“Ah,” said Peter, nodding thoughtfully, “that’s what it is to have ‘the seeing eye.’  But I’m grieved to hear of Undine in such a wanton mood.  I had hoped she would still be weeping her unhappy love-affair.”

“What! with that horrid, stolid German—­Hildebrandt, was his name?” cried the Duchessa.  “Not she!  Long ago, I’m glad to say, she learned to laugh at that, as a mere caprice of her immaturity.  However, this is a digression.  I want to return to our ‘Man of Words.’  Tell me—­what is the quality you especially like in it?”

“I like its every quality,” Peter affirmed, unblushing.  “Its style, its finish, its concentration; its wit, humour, sentiment; its texture, tone, atmosphere; its scenes, its subject; the paper it’s printed on, the type, the binding.  But above all, I like its heroine.  I think Pauline de Fleuvieres the pearl of human women—­the cleverest, the loveliest, the most desirable, the most exasperating.  And also the most feminine.  I can’t think of her at all as a mere fiction, a mere shadow on paper.  I think of her as a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood woman, whom I have actually known.  I can see her before me now—­I can see her eyes, full of mystery and mischief—­I can see her exquisite little teeth, as she smiles —­I can see her hair, her hands—­I can almost catch the perfume of her garments.  I ’m utterly infatuated with her—­I could commit a hundred follies for her.”

“Mercy!” exclaimed the Duchessa.  “You are enthusiastic.”

“The book’s admirers are so few, they must endeavour to make up in enthusiasm what they lack in numbers,” he submitted.

“But—­at that rate—­why are they so few?” she puzzled.  “If the book is all you think it, how do you account for its unpopularity?”

“It could never conceivably be anything but unpopular,” said he.  “It has the fatal gift of beauty.”

The Duchessa laughed surprise.

“Is beauty a fatal gift—­in works of art?”

“Yes—­in England,” he declared.

“In England?  Why especially in England?”

“In English-speaking—­in Anglo-Saxon lands, if you prefer.  The Anglo-Saxon public is beauty-blind.  They have fifty religions —­only one sauce—­and no sense of beauty whatsoever.  They can see the nose on one’s face—­the mote in their neighbour’s eye; they can see when a bargain is good, when a war will be expedient.  But the one thing they can never see is beauty.  And when, by some rare chance, you catch them in the act of admiring a beautiful object, it will never be for its beauty —­it will be in spite of its beauty for some other, some extra-aesthetic interest it possesses—­some topical or historical interest.  Beauty is necessarily detached from all that is topical or historical, or documentary or actual.  It is also necessarily an effect of fine shades, delicate values, vanishing distinctions, of evasiveness, inconsequence, suggestion.  It is also absolute, unrelated—­it is positive or negative or superlative—­it is never comparative.  Well, the Anglo-Saxon public is totally insensible to such things.  They can no more feel them, than a blind worm can feel the colours of the rainbow.”