e which the Luna marble served with his uncle.

As he saunters towards the smoking-room with his hands in the pockets of
a loose velvet jacket, he summons this useful resident of his brain,
intending to banish with it the remembrance, the too enervating
remembrance, of Xenia Sabaroff. But, to his surprise, they seem very
like one another, and their features blend confusedly into one.

"And I know nothing at all about this lady, except that she has a voice
like Albani's, big jewels, and a Russian name!" he thinks, with some
derision of himself. The smokers do not find him amusing, while his
companions seem to him insufferably tiresome. He hears the echo of
Madame Sabaroff's grave, low, melodious voice, and is not in temper for
the somewhat _scabreux_ jests of the smoking-room. He thinks that it is
all very well for boys to like that sort of salacious talk, but it seems
to him intolerably absurd that men of his own age, and older, should
find any kind of savor in it.

They tease him about the black women, moreover, and for once he is not
easy enough to be good-tempered and indifferent. He answers
contemptuously and irritably, and of course all his friends suppose,
which they had not supposed before, that there is, after all, some truth
in Mrs. Curzon's anecdote.

"What stupid stories that old _blagueur_ Wootton has told in the
smoking-room, and what beastly ones Fred Ormond has related! and all as
if they were something new, too! as if the one weren't taken out of the
manuscripts at Bute House, and the other out of last week's 'Figaro'! If
men won't be original, or can't be, why don't they hold their tongues?"

"What fools we are to sit shut up with gas-lights and tobacco on such a
night as this!--a night for Lorenzo and Jessica, for Romeo and Juliet,"
he thinks, as he stands awhile at the open window of his own bedroom.

It is three o'clock: there is a faint suggestive light which means the
dawn, young birds are twittering, there is a delicious scent of green
leaves, of full-blown roses, of dewy mosses; the air is damp and warm,
he can hear the feet of blackbirds scraping and turning over the mould
and the grass; it is dark, yet he can distinguish the masses of the
great woods beyond the gardens, the outlines of the trees near his
casement, the shape of the clouds as they move slowly southward. He
wonders in what part of the old house, whose fantastic roofs and turrets
and gargoyles and ivy-colored buttresses are hi