it gave him!' answered Lancelot. 'I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel abstractions. When you look through the glitter of the words, your 'spirit of beauty' simply means certain shapes and colours which please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.'
'Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!' said Claude, laughing.
'I don't care sixpence now for the ideal! I want not beauty, but some beautiful thing—a woman, perhaps,' and he sighed. 'But at least a person—a living, loving person—all lovely itself, and giving loveliness to all things! If I must have an ideal, let it be, for mercy's sake, a realised one.'
Claude opened his sketch-book.
'We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer. But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these degenerate days—the two poles of beauty; the milieu of which would be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics. Look at them! Honoria the dark—symbolic of passionate depth; Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light! Oh, that I were a Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in this piecemeal world!'
'You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon, I suppose, from both beauties?'
'I hope so, for my own sake. There is no path
