But it is in the case of art and adornment that cheapness is most delightful.  The only thing that betrayed a care for beauty on the part of my aunt was her dear old flower garden, and even there she was not above suspicion.  Her favourite flowers were tulips, rigid tulips with opulent crimson streaks.  She despised wildings.  Her ornaments were simply displays of the precious metal.  Had she known the price of platinum she would have worn that by preference.  Her chains and brooches and rings were bought by weight.  She would have turned her back on Benvenuto Cellini if he was not 22 carats fine.  She despised water-colour art; her conception of a picture was a vast domain of oily brown by an Old Master.  The Babbages at the Hall had a display of gold plate swaggering in the corner of the dining-room; and the visitor (restrained by a plush rope from examining the workmanship) was told the value, and so passed on.  I like my art unadorned:  thought and skill, and the other strange quality that is added thereto, to make things beautiful—­and nothing more.  A farthing’s worth of paint and paper, and, behold! a thing of beauty!—­as they do in Japan.  And if it should fall into the fire—­well, it has gone like yesterday’s sunset, and to-morrow there will be another.

These Japanese are indeed the apostles of cheapness.  The Greeks lived to teach the world beauty, the Hebrews to teach it morality, and now the Japanese are hammering in the lesson that men may be honourable, daily life delightful, and a nation great without either freestone houses, marble mantelpieces, or mahogany sideboards.  I have sometimes wished that my Aunt Charlotte could have travelled among the Japanese nation.  She would, I know, have called it a “parcel of trash.”  Their use of paper—­paper suits, paper pocket-handkerchiefs—­would have made her rigid with contempt.  I have tried, but I cannot imagine my Aunt Charlotte in paper underclothing.  Her aversion to paper was extraordinary.  Her Book of Beauty was printed on satin, and all her books were bound in leather, the boards regulated rather than decorated with a severe oblong.  Her proper sphere was among the ancient Babylonians, among which massive populace even the newspapers were built of brick.  She would have compared with the King’s daughter whose raiment was of wrought gold.  When I was a little boy I used to think she had a mahogany skeleton.  However, she is gone, poor old lady, and at least she left me her furniture.  Her ghost was torn in pieces after the sale—­must have been.  Even the old china went this way and that.  I took what was perhaps a mean revenge of her for the innumerable black-holeings, bread-and-water dinners, summary chastisements, and impossible tasks she inflicted upon me for offences against her too solid possessions.  You will see it at Woking.  It is a light and graceful cross.  It is a mere speck of white between the monstrous granite paperweights that oppress the dead on either side of her.  Sometimes I am half sorry for that.  When the end comes I shall not care to look her in the face—­she will be so humiliated.