ff your feet. Their enjoyment terrifies
the imagination. They are like a Sunday school let loose in the Moulin
Rouge, or Mr. Toole when he has made a pun! Sometimes I wish that I
could be good too, in order to have such a holiday. Are you really going
to bed, Lady Locke? Eleven! I had no idea it was so early. I am going to
sit up all night with Reggie, saying mad scarlet things, such as Walter
Pater loves, and waking the night with silver silences. Good-night.
Come, Reggie, let us go to the smoking-room, since we are left alone. I
will be brilliant for you as I have never been brilliant for my
publishers. I will talk to you as no character in my plays has ever
talked. Come! The young Endymion stirs in his dreams, and the pale-soul
Selene watches him from her pearly car. The shadows on the lawns are
violet, and the stars wash the spaces of the sky with primrose and with
crimson. The night is old yet. Let me be brilliant, dear boy, or I feel
that I shall weep for sheer wittiness, and die, as so many have died,
with all my epigrams still in me."

XII.

The cottage was full of the curious suppressed rustling that seems to be
inseparable from church-going in England. Good people invariably rustle,
and so bad people, trying to be good, are inclined to rustle too. At
least that was what Madame Valtesi said as she stood in the tiny,
sage-green hall hung with fans, and finished buttoning her long Suede
gloves. She still wore her big and shady hat. She declared it made her
feel religious, and nobody was prepared to dispute the assertion. Tommy
was clamouring for his promised green carnation; but Lord Reggie, in
obedience to Lady Locke's request, told him that the one he had intended
for him had faded away in the night, had faded exquisitely, as the
wicked fade after flourishing like green bay trees; and Tommy, though
inclined to tears, was soothed by a promise that he should sit on the
organ seat and turn over in the anthem. Lady Locke looked rather
serious, and Mrs. Windsor strangely dissipated. She always did look
particularly dissipated on Sunday mornings, although she was not aware
of it; and to-day she was intent on being decisively rustic, and as
countrified in her piety as possible. She wore an innocent gown powdered
with pimpernels, and a little bonnet that she thought holiness itself,
consisting as it did of a very small bow and a very large spike. Lord
Reggie and Esme Amarinth honoured the day with frock coats