reflective eye, "you 're an effulgent sort of egotist, as egotists go;
but you yield much cry for precious little wool."

"Yes, dead," Adrian repeated, pursuing his own train of ideas. "Donna
Susanna is a widow, a poor lone widow, a wealthy, eligible widow. You
must be kind to her."

"Why don't you marry her?" Anthony enquired.

"Pooh," said Adrian.

"Why don't you?" Anthony insisted. "If she 's really rich? You don't
dislike her--you respect her--perhaps, if you set your mind to it, you
could even learn to love her. She 'd give you a home and a position in
the world; she 'd make a sober citizen of you; and she 'd take you off
my hands. You know whether you 're an expense--and a responsibility.
Why don't you marry her? You owe it to me not to let such an occasion
slip."

"Pooh," said Adrian. But he looked conscious, and he laughed a
deliriously conscious laugh. "What nonsense you do talk. I 'm too
young, I 'm far too young, to think of marrying."

"See him blush and giggle and shake his pretty curls," said Anthony,
with scorn, addressing the universe.

By this time they had skirted the house, and come round to the southern
front, where the sunshine lay unbroken on the lawn, and the smell of
the box hedges, strong in the still air, seemed a thing almost
ponderable: the low, long front, a mellow line of colour, with the
purple of its old red bricks and the dark green of its ivy, sunlit
against the darker green of the park, and the blue of the tender
English sky. The terrace steps were warm under their feet, as they
mounted them. In terra-cotta urns, at intervals upon the terrace
balustrade, roses grew, roses red and white; and from larger urns, one
at either side of the hall-door, red and white roses were espaliered,
intertwining overhead.

The hall-door stood open; but the hall, as they entered it from the
brightness without, was black at first, like a room unlighted. Then,
little by little, it turned from black to brown, and defined
itself:--"that hackneyed type of Stage-property hall," I have heard
Adrian lament, "which connotes immediately a lost will, a family
secret, and the ghost of a man in armour"; "a noble apartment, square
and spacious, characteristic of the period when halls were meant to
serve at need as guard-rooms," says the _County History_.

Square and spacious it was certainly, perhaps a hackneyed type none the
less: the ceiling and the walls panelled in dark well-polished oak