of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as paste
will pass for diamonds where the mirror is held up to Nature by bold
supernumeraries.

He wished to introduce Nesta. His girl was on the raised orchestral
flooring. Nataly held her fast to a music-scroll.

Mr. Peridon, sad for the absence and cause of absence of Louise de
Seilles,--summoned in the morning abruptly to Bourges, where her brother
lay with his life endangered by an accident at Artillery practise,--Mr.
Peridon was generally conductor. Victor was to lead the full force of
amateurs in the brisk overture to Zampa. He perceived a movement of
Nataly, Nesta, and Peridon. 'They have come,' he said; he jumped on the
orchestra boards and hastened to greet the Luciani with Durandarte in the
retiring-room.

His departure raised the whisper that he would wield the baton. An
opinion was unuttered. His name for the flute-duet with the Hon. Dudley
Sowerby had not provoked the reserve opinion; it seemed, on the whole, a
pretty thing in him to condescend to do: the sentiment he awakened was
not flustered by it. But the act of leading, appeared as an official
thing to do. Our soufe of sentiment will be seen subsiding under a
breath, without a repressive word to send it down. Sir Rodwell
Blachington would have preferred Radnor's not leading or playing either.
Colonel Corfe and Mr. Caddis declined to consider such conduct English,
in a man of station . . . notwithstanding Royal Highnesses, who are at
least partly English: partly, we say, under our breath, remembering our
old ideal of an English gentleman, in opposition to German tastes. It is
true, that the whole country is changeing, decomposing!

The colonel fished for Lady Carmine's view. And Lady Swanage too? Both of
the distinguished ladies approved of Mr. Radnor's leading--for a leading
off. Women are pleased to see their favourite in the place of
prominence--as long as Fortune swims him unbuffeted, or one should say,
unbattered, up the mounting wave. Besides these ladies had none of the
colonel's remainder of juvenile English sense of the manly, his
adolescent's intolerance of the eccentric, suspicion and contempt of any
supposed affectation, which was not ostentatiously, stalkingly practised
to subdue the sex. And you cannot wield a baton without looking affected.
And at one of the Colonel's Clubs in town, only five years back, an
English musical composer, who had not then made his money--now by the