cried the man, leaning towards her again, and looking—­dazzled—­into the beauty and intelligence of her eyes, “the idea that you are afflicted with any disease could only occur to the morbid mind of the bluest-nosed Puritan who ever cut down a May-pole!  You’re wonderfully, you’re terrifyingly, you are superbly sound and vigorous!”