quivering twilight moths drew from our veranda honeysuckles. Yet it was
mainly her vanity that feasted, not any lower impulse--of which, you know,
there are several--and, possibly, all her vanity craved at first was the
tinsel distinction of unusual knowledge.

One night she got into my dreams. I seemed to be explaining to Monsieur
Fontenette apologetically that this newly opened world was not at all
separate from my old one, but shone everywhere in it, like our winged
guests in our garden, and followed and surrounded me far beyond the
Baron's company, terminology, and magnifying-glass, lightening the burdens
and stress of the very counting-room and exchange. Whereat he seemed to
flare up!

"Ah!--you--I believe yes! But she?" he waved his hand in fierce unbelief.

I awoke concerned, and got myself to sleep again only by remembering the
utter absence of vanity in the Baron himself. I lay smiling in the dark to
think how much less all our verbal caressings were worth to him than the
drone of the most familiar beetle, and how his life-long delving in books
and nature had opened up this fairy world to him only at the cost of
shutting up all others. If education means calling forth and perfecting
our powers and affections, he was ten times more uneducated than his wife,
even as we knew her then. He appeared to care no more for human interests,
far or near, in large or small, than a crab cares for the stars. I fell
asleep chuckling in remembrance of an occasion when Mrs. Fontenette,
taking her cue from me, spoke to him of his plant-and-insect lore as one
of the many worlds there are within _the_ world, no more displacing it
than light displaces air, or than fragrance displaces form or sound. He
made her say it all over again, and then asked: "Vhere vas dat?"