Upon the warm air, sweet with the breath of lemon flowers, floated the peculiar, jeering, yet subdued and musical laughter, which told that Alma had flown straight at some luckless quarry.  She held in one hand a cluster of crimson anemones, and purple stars of periwinkle, and walking between two English gentlemen, whose yacht, the “Albatross”, lay anchored close to the “Cleopatra” in the harbor below, slowly approached Leo, saying: 

“Don’t stone your prophets.  Especially one hedged about with the triple sanctity of Brasenose!  ’Consider that thy marbles are but the earth’s callosities, thy gold and silver its faeces; thy silken robe but a worm’s bedding; and thy purple an unclean fish.’  That is one sugar-coated pill that I administer to my humility now and then to keep it healthy.  Hear him again;—­’sitting on the marble bench of one of the exhedrea on the edge of the Appian Way, close to the fragrant borders of a rose farm’:  ’So it is, with the philosophers; all alike are in search of happiness, what kind of thing it is.  It is pleasure, it is virtue; what not?  All philosophers, so to speak, are but fighting about the ass’ shadow.  I saw one who poured water into a mortar, and ground it with all his might with a pestle of iron, fancying he did a thing useful; but it remained water only, none the less.’  Stoicism, hedonism, the gospel of ’Sweetness and Light’; what is it, may I ask, that your aesthetic priests furnish, to feed immortal British souls?  Knee breeches, sun flowers, niello, cretonne, Nanking bowls, lily dados?  To us it savors sorrowfully of that which one of your prophets foreshadowed, ’Despair, baying as the poet heard her, in the ruins of old Rome’.”

“Beg pardon, Miss Cutting; but you quite surprise me.  The tone of many American papers and magazines led us to suppose, really, that the rosy dawn of Culture was beginning to flush the night of Philistinism brooding over your Western world.”

“Believe it not.  Primeval gloom, raw realism so weigh upon our apathetic souls, that we rub our eyes and stare at sight of your aesthetic catechism:  ’Harmony, but no system; instinct, but no logic; eternal growth and no maturity; everlasting movement, and nothing attained; infinite possibilities of everything; the becoming all things, the being nothing.’  We have too much Philistine honesty to pretend that we understand that, but like other ambitious parrots we can commit to memory.  One of your seers tells us that:  ’Renaissance art will make our lives like what seems one of the loveliest things in nature, the iridescent film on the face of stagnant water!’ Now it will require at least a decade, to train us to appreciate the subtile symphonies of ditch slime.  An English friend compassionating my American stupidity, essayed to initiate me in the cult of ‘culture’, and gave me a leaf to study, from the latter-day gospel.  I learned it after a time, as I did the multiplication table.  ’Culture steps in, and points out the grossness