sense of beauty you can make an earthly paradise for yourself in
Venice on 1500 pounds a year, whilst our wretched vulgar industrial
millionaires are spending twenty thousand on the amusements of
billiard markers. I assure you I am a poor man according to modern
ideas. But I have never had anything less than the very best that
life has produced. It is my good fortune to have a beautiful and
lovable daughter; and that girl, sir, has never seen an ugly sight or
heard an ugly sound that I could spare her; and she has certainly
never worn an ugly dress or tasted coarse food or bad wine in her
life. She has lived in a palace; and her perambulator was a gondola.
Now you know the sort of people we are, Mr Savoyard. You can imagine
how we feel here.

SAVOYARD. Rather out of it, eh?

THE COUNT. Out of it, sir! Out of what?

SAVOYARD. Well, out of everything.

THE COUNT. Out of soot and fog and mud and east wind; out of
vulgarity and ugliness, hypocrisy and greed, superstition and
stupidity. Out of all this, and in the sunshine, in the enchanted
region of which great artists alone have had the secret, in the sacred
footsteps of Byron, of Shelley, of the Brownings, of Turner and
Ruskin. Dont you envy me, Mr Savoyard?

SAVOYARD. Some of us must live in England, you know, just to keep the
place going. Besides--though, mind you, I dont say it isnt all right
from the high art point of view and all that--three weeks of it would
drive me melancholy mad. However, I'm glad you told me, because it