Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/160

Rh sanctities, of its almost divinities; see only their own friends, their own faces, their own fans, flirtations, and fallals, reflected as in mirrors all around them, and filling up their horizon.

"A Dutchman can be just as solemnly and entirely contemplative of a lemon-pip and a cheese-paring as an Italian of the Virgin in glory."

Cosmopolitan and Anglo-American Floralia is in love with its lemon-pips, and has no eyes for the Glory. When it has an eye, indeed, it is almost worse, because it is bent then on buying the Glory for its drawing-room staircase, or worse yet, on selling it again at a profit.

The Lady Hilda, who did not love lemon-pips, but who yet had never seen the Glory with that simplicity, as of a child's worship, which alone constitutes the true sight, began to unlearn many of her theories, and to learn very much in emotion and vision, as she carried her delicate disdainful head into the little dusky chapels and the quiet prayer-worn chauntries of Floralia.

Her love of Art had after all been a cold, she began to think a poor, passion. She had studied the philosophy of Art, had been learned in the