Vanitas

s your pots, so long as your pot

hing to tell it of happier things, gets no share in art. The people is too poor to possess beautiful things, and too brutish to care for them: the only amusement it can affor

with the annoyance at having let himself be carried away by

ware, and mechanically dusting it with the feather brush, "it's absurd to talk

at the girl, where she stood in a golden beam of d

and practical than those of the girls he knew, yet telling of a life anything but practical and simple-that she belonged to that same set of persons; a fact apparent also in her movements, her words and accent, nay in the something indefinable in her manner which seemed to take things for granted. But he didn't care for her being beautiful. His feeling was solely of vague irritation at having let himself speak-he had quite unnecessarily told her he intended giving up the pottery next year-about the things which were his very life, to a stranger; a stranger who had come with a card to ask advice about her own amateur work, and from out of a world which was foreign and odious to

with grave politeness, "Is there any further point upon wh

mplating the old warped oaken floor, on whose dust she was

things to-people, Mr. Greenleaf?" she asked. "Of course,

very level brows, and she had an odd way of opening them out at one. Like that, with her delicate com

she added quickly; "at least they must be

second part of her speech was the reaction against his own; and that was brutal. He ought not to have let the conversation depart from the techn

r face had a totally different expression, indifferent, bore

iness, "to tell me so many things, and to have given up so much of your time. I didn't know, you know, from Messrs. Boyce, that I was breaking in

he ought to take it, because he guessed that she did not know whether she

I could, Miss Flodden," he said; "besides, the owners

up of tea? Number 5; the number is on the card. But," she added suddenly, with a little laugh, which was that social stiffening on

d understood, or thought he understood, that his visitor had grasped the fact of his being a sort of gentleman after all, and that she though

epeated. "Perhaps some day you will let me come

om?" he asked, wondering

, and then along the side of the British Museum, don't you? I made a not

me on the family card. At least so Greenleaf said to himself, as he watched the tall, slight young figure disappearing down the black Bloomsbury street, and among the green leaves and black stems of the Bloomsbury square. An unlikely apparition, oddly feminine i