How fresh and sweet and welcoming the garden looked on that calm, lovely summer day! How brightly the morning dewdrops twinkled on the leaves, like a sprinkling of liquid diamonds! Every flower seemed to greet him with silent laughter: "Aha, you've been playing truant, have you?
Straying into alien precincts, roving in search of something newer and gaudier than anything you have here?
Sunlight palls on you; gas is so much more festive! The scents of the fields are vulgar; finer the hot smells of the playhouse, more meet for a cultured nostril!" Of course Austin made all this nonsense up himself, but he felt so happy that it amused him to attribute the words to the dear flower-friends who were all around him, and to whom he could never be really faithless.

Faugh! that playhouse! He would never enter one again.

Be an actor! Lubin was a cleaner gentleman than any painted Buskin on the stage.

Here, in the clear, pure splendour of the sunlit air, the place where he had been last night loomed up in his consciousness as something meretricious and unwholesome.

Yet he was glad he had been, for it made everything so much purer and sweeter by contrast.