Suddenly, she sat up with a stifled cry. It seemed as if a flash of light had been turned upon her, almost blinding her. “Why can’t you help him in his own house, instead of wandering all about the country?” Flossie wanted to know.!

“He tried to be shy with me,” said Mrs. Phillips, “but I wouldn’t let him. I chipped him out of it. If he’s going to write plays, as I told him, he will have to get over his fear of a petticoat.” “If you’re going the whole hog, that’s something I can understand,” continued Flossie. “If not, you’d better pull up.”

“I shall try to win you over, I warn you,” he said. “Politics will never reform the world. They appeal only to men’s passions and hatreds. They divide us. It is Art that is going to civilize mankind; broaden his sympathies. Art speaks to him the common language of his loves, his dreams, reveals to him the universal kinship.” He thought it the tragedy of the world that Rome had conquered Greece, imposing her lower ideals upon the race. Rome should have been the servant of Greece: the hands directed by the brain. She would have made roads and harbours, conducted the traffic, reared the market place. She knew of the steam engine, employed it for pumping water in the age of the Antonines. Sooner or later, she would have placed it on rails, and in ships. Rome should have been the policeman, keeping the world in order, making it a fit habitation. Her mistake was in regarding these things as an end in themselves, dreaming of nothing beyond. From her we had inherited the fallacy that man was made for the world, not the world for man. Rome organized only for man’s body. Greece would have legislated for his soul. “It’s the frills and flummery part of it that frightens me,” he said. “You wouldn’t think that sensitiveness was my weak point. But it is. I’ve stood up to a Birmingham mob that was waiting to lynch me and enjoyed the experience; but I’d run ten miles rather than face a drawing-room of well-dressed people with their masked faces and ironic courtesies. It leaves me for days feeling like a lobster that has lost its shell.”