She was accustomed to hear of Boticelli and the early
Italian painters in connection with her own charms of face and figure.
Lesbia, whose faultless features were of the aquiline type, regarded the
bard's rhapsody as insufferable twaddle, and began to think Mr. Smithson
almost a wit when he made fun of the bard.
Smithson was enchanted when she laughed at his jokelets, even although
she did not scruple to tell him that she thought his favourite pictures
detestable, and looked with the eye of indifference on a collection of
jade that was worth a small fortune.
Mr. Meander fell into another rhapsody over those classic cups and
shallow little bowls of absinthe-coloured jade.
'Here if you like, are colour and beauty,' he murmured, caressing one of
the little cups with the roseate tips of his supple fingers. 'These,
dearest Smithson, are worth all the rest of your collection; worth
vanloads of your cloisonne enamels, your dragon-jars in blood-colour and
blue. This cloudy indefinable substance, not crudely transparent nor yet
distinctly opaque, a something which touches the boundary line of two
worlds--the real and the ideal.
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