ar of impertinence
that she was a model of innocent beauty, that her conversation was as
charming as her expression, and her dresses as charming as her
conversation. I am myself not much addicted to cards, but when she
proposed in the evenings to teach me the Hungarian game of Tarok I
should not have been human had I failed to become her pupil. But I was
never long in her company without being conscious of a feeling that she
was a woman who, through no fault of her own, had already had a history,
or was certain to have one some day. This feeling did not mislead me. A
year later it was justified. I learned, by accident, that her history
had been short, forlorn, and fatal. Its hidden actualities,
reconstructed by my own imagination, I afterward combined in my novel _A
Human Document_.

CHAPTER XIII

TWO WORKS ON SOCIAL POLITICS

The Second Lord Lytton at Knebworth--"Ouida"--Conservative
Torpor as to Social Politics--Two Books: _Labor and the Popular
Welfare_ and _Aristocracy and Evolution_--Letters from Herbert
Spencer

My visit to Cyprus one year, and my visit to Hungary the next, were both
of them retreats from the life of political and even philosophical
thought. They were frank acts of truancy in the regions of pure romance;
where life, individual and social, is a spectacle to be enjoyed, not a
problem of which thinkers compete in devising an explanation. But on
returning from Hungary to England the practical affairs of the moment
met me again halfway, at Vienna, where for a day or two I broke my
journey. My acquaintances at Vienna were few, but they included Sir
Augustus and Lady Paget at the Embassy, whom I had last seen at midnight
on the deck of the Dover packet when I was bound for the shores of
Cyprus more than a year before. Ambassadors, if they know their
business, are necessarily preoccupied with the present, and when
lunching or dining with Sir Augustus it was not possible to forget it.
It was all the more impossible because on these occasions there was
another diplomat present, also an old acquaintance--Sir Henry Drummond
Wolf, who happened to be then on his way home from Persia, and who was
voluble on questions of international, and especially of English,
politics. So far, however, as my own mood was concerned, this
dissipation of romance by realities was a more or less gradual process.
Even when I was again in England my inclinations to the life
romantic--to what Virgil (