“Child, don’t you know that a young man, really beautiful without being effeminate, is bound to be conscious of it.  But vain he is not.  It mortifies him dreadfully, though he pretends to make light of it.”

“But why speak of it so often?  He was telling me to-day of an elderly Englishman who addressed him on the train, telling him what a striking resemblance he bore to the Prince of Wales when he was a youth.”

“Quite so; and he told me yesterday of hearing a lady in the drug-store ask the clerk who ‘that handsome stranger’ was.  But, my dear, he tells them as jokes on himself, and he’s so sheepish about it.  And he’s such a splendid orator.  I persuaded him to-day to read me one of his college papers.  I don’t seem to recall much of the substance, but it was full of the most beautiful expressions.  One, I remember, begins, ’Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of—­’ you know I’ve forgotten what it was—­Civilisation or Truth or something.  Anyway, whatever it was, it had like a giant engine rolled the car of Civilisation out from the maze of antiquity, where she now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, and so on.”

“That seems impressive and—­mixed, perhaps?”

“Of course I can’t remember things in their order, but it was about the essential nature of man being gregarious, and truth is a potent factor in civilisation, and something would be a tear on the world’s cold cheek to make it burn forever—­isn’t that striking?  And Greece had her Athens and her Corinth, but where now is Greece with her proud cities?  And Rome, Imperial Rome, with all her pomp and splendour.  Of course I can’t recall his words.  There was a beautiful reference to America, I remember, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes of the frozen North to the ever-tepid waters of the sunny South—­and a perfectly splendid passage about the world is and ever has been illiberal.  Witness the lonely lamp of Erasmus, the cell of Galileo, the dying bed of Pascal, the scaffold of Sidney—­Sidney who, I wonder?”

“Has it taken you that way, Aunt Bell?”

“And France, the saddest example of a nation without a God, and succeeding generations will only add a new lustre to our present resplendent glory, bound together by the most sacred ties of goodwill; independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, and it was fraught with vital interest to every thinking man—­”

“Spare me, Aunt Bell—­it’s like Coney Island, with all those carrousels going around and five bands playing at once!”

“But his peroration!  I can’t pretend to give you any idea of its beauties—­”

“Don’t!”