amorousness, which here is not ever blighted by shrill reprobation, has need at no time to fear either the chastisement of human law nor the anathemas of any other religion anywhere in the quiet brakes and lowlands of the moist realm of Koleos Koleros. For, you conceive, these feminine myths who now are flute-players in and about the shrine of the wrinkled goddess, and who through so many centuries have been trained in all the arts of pleasure, came by and by into a certain confusion—”

“But what sort of confusion, Horvendile, do you mean? For I find your speaking another sort. And I am rather more interested in that princess—”

“I mean that their religion, which ranks pleasure above all else, permits no man to pass by unpleased.”

“Ah, now I understand you!”

“—I mean that, through the duties of their religious faith, their way of living has been given over to an assiduous and an empirical study of all the charms peculiar to a woman, the more particularly as these charms are employed—”

“Let us say, in the exercise of their religion,” Gerald suggested, “for I wholly understand you, sir.”

“It has followed that the taste of these ladies has become more delicate. It has followed that, by force of considering their own feminine loveliness, always unveiled and in lively employment, and by comparing it so intimately and so jealously with the loveliness of their female rivals in the service of the wrinkled goddess, they have become connoisseurs of the beauties peculiar to their sex. They have acquired a refinement of taste—”

“To be refined in one’s taste is eminently praiseworthy. Ah, my dear fellow, if you but knew what shocking examples of bad taste we kings are continually encountering among our sycophants! And that reminds me, you said something about a princess—”

“—They have learned to despise the hasty and boisterous and, between ourselves, the very often disappointing ways of men—”

“Ah, yes, no doubt!” said Gerald. “Men are a bad lot. But we were speaking of a princess—”

“—And they have lovingly contrived more finespun and more rococo diversions without the crude assistance of any man. Then also they delight in playing with many well-trained pets,—with goats and large dogs and asses and, they tell me, with rams and with bulls also. The surprising and mysterious joys which blaze up among these flute-players are, thus, very violent and delicious.”

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