Besides, you do not suppose that I would wish to alter this age by a single iota of its ugliness and its preposterousness! You do not suppose I do not love it! You do not suppose I do not wallow in the trough of it with delight! There is not one stockbroker, not one musical comedy star, not one philanthropic giver of free libraries, not one noble brewer, not one pander, not one titled musician, not one fashionable bishop, not one pro-consul, that I would wish away. Where should my pride bitterly exercise itself if not in proving that my age, exactly as it exists now, contains nothing that is not the raw material of beauty? If I wished to do so, I would force some among you to see that even the hotel-tout within the portals of the city of Giotto is beautiful.
At dinner I am waited upon by a young and beautiful girl who, having almost certainly never heard of Gabriele d’Annunzio, yet speaks his language and none other. But she wears the apron and the cap of the English parlour-maid, in plenary correctness, and, knowing exactly how I should be served in England, she humours me; and above us is a vaulted ceiling. Such is the terrible might of England. I am surrounded by ladies; the room is crammed with ladies. By the perfection of their virtuosity in the nice conduct of forks alone is demonstrated their ladyship. (And I who, like a savage, cannot eat pudding without a spoon!) There is a middle-aged gentleman, whose eyeglasses are wandering down his fine nose, lost in a bosky dell of women at the other end of the room; and there is myself; and there is a boy, obviously in Hades. And there are some fifty dames. Their voices, high, and with the sublime unconscious arrogance of the English, fight quietly and steadily among each other up in the vaulting. “Of course, I used to play cricket with my brothers. But, will you believe me, I’ve never seen a football match in my life!”
“No, we haven’t seen the new rector yet, but they say he’s frightfully nice.”
“Benozzo Gozzoli--ye-es.” It is impossible not to believe, listening to these astounding conversations, that nature, tired of imitating Balzac any longer, has now taken to imitating the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
The drawing-room is an English drawing-room--yes, with the _Queen_ and “the authoress of _Elizabeth and her German Garden_” and a Bechstein grand. There are forty-five chairs and easy chairs in it, and fifty ladies; the odd five ladies sit low upon hassocks or recline on each other in attitudes of intense affection. And at the other end is a male, neither the man with the pincenez nor the boy in Hades, but a third who has mysteriously come out of nothing into existence. I have entered, and I am held, as by a spell, in the doorway, the electric light raining upon me, a San Sebastian for the fatal arrows of the fifty, who fix on me their ingenuous eyes--