So much the better.  This soulful cult of tradition, this clinging to the obvious and genteel as it were an anchor of safety—­it nipped in the bud the monster-making faculty of low horizons and bleak, wintry stretches of earth.  Bazhakuloff!  Those Russians, it struck him, had been providentially sent to Nepenthe for his delectation and instruction.  He was glad to have beheld a type of this nature, inconceivable in England.  That grotesque, with three million followers!  It had been a liberal education to look into his vacuous face, into those filmy eyes dripping with saintliness and alcohol.  The Little White Cows!  Chimaeras, engendered in hyperborean mists.

And still Count Caloveglia said nothing.  He gazed at the sun, whose orb now rolled upon the rim of the horizon.  Slowly it sank, fusing the water into a golden pool.  A hush fell upon nature.  Colours fled from earth into the sky.  They scattered among the clouds.  The enchantment began, overhead.

At last the old man remarked: 

“I suppose that is why I am no colourist.  That is why I worship the inexorable rigour of form.  We of the South, Mr. Heard, are drenched in volatile beauty. . . .  And yet one never wearies of these things!  It is what you call a glamour, an interlude of witchcraft.  Nature is a-tremble with the miraculous.  She beckons us to explore her strange places.  She says:  Tread here, my friend—­and here; tread where you have never trodden before!  The sage surrenders his intelligence, and grows young again.  He recaptures the spirit of his boyish dreams.  He peers into worlds unknown.  See!  Adventure and discovery are lurking on every side.  These painted clouds with their floating banners and citadels, yonder mysterious headlands that creep into the landscape at this hour, those islets emerging, like flakes of bronze, out of the sunset-glow—­all the wonder of the Odyssey is there!”

He spoke out of politeness and soon fell silent again.  His thoughts roamed far away.

They were thoughts commensurate with the grandeur of the scene.

Count Caloveglia was no colourist.  He was a sculptor, about to reap the reward of his labours.  The cheque would be in his pocket that night.  Three hundred and fifty thousand francs—­or nearly.  That is what made him not exactly grave, but reserved.  Excess of joy, like all other excesses, is not meet to be displayed before men.  All excess is unseemly.  Nothing overmuch.  Measure in everything.

Measure even in the fabrication of Hellenic masterpieces.  He had created one of them (the Demeter did not count); it sufficed for his modest ambitions.  The Faun was his first forgery and his last.  To retrieve the fortunes of his family he had employed those peculiar talents which God had given him.  He would remain, henceforward, an artist.  He shrank from the idea of becoming a wholesale manufacturer of antiques.