all the
bouquets of the chemist commingled; most nourishing to the idea of
woman in the nose of man. They are a forest foliage--rustle of silks and
muslins, magic interweaving, or the mythology, if you prefer it. See,
hear, smell, they are Juno, Venus, Hebe, to you. We must have poetry
with them; otherwise they are better in the kitchen. Is there--but there
is not; there is not present one of the chivalrous breeched who could
prefer the shocking emancipated gristly female, which imposes propriety
on our sensations and inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of
them.

Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme. He is a colonel of
Companies. But those are his diversion, as the British Army has been
to the warrior. Puellis idoneus, he is professedly a lady's man, a
rose-beetle, and a fine specimen of a common kind: and he has been that
thing, that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years,
necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving
him, to conceal the muster. He has to be fascinating, or he would look
outworn, forlorn. On one side of him is Lady Carmine; on the other,
Lady Swanage; dames embedded in the blooming maturity of England's
conservatory. Their lords (an Earl, a Baron) are of the lords who go
down to the City to sow a title for a repair of their poor incomes, and
are to be commended for frankly accepting the new dispensation while
they retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient. Thus gently
does a maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies,
Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though
one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral
spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere);
holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the
glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the
neck, at the wrist; Bankers and wives of Bankers. Victor passed among
them, chatting right and left.

Lady Carmine asked him: 'Is Durandarte counted on?'

He answered: 'I made sure of the Luciani.'

She serenely understood. Artistes are licenced people, with a Bohemian
instead of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as
paste will pass for diamonds where the mirror is held up to Nature by
bold supernumeraries.

He wished to introduce Nesta. His girl was on the raised orchestral
flooring. Nataly held her fast to a music-scroll.

Mr. P