itions it was all his own doing: it came
from his inveterate habit of abysmal imputation, the snatching of the
ell wherever the inch peeped out, without which where would have been
the tolerability of life? It didn't matter now what he had imputed--and
he always held that his expenses of imputation were, at the worst, a
compliment to those inspiring them. It only mattered that each of the
pair had been then what he really saw each now--full, that is, of the
pride of their youth and beauty and fortune and freedom, though at
the same time particularly preoccupied: preoccupied, that is, with the
affairs, and above all with the passions, of Olympus. Who had they been,
and what? Whence had they come, whither were they bound, what tie united
them, what adventure engaged, what felicity, tempered by what peril,
magnificently, dramatically attended? These had been his questions, all
so inevitable and so impertinent, at the time, and to the exclusion of
any scruples over his not postulating an inane honeymoon, his not taking
the "tie," as he should doubtless properly have done, for the mere blest
matrimonial; and he now retracted not one of them, flushing as they did
before him again with their old momentary life. To feel his two friends
renewedly in presence--friends of the fleeting hour though they had but
been, and with whom he had exchanged no sign save the vaguest of salutes
on finally relieving them of his company--was only to be conscious that
he hadn't, on the spot, done them, so to speak, half justice, and that,
for his superior entertainment, there would be ever so much more of them
to come.

II

It might already have been coming indeed, with an immense stride, when,
scarce more than ten minutes later, he was aware that the distinguished
stranger had brought the Princess straight across the room to speak
to him. He had failed in the interval of any glimpse of their closer
meeting; for the great tenor had sung another song and then stopped,
immediately on which Madame Gloriani had made his pulse quicken to a
different, if not to a finer, throb by hovering before him once more
with the man in the world he most admired, as it were, looking at him
over her shoulder. The man in the world he most admired, the greatest
then of contemporary Dramatists--and bearing, independently, the name
inscribed if not in deepest incision at least in thickest gilding on the
rich recreative roll--this prodigious personage was actually