f his set to a
water-party--a Bacchanalian water-party, with the Zu-Zu and her sisters
for the Naiads and the Household for their Tritons.

A water-party whose water element apparently consisted in driving
down to Richmond, dining at nine, being three hours over the courses,
contributing seven guineas apiece for the repast, listening to the songs
of the Cafe Alcazar, reproduced with matchless elan by a pretty French
actress, being pelted with brandy cherries by the Zu-Zu, seeing their
best cigars thrown away half-smoked by pretty pillagers, and driving
back again to town in the soft, starry night, with the gay rhythms
ringing from the box-seat as the leaders dashed along in a stretching
gallop down the Kew Road. It certainly had no other more aquatic feature
in it save a little drifting about for twenty minutes before dining,
in toy boats and punts, as the sun was setting, while Laura Lelas, the
brunette actress, sang a barcarolle.

"Venice, and her people, only born to bloom and droop."

"Where be all those
Dear dead women, with such hair too; what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old;"

It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning's fashion,
because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to think
at all; in the second, if put to it he would have averred that he knew
nothing of Venice, except that it was a musty old bore of a place, where
they worried you about visas and luggage and all that, chloride of lim'd
you if you came from the East, and couldn't give you a mount if it were
ever so; and, in the third, instead of longing for the dear dead women,
he was entirely contented with the lovely living ones who were at that
moment puffing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his eyes, making
him eat lobster drowned in Chablis, or pelting him with bonbons.

As they left the Star and Garter, Laura Lelas, mounted on Cecil's
box-seat, remembered she had dropped her cashmere in the dining room. A
cashmere is a Parisian's soul, idol, and fetich; servants could not find
it; Cecil, who, to do him this justice, was always as courteous to a
comedienne as to a countess, went himself. Passing the open window of
another room, he recognized the face of his little brother among a set
of young Civil Service fellows, attaches, and cornets. They had no
women with them; but they had brought what was perhaps worse--dice
for hazard--and wer