y to the waiter. It was
immense, the look of genuine respect that came into the face of the
waiter. The Louvre had a good Romanee-Conti. Its price, two pounds five
a bottle, staggered Henry, and he thought of his poor mother and aunt at
the tea-meeting, but his impassive features showed no sign of the
internal agitation. And when he had drunk half a glass of the
incomparable fluid, he felt that a hundred and two pounds five a bottle
would not have been too much to pay for it. The physical, moral, and
spiritual effects upon him of that wine were remarkable in the highest
degree. That wine banished instantly all awkwardness, diffidence,
timidity, taciturnity, and meanness. It filled him with generous
emotions and the pride of life. It ennobled him.

And, in the third place, Geraldine at once furnished him with a new
ideal of the feminine and satisfied it. He saw that the women of Munster
Park were not real women; they were afraid to be real women, afraid to
be joyous, afraid to be pretty, afraid to attract; they held themselves
in instead of letting themselves go; they assumed that every pleasure
was guilty until it was proved innocent, thus transgressing the
fundamental principle of English justice; their watchful eyes seemed to
be continually saying: 'Touch me--and I shall scream for help!' In
costume, any elegance, any elaboration, any coquetry, was eschewed by
them as akin to wantonness. Now Geraldine reversed all that. Her frock
was candidly ornate. She told him she had made it herself, but it
appeared to him that there were more stitches in it than ten women could
have accomplished in ten years. She openly revelled in her charms; she
openly made the most of them. She did not attempt to disguise her wish
to please, to flatter, to intoxicate. Her eyes said nothing about
screaming for help. Her eyes said: 'I'm a woman; you're a man. How
jolly!' Her eyes said: 'I was born to do what I'm doing now.' Her eyes
said: 'Touch me--and we shall see'. But what chiefly enchanted Henry
was her intellectual courage and her freedom from cant. In conversing
with her you hadn't got to tread lightly and warily, lest at any moment
you might put your foot through the thin crust of a false modesty, and
tumble into eternal disgrace. You could talk to her about anything; and
she did not pretend to be blind to the obvious facts of existence, to
the obvious facts of the Louvre Restaurant, for example. Moreover, she
had a way of being suddenly