with Gilbert Osmond, who almost always was present when his wife
received. They sat down together, and Osmond, talkative,
communicative, expansive, seemed possessed with a kind of
intellectual gaiety. He leaned back with his legs crossed,
lounging and chatting, while Goodwood, more restless, but not at
all lively, shifted his position, played with his hat, made the
little sofa creak beneath him. Osmond's face wore a sharp,
aggressive smile; he was as a man whose perceptions have been
quickened by good news. He remarked to Goodwood that he was sorry
they were to lose him; he himself should particularly miss him.
He saw so few intelligent men--they were surprisingly scarce in
Rome. He must be sure to come back; there was something very
refreshing, to an inveterate Italian like himself, in talking
with a genuine outsider.

"I'm very fond of Rome, you know," Osmond said; "but there's
nothing I like better than to meet people who haven't that
superstition. The modern world's after all very fine. Now you're
thoroughly modern and yet are not at all common. So many of the
moderns we see are such very poor stuff. If they're the children
of the future we're willing to die young. Of course the ancients
too are often very tiresome. My wife and I like everything that's
really new--not the mere pretence of it. There's nothing new,
unfortunately, in ignorance and stupidity. We see plenty of that
in forms that offer themselves as a revelation of progress, of
light. A revelation of vulgarity! There's a certain kind of
vulgarity which I believe is really new; I don't think there ever
was anything like it before. Indeed I don't find vulgarity, at
all, before the present century. You see a faint menace of it
here and there in the last, but to-day the air has grown so dense