Nor can I begrudge their cost, of
whatever sort, even now when my delight in them is no longer a constant
enthusiasm. The cases of specimens have passed from daily sight, but
thenceforth, as never before, our garden was furnished with guests--pages,
ladies, poets, fairies, emperors, goddesses--coming and going on gorgeous
wings, and none ever a stranger more than once. My non-parasitic friend
"opened a new world" to me; a world that so flattered one with its grace
and beauty, its marvellous delicacy and minuteness, its glory of color and
curiousness of marking, and its exquisite adaptation of form to need and
function, that in my meaner depths, or say my childish shallows--I
resented Mrs. Fontenette's making the same avowal for herself--I didn't
believe her!
I do not say she was consciously shamming; but I could see she drank in
the Baron's revelations with no more true spiritual exaltation than the
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.
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