Vanitas

eenleaf with something more than the mere sense of slight comicality. Indeed, Greenleaf, like many apos

ng caused by something not its ostensible reason, or being caused by the quite undefinable. When at last, from out of the blue haze and gauzy blackness of the Bloomsbury summer, there emerged an object of interest, and the slender recognised figure detached itself from the crowd of unreal other creatures, on foot, in cabs, and behind barrows, he was aware of a certain flat and prosaic quality in things since that tea-party at Colonel Dunstan's. And he was very

rfully business-like. Miss Flodden was business-like simply because she was extraordinarily interested in the matter in hand; and Greenleaf was business-like because he was ash

he great Hispano-Moorish dishes, heraldic creatures spreading wings among their arabesques of yellow brown goldiness; the rotund vases and ewers where Roman consuls and Jewish maidens and Greek gods were crowded together, yellow and green and brown, on the deep sea-blue of Castel Durante and Gubbio majolica; the fanciful scalloped blue upon blue nymphs and satyrs of seve

makes you know so much about pottery?" remarked Greenleaf, in consid

sed her pale blu

sed to see all those beautiful Greek things-I had seen statues once when we went to Rome-I wanted so much to look at them a little, but my friends thought they weren't in good repair, and wanted to have tea and go to th

nt part of every year of her life in London, and had been only once to the British Museum, and then had expected to s

ers at the contact of strong green tea or caper sauce-with indignation at all the waste of intellectual power and intellectual riches implied in this hideous present misarrangement of all things. Was i

todian imperturbably occupying the only seat in the place, they leaned upon the glass case, and she asked him, and he told her, about the various currents in art history-the form element of ancient Greece, the colour element of the Orientals, the patte

balls, and picnics, and so forth? Or does one get interested whenever one does anything as hard as one can, like hard riding, or rowing, or playing tennis properly? Some books seem so awfully interesting, you know; but there are such a lot of others that one would just throw into the fire if they didn't belong t

woman's mind; and at the same time he felt strangely touched and indignant, as he did sometimes when giving som

thodically?" he asked. He really meant,

ong as one hadn't turned into a savage; everyone else has to do it. Of course, there's the fiddle; I've practised that rather methodically, but it was because I liked the sound of the thing so much, and I once had a little German-my brother's German crammer for di

it was waiting among the vast and shabby umbrellas of the studious, very incongruou

descended the Museum steps, with the pigeons fluttering a

utter profanation of life; and to his ?sthetic soul, the fact that many thousands of people lived among smoke and smuts, and never saw a clear stream, a da

the trees against the black walls, and the moving crowd." Then, as if suddenly taking courage to say something rath

she asked this. She seemed to have a difficul

her, who was an Oriental scholar himself, used to say so; and he is a great arch?ologist, besides his knowledg

e different currents of ancient art, Persian and Greek and Etruscan, and t

red with him. Why, most of the little I know I learned at hi

windows of a solemn Georgian house, with its courses of white stone, and its classic door frie

Dunstan knows so many interesting things

at, Miss

rid, nonsense and filth people talk? I used to meet him about everywhere, when I used still to go into the world. He often came to my sister's-I thought he was just an old-well, an old creature like the r

tterly; "because he cares about art, and history, and philosophy, but he also

are-doesn't everyone car

e. It had hitherto struck her merely by its great kindness, and a sort of gentle candour which was rare. Now, the clea

well-mannered; and people who are ugly and brutish and hateful, because the first are idle and unjust, and the second overworked and oppressed. Nowadays, more even than when Christ taught

in her breath, as if overcome by

id, closing the f

head, with the little black bonnet all points and bows of lace, wa

ned with shame

Etruscan things some day?" he

d he to talk of such things to such a woman. To let the holy of holie