dampen almost any other lover in the universe.

The park embrace, as nearly as I can analyse it, seems to be one part
instinct, one part duty, one part custom, and one part reflex action. I
have purposely omitted pleasure (which, in the analysis of the ordinary
embrace, reduces all the other ingredients to an almost invisible
faction), because I fail to find it; but I am willing to believe that
in some rudimentary form it does exist, because man attends to no
purely unpleasant matter with such praiseworthy assiduity. Anything
more fixedly stolid than the Park Lover when he passes his arm round his
chosen one and takes her crimson hand in his, I have never seen; unless,
indeed, it be the fixed stolidity of the chosen one herself. I had not
at first the assurance even to glance at them as I passed by, blushing
myself to the roots of my hair, though the offenders themselves never
changed colour. Many a time have I walked out of my way or lowered my
parasol, for fear of invading their Sunday Eden; but a spirit of inquiry
awoke in me at last, and I began to make psychological investigations,
with a view to finding out at what point embarrassment would appear in
the Park Lover. I experimented (it was a most arduous and unpleasant
task) with upwards of two hundred couples, and it is interesting to
record that self-consciousness was not apparent in a single instance.
It was not merely that they failed to resent my stopping in the path
directly opposite them, or my glaring most offensively at them, nor that
they even allowed me to sit upon their green bench and witness their
chaste salutes, but it was that they did fail to perceive me at
all! There is a kind of superb finish and completeness about their
indifference to the public gaze which removes it from ordinary
immodesty, and gives it a certain scientific value.

Chapter VII. A ducal tea-party.

Among all my English experiences, none occupies so important a place as
my forced meeting with the Duke of Cimicifugas. (There can be no harm in
my telling the incident, so long as I do not give the right names,
which are very well known to fame.) The Duchess of Cimicifugas, who is
charming, unaffected, and lovable, so report says, has among her chosen
friends an untitled woman whom we will call Mrs. Apis Mellifica. I met
her only daughter, Hilda, in America, and we became quite intimate. It
seems that Mrs. Apis Mellifica, who has an income of 20,000 pounds a
year, often e