something about changing the dress she
wore at dinner. She will come." And the Warden thanked his young friend
for the great kindness he had shown to Zuleika. He hoped the Duke had
not let her worry him with her artless prattle. "She seems to be a good,
amiable girl," he added, in his detached way.

Sitting beside him, the Duke looked curiously at the venerable profile,
as at a mummy's. To think that this had once been a man! To think that
his blood flowed in the veins of Zuleika! Hitherto the Duke had seen
nothing grotesque in him--had regarded him always as a dignified
specimen of priest and scholar. Such a life as the Warden's, year
following year in ornamental seclusion from the follies and fusses of
the world, had to the Duke seemed rather admirable and enviable. Often
he himself had (for a minute or so) meditated taking a fellowship at All
Souls and spending here in Oxford the greater part of his life. He had
never been young, and it never had occurred to him that the Warden had
been young once. To-night he saw the old man in a new light--saw that
he was mad. Here was a man who--for had he not married and begotten a
child?--must have known, in some degree, the emotion of love. How, after
that, could he have gone on thus, year by year, rusting among his
books, asking no favour of life, waiting for death without a sign of
impatience? Why had he not killed himself long ago? Why cumbered he the
earth?

On the dais an undergraduate was singing a song entitled "She Loves Not
Me." Such plaints are apt to leave us unharrowed. Across the footlights
of an opera-house, the despair of some Italian tenor in red tights and
a yellow wig may be convincing enough. Not so, at a concert, the despair
of a shy British amateur in evening dress. The undergraduate on the
dais, fumbling with his sheet of music while he predicted that only when
he were "laid within the church-yard cold and grey" would his lady
begin to pity him, seemed to the Duke rather ridiculous; but not half so
ridiculous as the Warden. This fictitious love-affair was less nugatory
than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the
devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the warbler was perhaps
expressing a genuine sentiment. Zuleika herself, belike, was in his
thoughts.

As he began the second stanza, predicting that when his lady died too
the angels of heaven would bear her straight to him, the audience heard
a loud murmur, or subdued roar