true perspective.  He possessed traditional moral standards whereby to judge the actions of historical contemporaries; he could praise or blame his politicians with a good conscience.  For the Parthenon creators he had no sure norm.  The standards were not yet evolved.  Pheidias was a talented fellow-citizen—­a hewer in stone by profession:  what could he know of the relations of Pheidias to posterity?  Great things can only be seen at a proper distance.  Pheidias, to him, may have been little more than an amateur, struggling with brute material in the infancy of his trade or calling.  No, my friend!  I am glad not to be coeval with Pericles.  I am glad to recognize Hellenic achievements at their true worth.  I am glad to profit by that wedge of time which has enabled me to reverence things fair and eternal.”

“Things fair and eternal,” echoed Keith, who was getting too thirsty and restless to discuss art-matters.  “Come with me!  I will show you things fair and eternal.”

He led the way to a distant arbour, overhung with a canopy of blood-red passion-flowers and girt about by design dangled from the clustering foliage in its roof.  Within, directly under the beams, all by itself, on an upright chair beside a small table, sat an incongruous, startling, awe-inspiring apparition—­a grimy old man of Mongolian aspect.  He might have been frozen to stone, so immobile, so lifeless were his features.  Belated visitors passed near the entrance of the shrine, peered within as at some outlandish and sinister freak of nature, and moved on with jocular words.  Nobody ventured to overstep the threshold, whether from religious fear or because of something repellent, something almost putrescent, which radiated from his person.  A contingent of Little White Cows, a kind of bodyguard, stood at a respectful distance beyond, intent upon his every movement.  The Master never stirred.  He sat there to be looked at—­accustomed to homage almost divine; beatifically inane.  Like the Christians of old, he wore no hat.  The head was nearly bald.  A long cloak, glistening with grease stains, swathed his limbs and portly belly, on which one suspected multitudinous wrinkles of fat.  Two filmy lidless eyes, bulging on a level with his forehead, stared into vacuity; his snub nose grew out of a flattened face whose pallor was accentuated by the reflection of the glittering leaves—­it looked faded and sodden, like blotting-paper that has been left out all night in the rain.  Sporadic greenish-grey hairs were scattered about his chin.  The mouth was agape.

On Mr. Keith’s appearance he made no sign of recognition.  Presently, however, his lips seemed to get out of control.  They moved; they began to chatter and to mumble, in childish fashion, the inarticulate yearnings of eld.  Keith said, as though displaying some museum curiosity: 

“Mine is the only house on Nepenthe which the Master still deigns to enter.  I’m afraid he has grown very groggy on his pins of late; if he sat on any by a straight-backed chair they would never get him up again.  To think that was once a pretty little boy . . .  Poor old fellow!  I know what he wants.  They’ve been neglecting him, those young idiots.”