Vaness say, quite close:
"There's nothing for me but beauty, Miss Monroy."
The two were evidently just behind my azalea clump, perhaps four yards
away, yet as invisible as if in China.
"Beauty is a wide, wide word. Define it, Mr. Vaness."
"An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory: it stands before me."
"Come, now, that's just a get-out. Is beauty of the flesh or of the
spirit?"
"What is the spirit, as you call it? I'm a pagan."
"Oh, so am I. But the Greeks were pagans."
"Well, spirit is only the refined side of sensuous appreciations."
"I wonder!"
"I have spent my life in finding that out."
"Then the feeling this garden rouses in me is purely sensuous?"
"Of course. If you were standing there blind and deaf, without the
powers of scent and touch, where would your feeling be?"
"You are very discouraging, Mr. Vaness." "No, madam; I face facts.
When I was a youngster I had plenty of fluffy aspiration towards I
didn't know what; I even used to write poetry."
"Oh! Mr. Vaness, was it good?"
"It was not. I very soon learned that a genuine sensation was worth all
the uplift in the world.
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