side, accessible to pain at every
point.

In the tumult of his conflicting inclinations, he had lost all guiding
will-power and moral perception. Will, in abdicating had yielded the
sceptre to instinct and the aesthetic sense was substituted for the
moral. But, it was nevertheless precisely to his aesthetic sense--in him
most subtle and powerful--that he owed a certain strength and
equilibrium of mind, so that one might say his existence was a perpetual
struggle between contrary forces, enclosed within the limits of that
equilibrium. Men of intellect, educated in the cult of the beautiful,
preserve a certain sense of order even in their worst depravities. The
conception of the beautiful is, so to speak, the axis of their being,
round which all their passions revolve.

Over this sadness, the recollection of Constance Landbrooke still
floated like a faded perfume. His love for Conny had been a very
delicate affair, for she was a very sweet little creature. She was like
one of Lawrence's creations, with all the dainty feminine graces so dear
to that painter of furbelows and laces and velvets, of lustrous eyes and
pouting lips, a very re-incarnation of the little Countess of
Shaftesbury. Lively, chattering, never still, lavish of infantile
diminutives and silvery peals of laughter, easily moved to sudden
caresses and as sudden melancholies and quick bursts of anger, she
contributed to her share of love a vast amount of movement, much variety
and many caprices. But Conny Landbrooke's melodious twitterings had left
no more mark on Andrea's heart than the light musical echo left in one's
ear for a time by some gay ritornella. More than once in some pensive
hour of twilight melancholy, she had said to him with a mist of tears
before her eyes--'I know you do not love me.' And in truth he did not
love her, she did not by any means satisfy his longings. His ideal was
less northern in character. Ideally he felt himself attracted by those
courtesans of the sixteenth century, over whose faces there would appear
to be drawn some indefinable veil of sorcery, some transparent mask of
enchantment, some divine nocturnal spell.

The moment Andrea set eyes on the Duchess of Scerni, he said to
himself--'_This_ is my Ideal Woman!' and his whole soul went out to her
in a transport of joy, in the presentiment of the future.

CHAPTER III

The next day the public sale-room of the Via Sistina was thronged with
fashionable people, com