FRIENDSHIP 
 
OUIDA'S NOVELS. 
 
 Uniform edition, crown %vo, cloth extra, ^s, each. 
 
 HELD IN BONDAGE. 
 
 STRATHMORE. 
 
 CHANDOS : A Novel. 
 
 UNDER TWO FLAGS. 
 
 IDALIA : A Romance. 
 
 TRICOTRIN. 
 
 CECIL CASTLEMAINE'S GAGE. 
 
 PUCK : His Vicissitudes, Adventures, etc. 
 
 FOLLE FARINE. 
 
 A DOG OF FLANDERS. 
 
 PASCAREL : Only a Story. 
 
 TWO LITTLE WOODEN SHOES. 
 
 SIGNA. 
 
 IN A WINTER CITY. 
 
 ARIADNE. 
 
 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHATTO &- WIND US, PICCADILLY, W. 
 
FRIENDSHIP 
 
 A STORY, 
 
 By OUIDA, 
 
 AUTHOR OF "puck," "aRIADNE," "SIGNA," ETC, 
 
 " Si I'emploi de la Comedie est de corriger les vices, je ne vois pas 
 par quelle raison il y en aura de privilegies." — Moliere. 
 
 A NEW EDITION. 
 
 Honbon: 
 CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY. 
 
PRINTED AT THE CAXTON PRESS, BECCLES. 
 

 
 A PEOPOS. 
 
 A FROG that dwelt in a ditch spat at a worm that bore a 
 lamp. 
 
 " "Why do you do that ? " baid the glowworm. 
 
 " Why do you shine ? " said the frog. 
 
 iViiesyiJio 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/friendshipstorybOOouidrich 
 
AVANT-PEOPOS. 
 
 When Zens, half in s^Dort and half in cruelty, made man, 
 young Hermes, who, as all Olympus knew, was for ever at 
 some j)iece of mischief, insisted on meddling with his 
 father's work, and got leave to fashion the human ear out 
 of a shell that he chanced to have by him, across which he 
 stretched a fine cobweb that he stole from Arachne. But 
 he hollowed and twisted the shell in such a fashion that it 
 would turn back all sounds except very loud blasts that 
 Falsehood should blow on a brazen horn, whilst the im- 
 penetrable web would keep out all such whispers as Truth 
 could send up from the depths of her well. 
 
 Hermes chuckled as he rounded the curves of his ear, 
 and fastened it on to the newly-made Human Creature. 
 
 "So shall these mortals always hear and believe the 
 thing that is not," he said to himself in glee — knowing 
 that the box he would give to Pandora would not bear 
 more confused and complex woes to the hapless earth than 
 this gift of an ear to man. 
 
viii A7ANT-PR0P08. 
 
 But lie forgot himself so far that, though two ears were 
 wanted, he only made one. 
 
 Apollo, passing that way, marked the blunder, and 
 resolved to avenge the theft of his milk-white herds which 
 had led him such a weary chase through Tempo. 
 
 Apollo took a pearl of the sea and hollowed it, and 
 strung across it a silver string from his own lyre, and with 
 it gave to man one ear hy which the voice of Truth should 
 reach the brain. 
 
 " You have spoilt all my sport," said the boy Hermes, 
 angry and weeping. 
 
 " Nay," said the elder brother, with a smile. " Be 
 comforted. The brazen trumpets will be sure to drown 
 the whisper from the well, and ten thousand mortals to 
 one, be sure, will always turn by choice your ear instead 
 of mine." 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 " It is a pull, sister," said the elder Miss Moixaj of Craig Moira, 
 to the younger. 
 
 " It is a iDull, sister. But wc promised Archie." 
 
 " We promised Archie, and I'm wishful to see how she gets 
 on wi' the man that sold cari)ets." 
 
 So the carriage, bearing the Misses Moira, of Craig Moira, 
 their plaids, pugs, ear-trumpets, and courier, continued its 
 course across the Eoman Campagna, and up the steep and 
 wooded roads that led to the old Castle of Fiorclelisa. 
 
 The Misses Moira, of Moira, lived on their own lands in 
 Caithness, were very rich, very ugly, very eccentric, spoke with 
 a strong native accent, and delivered their opinions uncalled for ; 
 two of their sister's children were respectively the Duchess of 
 Forfar and the Marquis of Fingal ; the younger was the echo of 
 the elder — both wore spectacles, both were deaf; and neither 
 ever forgot that the Moiras, of Craig Moira, had the right to sit 
 before their sovereign, and were allied with half the bluest blood 
 and highest names in Great Britain. 
 
 They were now about to call on one of their connections, and 
 gazed anxiously through their spectacles for the Castle of Fior- 
 delisa, where she dwelt. Fiordelisa came at last in sight, a 
 grey, rambling, and ancient pile, set amidst cypress and ilex 
 woods, with its gardens straying down into its farm-lands in 
 Italian fashion, covering hills and plains with corn and vine and 
 olive. 
 
 " A braw place this, but ill-kept," said the elder Miss Moira, 
 as they entered a dark avenue of ancient oaks, " and has tho 
 idolatrous emblems even at the very gates." 
 
 She shut her eyes not to seethe Pieta let into the wall under 
 the woods, and kept them shut lest she should see any more such 
 signs. They had been brought into the land of such mummeries 
 
 r. 
 
2 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 under protest by the dangerous illness of a beloved sister, 
 mother of her young Grace of Forfar, at Naples, and the sister 
 being restored to health, they were hastening away from the 
 scene of abominations, only pausing a few days in Eome because 
 the younger of them was somewhat of an invalid, and unequal to 
 rapid travelling. 
 
 The sudden stoppage of the carriage made the elder Miss 
 Moira open her eyes. They had arrived at the entrance door of 
 Fiordelisa. 
 
 Between the centre columns of a beautiful loggia, built by 
 Bramante, there was standing a handsome, black-browed woman, 
 a little in advance of two gentlemen, who stood one on each side 
 of her, awaiting the arrival of the guests. 
 
 She was the Lady Joan Challoner. 
 
 With ardour and cordial eagerness of welcome she rushed 
 down the stone steps and darted to the carriage. 
 
 " Oh, dearest Miss Moira, how kind of you! And dear Miss 
 Elizabeth, too. How sorry I am not to be in Rome ! We go down 
 for good the day after to-morrow. If I had only known you 
 were coming there, of course I should have gone in last week. 
 Let me present them to yoii — Mr. Challoner ; Prince loris. 
 Come in, pray, out of the sun. Yes, even in November it is 
 oppressively warm. You must bo overladen with all those 
 plaids. Robert lo " 
 
 " Enchante d I'honneur de vous voir, mesdames," murmured 
 a tall, graceful, dark-eyed person, with a sweet smile and a low 
 bow, coming forward on to the first step, and offering his arm to 
 the old gentlewoman. 
 
 " Hoot toot, man ! Canna ye speak yer own tongue ?" said the 
 elder Miss Moira sharply, accepting the arm of her host, as she 
 thought, and entering the house with him, whilst her sister 
 followed with their hostess, who was talking eagerly into her 
 ear-trumpet; the other gentleman, who had a Scotch face and a 
 German manner, and looked like a fusion between a Leipzig 
 pliilologist and an American senator, made a feeble attempt to 
 offer his arm as well, but hesitated, not seeing very well how to 
 do it, and halted midway, making believe to hold back a barking 
 Clumber spaniel. 
 
 The whole party passed into the loggia, and thence into the 
 first great apartment opening out from it, where some twenty 
 other people, English and American residents of Rome, had 
 been gathered to do honour to the Misses Moira, of Moira, and 
 were taking tea, eating grapes, and looking at pictures and 
 cliina. Seated, the two ladies looked round the noble tapestried 
 guest-chamber with some bewilderment and some vague dis- 
 pleasure. 
 
 " So ye'ro Joan Perth-Douglas that was ? " said the elder 
 Miss Moira, bringing her spectacles to bear on her hostess. " Yo 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 3 
 
 were a slip of twclvo wlicn wc saw yc lust— twenty years ago, 
 aye, twenty years aud more. Will ye tell mo why your good 
 husband talks French to us ? " 
 
 "Allow me, madam," murmured the gentleman who looked 
 like a Leipzig philologist and an American senator, offering to 
 relieve her of her plaids. 
 
 " Don't bo officious, man ! " said Miss Moira, sharply. " My 
 sister's no richt in tho lungs, and your master's house is 
 draughty." 
 
 The gentleman shrank back. 
 
 " I never saw a Scot so dark as your good husband, Joan," 
 pursued the elder Miss Moira, adhering to her original thoughts, 
 sternly fastening her glasses upon the graceful and dark-eyed 
 personage, who murmured a soft and perplexed "Piait-il, 
 Madame ? " 
 
 " Have yon lived among Papists till you've forgot every word 
 of the tongue yon were born to, sir ? " asked Miss Moira of him, 
 believing that she was addressing a fellow-countryman. 
 
 " You must be inconvenienced by all those plaids, madam. 
 
 Do allow me " commenced in a kind of desj^air the other 
 
 person who had been scouted. 
 
 " Canna ye wait till ye're spoke to ! " said the lady, turning 
 on him in wrath at the interference. " Canna ye teach your 
 servants better ways, Leddy Joan, than to gird at a body like 
 that? A very brown man for a Scot your husband, though 
 extraordinary well-favoured. How comes it he canna talk his 
 own tongue V " 
 
 " Tliat is not my husband," said the Lady Joan hurriedly, 
 with a flush rising on her face and a laugh to her eyes. " You 
 are mistaken, dear Miss Moira. I introduce people so badly ; 
 this is only loris, a friend, you know. ]\Iy husband, Mr. 
 Challoner, you've been taking for a servant, and scolding about 
 your plaids." 
 
 The well-bred twenty people who were taking tea at Fior- 
 delisa were not so perfectly well-bred that they could help a 
 little titter as they listened. 
 
 " Prut-tut ! " cried the elder Miss IMoira, with her head 
 higher in the air, being a person who never recognised her own 
 errors, let them be made manifest as they might. " Tlus man 
 received us, certainly he received us, at the door (I am correct, 
 sister?). Certainly he received us, Leddy Joan. If yon be 
 master here," she demanded with sudden vigour of the gentle- 
 man whom she was informed was Mr. Challoner, as he returned 
 with a cup of tea and a cream-jug — " if tjou be master here, why 
 don't you behave like it ? Are you master, eh ? " 
 
 Mr. Challoner, conscious of the twenty well-bred people and 
 the irrepressible ill-bred titter, begged Miss Moira to tell him if 
 she took much sugar or little. 
 
4 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 " I can sugar for myself! " said that lady with asperity. " So 
 you are Leddy Joan's husband, are you? You don't seem to 
 conduct yourself like it. But I thought the other was very dark 
 for a Scot." 
 
 " Do you take cream, madam ? " murmured Mr. Challoner, 
 bending his back stifBy over the silver jug, whilst Miss Moira 
 stared with stony gaze at the coronets and coats of arms on the 
 chairs. 
 
 " Vv''hose quarterings are those ? " she demanded. " They're 
 none known north o' Tweed, nor north o' Thames either for that 
 matter ; the shape o' the shield " 
 
 " Dear Miss Moira, allow me ■," said the Lady Joan, 
 
 avoiding heraldi-y by bringing up a small division of the twenty 
 well-bred people for jDresentation. But Miss Moira was not to 
 be so lightly diverted from her purpose. Having bent her head 
 as many times as i)oliteuess required, she retained her grasp on 
 Mr. Challoner, and returned to her original investigations. " A 
 fine place," she resumed, letting her spectacles rove from 
 the timber roof to the mosaic floor ; " a fine place ; is it your 
 own ? " 
 
 Mr. Challoner murmured inarticulately, and stooped for the 
 sugar-tongs. 
 
 " Bought it ? " said Miss Moira sharply. 
 
 " No — not precisely." 
 
 " Hired it ? " 
 
 " Not exactly. That is, at least " 
 
 Mr. Challoner shifted his eyeglass, and, being an exact man, 
 paused to find an exact word. 
 
 " Oh, my gude soul, then if ye've na bought it and na hired 
 it, it's na yours at all, and what for be ye speering to ask ns 
 into it?" 
 
 Mr. Challoner wondered to himself M'hy an unkind Provi- 
 dence would move old maiden ladies from their own safe ingle- 
 nooks by grey Atlantic shores, and muttered something of " a 
 friend, an old friend." 
 
 "Oh, it's the dark man's, is it? He don't look old," said 
 Miss Moira, "and you and your good leddy live in it out of 
 friendship. Is that the custom in this pajiistical couutrv, pray, 
 sir ? " 
 
 Mr. Challoner murmured that he thought it was the custom 
 — " the houses were so large, the nobility were so poor " 
 
 " And has he a good lady? What docs she say to it ? Cer- 
 tainly, Leddy Joan asked us out here as to her own place. Quito 
 clearly — her own place. I am correct, sister ? " 
 
 " Quite correct, sister. Pier own place." 
 
 " loris is not married," said Mr. Challoner, wondering if ho 
 could drop the sugar-tongs again without too miich awkward- 
 ness. " He is a good fellow. We are very much attached to 
 
FRIENDSEIP. 5 
 
 liira. Will yoii like to see my greenhouses ? I am curious in 
 the Nymplixafi — cijanea — cxniha — 7-uhra." 
 
 " A poud-lily's a puir feckless taste for a man," said Miss 
 Moira severely. " Archie asked us to come and see his 
 daughter, and so we came. But certainly when she wrote to us 
 she said her 'own place ' — most distinctly her own place." 
 
 " Oh, she has got into the habit of calling it so, she has done 
 so much for it " 
 
 " But if it be the young man's " 
 
 _ Lady Joan Challoner begged at that moment to present to 
 Miss Moira an Anglican clergyman. 
 
 The Anglican clergyman 'disposed of, Miss Moira, of Craig 
 Moira, returned to the charge. 
 
 "Eh, but it must be a perilous experiment — twa masters 
 under one roof." 
 
 " Eh, it must, indeed," murmured the younger Miss Moira. 
 " Mony voices make mucklo strife." 
 
 "Ay, they do. Tell me now, do you twa good gentlemen 
 never fash one another ? " 
 
 " Never," said Mr. Challoner cordially, but his cold light eyes 
 fell as he sjDoke. 
 
 "Then ye're just no human, sir," said Miss Moira with 
 emphasis ; " and Joan Perth-Douglas had always a sharp tongue 
 of her own. Perth-Douglas women never were easy to live with. 
 You seem a quiet body yourself, but still " 
 
 "Let me show you my wife's fowls. The fame of the 
 poultry of Craig Moira— — " commenced Mr. Challoner. 
 
 " Still, I think you're no wise, and so I'll tell Archie," con- 
 tinued Miss Moira, not to be moved even by praise of her 
 poultry-yard. "It's a queer way of living, and certainly she 
 said her own place, ' her own place ; ' and ye'll take no offence, for 
 I always speak my mind, but that Papist's a deal too bonny to 
 look at, and Lcddy Joan's a young woman still." 
 
 " My dear madam ! I have not the most distant idea of your 
 meaning " 
 
 " Then ye're just a fule, sir," said Miss Moira sharply. 
 
 "Will you look at my wife's poultry ? She has some spangled 
 bantams that " 
 
 " Eh ? Joan Perth-Douglas has taken to cocks and hens and 
 bubbly-jocks, has she? Weel, there's no accounting for con- 
 versions. Perth-Douglas women were always a handful. I've 
 known three generations of them, and they always were master- 
 ful. Dear douce Archie never daured say his soul was his own. 
 Yes, I'll come and see your chicks and stove plants. But how 
 can they be yours if the place is the Papist's ? " 
 
 " It was a tumble-down old barrack. We have spent a good 
 deal on it. One is always glad to do good to a friend," mur- 
 mured Mr. Challoner, a little vaguely, offering his arm to bis 
 tormentor. 
 
5 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 , " Humph ! " said the elder Miss Moira with a sniff. 
 
 " We are quite farmers here, you know," Mr. Challoner con- 
 tinued, leading the M'ay thi'ougli courts and chambers to the 
 open air. " The whole thing had gone to rack and ruin when 
 we took it in hand. Italians are so improvident, and the 
 national habits are so wasteful. But my wife's energy is 
 wonderful ; whatever she undertakes prospers " 
 
 "Humph ! " said the elder Miss Moira once more. " And the 
 handsome Papist, is he grateful to ye for her energy ? " 
 
 " Oh, don't talk about gratitude. There is no question of 
 that ! We are always glad to be of use to our friends, and loris 
 is an excellent fellow. Ask Lord Archie." 
 
 Lord Archie was an idol of Craig Moira, and his word was 
 law there. Miss Moira was softened by it, and her suspicions 
 were mollified. She consented to be conducted through the 
 greenhouses, praised the bantams, and only sniffed a little as 
 she passed the open door of the castle chapel, where some 
 peasants were going in for vespers. She returned in a more 
 amiable frame of mind to her sister and her sofa, and relented 
 enough to take a fresh cup of tea and some fruit, which was 
 handed her with exquisite grace by the Prince loris. Miss 
 Moira's eyes through their spectacles followed the Prince loris to 
 the other end of the large reception room. 
 
 " He's an elegant-made man and a taking one," she said to 
 her host ; " and I think ye're no wise to live in the same house 
 with him. Oh, ye've no need to glower and look glum : an old 
 body like me can tell truth without fashin' anybody, and ye 
 know that we and Archie's people have foregathered all our 
 lives, and it never was hid from us that Joan Perth-Douglas 
 was masterful, and had her cantrips. Lord, man ! Do ye think 
 they'd have wedded her to a mere decent body like you, if she 
 hadn't been a handful ? Not they ; they're proud-stomached, 
 and ye sold carpets and the like in Bagdad." 
 
 " Eeally, madam " Mr. Challoner shifted his eyeglass, 
 
 and felt that this kind of amiability was worse to bear than the 
 jjrcvious antagonism. 
 
 " Hoot ! it's no sort of use giving yourself bobberies with us. 
 We know all about you," said Miss Moira pleasantly. " Your 
 forebears were decent folks, dwellers on my cousin Allantl ale's 
 lands on the Border for mony a generation, pious canny bodies, 
 but sma' traders all. I mind well when I was a bit lassie, and 
 staying at Allandale's, buying tapes, and pins and what not, at 
 your grandmother's little shop. She sold snuff and letter papers, 
 and had the post, and sold stamps as weel — twa bawbee stamps 
 they were in those days. Ye mind it too, don't ye, sister ? " 
 
 " Eicht well, sister. She sold sweeties too." 
 
 "Lord, man, it's sma' blame to yc. Your folk were all 
 decent folk in the Cheviots, and tri;o believers. But PU not 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 7 
 
 deny that when ye stitck up on your countin'-house stool so 
 high that ye mated with Archie's daughter, we did set our necks 
 still", and " 
 
 Mr. Challoner threw down a piece of majolica. It belonged 
 to the house, and would cost him nothing, and the crash of the 
 falling vase spared him more recollections of Allandale. 
 
 " yister, we must be going. The sun's well-nigh down," said 
 the elder Miss Moira, when the majolica was picked ujd. " Now, 
 sir, take an old woman's word, and don't disremember that your 
 good leddy's a Perth-Douglas, and Perth-Douglas women are 
 always like bucking fillies ; and the Papist's got a face o' graco 
 and a pretty way with him. Oh, you may get on your high 
 horse as ye like! Sense is sense. Still, Pm glad to see ye have 
 such a trust in your wife, and it speaks well for ye both, and 
 shows she's given over her cantrips ; and I'm sorry I fashed ye 
 about your grandame, but there's nothing to be ashamed of, 
 nothing at all. She was a good clean religious body, and I'm 
 not one to look down on ye because ye are not what we are, 
 though I'm free to own when they married Joan to ye we 
 quarrelled with Archie, as far as anybody ever can quarrel with 
 him, the fair sweet^spoken soul " 
 
 Mr. Challoner, conscious of a sudden silence that had fallen 
 on the twenty well-bred people scattered about, behind and 
 around him, in which the voice of his torturer fell horribly loud 
 and distinct, wished that the mosaic floor would open as the 
 gulf for Curtius. 
 
 " Joan's a fine-featured woman," pursued Miss Moira, rising 
 in all her plaids, " but she's a Perth-Douglas, and she's got a 
 Avild eye. You mind my word when I'm gone. Look after her 
 well with the Papist. And now, gude day, and many thanks to 
 ye, Leikly Joan. I'm mighty glad to see ye've taken to such a 
 solaer thing as tillin' land and fattin' fowls, and I hope ye'll keep 
 steady at it; and, yes, to be sure, I'll remember ye to my 
 niece Forfar, though she's never seen ye, and I doubt if she's 
 ever heard o' ye, and ye're scarce cousin to her, as ye're sayin' — • 
 it's very far away, indeed ; one of your forebears in the last 
 century married the then duke's seventh daughter, and they 
 were Archie's father's great-grandfather's cousins-german — still 
 it counts, oh yes, it counts, and I'll give her your love for 
 certain ; and so I'll bid ye fareweel, and many thanks to ye, and 
 we'll return it in kind whenever ye come north again. And I 
 suppose ye don't travel with the Papist, but ye can explain to 
 him that we'd be glad to see him in Caithness, for it might be 
 the saving of his soul if he came in reach of the true doctrine, 
 and our minister would weary the Lord for him night and day, 
 for he is a personable man and a courteous, and it is sad to 
 think he will burn in the life everlasting." 
 
 '' Mille remerciments, Mesdames, et a revoir," murmured the 
 
8 FRIENDSEIP. 
 
 Prince loris, vaguely gathering that they were wishing him well, 
 and offering them a bouquet of autumnal heliotrope and Louise 
 de Savoie roses. 
 
 The Miss Moiras accepted the flowers, and drove away in 
 state, pugs, plaids, ear-trumpets, courier, and all, on their return 
 journey towards Eome. 
 
 "There is a deal in manner, sister," said the elder Miss 
 Moira, as she smelt the heliotrope. 
 
 " There is, sister. "What were ye meaning ? " 
 
 " That the Papist has a manner, and that the carpet man 
 hasn't," replied the elder Miss Moira. " Let us hope that Leddy 
 Joan cauna see the difference, and has steadied down. But I 
 have my doubts, sister." 
 
 " And ye do well to have yotu- doubts, sister. Ye were ever 
 very sharp o' sight." 
 
 The elder Mss Moira sniffed with scorn the bland air of the 
 Eoman twilight. 
 
 " It needs but half an eye, Elizabeth, to see that a Perth- 
 Douglas woman loves her cantrips, and that the Papist is a deal 
 bonnier to look at than the person that sold carpets. But she 
 was very civil, and her gude man seems a well-meaning douce 
 body, and she's steadied down ; I shall say so everywhere ; she's 
 steadied down, and we must do all we can"^for her, sister. She is 
 Archie's daughter." 
 
 " She is Archie's daughter, sister." 
 
 The elder Miss Moira would have changed her amicable 
 intentions if she could have seen her hostess dancing a war- 
 dance in the loggia, and snapping her fingers after the vanishing 
 carriage. 
 
 " The hateful old cats ! " cried the Lady Joan, " I thought 
 they'd never go ! Wretched old women ! "Why didn't you stop 
 their tongues, Robert? And what an ass you were, lo, receiving 
 them like that. Of course they couldn't help finding out the 
 house was yours, and old idiots like those will never under- 
 stand " 
 
 " They were good harmless people," said the Prince loris, iu 
 his own tongue, a little timidly, standing under the arch of his 
 loggia, and watching the sunset. 
 
 " Stuff! They are the most horrid old harridans in existence. 
 But every old hag seems good to you. I do believe you see good 
 in every Ijody! The idea, too, of wasting those roses on 'em! 
 Roses sell for half a franc apiece now. And giving them your- 
 self, too! They've been boring Mr. Challoner to death about 
 what you are here, and whose the house is. But you're always 
 doing something ridiculous. Only remember this. Give your 
 head away with the roses next time, if you like, only all I insist 
 is — don't compromise me ! " 
 
 The Prince loris was silent. He leaned against a column of 
 the loggia, and watched the sun go down behind the hills. 
 
FRIENDSHIP, 9 
 
 Lady Joan Cha,lIoner and lior husband went within to the 
 twenty well-bred people, and busied themselves pleasantly with 
 them, and gave jDartiug smiles and Muscat grapes to some, and 
 retained a few to dinner. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Miss Moiras rolled onward to Eomc through 
 the descending mists of evening, and nodding amidst their 
 cushions, fell asleep, until roused by the cessation of all move- 
 ment, and a voice they knew, they were startled to find that the 
 carriage was entering the gates of Eome. A gentleman, old, 
 bent, feeble, smiled and nodded, came up and shook hands, as 
 the horses were stopped for a moment by the pressure of traffic. 
 This gentleman was Lord George Scrope-Stair, an old acquaint- 
 ance and a privileged person. 
 
 " You have been to see Pope Joan ? " he said, with a little 
 laugh. " Did you like Fiordelisa ? " and he nodded and laughed 
 again. " Ah 1 yes, we always call her Pope Joan ; I do, at least, 
 when my daughters don't hear nie ; Pope Joan keeps the keys of 
 both heaven and earth and ousts Peter out of his own palace, 
 you know ! Only my little joke ; don't tell the girls. Good 
 night." 
 
 And the old man, who had been once a dandy and a beau in 
 days when George the Fourth was King, walked onward in the 
 twilight, chuckling feebly. 
 
 " Pope Joan ! " echoed Miss Moira of Moira, as their carriage 
 rolled over the stones. " Sister, I wish we had not gone to the 
 place ! " 
 
 " So do I, sister," said the echo. 
 _ They went peacefully home to their hotel and dined, with 
 misgivings weighing on their souls; and then being tired slept 
 again until the elder Miss Moira awoke from a blissful doze with 
 a start. 
 
 " I wonder whose the place really is, sister ? " she mumoied 
 as she yawned. 
 
 " I wonder, sister," said the echo. 
 
10 FBhilNDSHLP. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 It was sunset on the Pincio on the first day of December. 
 Beyond St. Peter's there was that sky of purple and of gold 
 which always seems so much more marvellous here than it does 
 anywhere else ; that roseleaf warmth and soft transparency of 
 flame-like colour which those who have looked on it never will 
 forget so long as their lives shall last on earth. 
 
 Below, loud, cracked, discordant bells were chiming one 
 against another ; near at hand a military band was playing, very 
 fast and very much out of tune, waltzes of Strauss's ; a monk, 
 the Avorse for wine, was screaming homilies from a bench, and 
 guards were vainly striving to arrest him amidst the laughter of 
 the crowd ; but nothing sj^oiled the grandeur of the scene, or 
 could destroy the sublime calmness of the declining day, as the 
 broken green lines of the hills grew black against the burning 
 scarlet of the clouds, and the vast expanse of roofs and spires, 
 cupolas and towers, obelisks and gardens, ruins and palaces, 
 colossal temples and desolate marshes, that is all called Eome, 
 stretched away wide and vague and solemn as a desert ; with a 
 sun, nearly as red and rayless as the desert s, hanging above the 
 cross on the great dome. 
 
 It was four o'clock ; and there was the customary crowd of 
 fashionable idlers, fretting horses, emblazoned carriages, saunter- 
 ing dandies, handsome artists, tired invalids, black-robed priests 
 and scarlet-clad janitors, cuirassed soldiers and curly headed 
 children, violet-gowned seminarists and purple-gowned scholars, 
 and, first and foremost, fashionable ladies chattering at the top of 
 their voices about the first fox-hunt of the year, the first court 
 ball, the new arrivals, and the Pope's state of health. 
 
 The sun was going down in majesty behind the round domes 
 raised to lay the restless soul of Nero ; but up here on the hill 
 nobody scarcely looked at it, but idling and laughing and 
 talking people turned their backs to the west, to hear the music 
 better, and kept looking instead at one woman as she passed, and 
 murmured to each other in a little flutter : " Dear me ! There is 
 Etoile, and the Coronis ! " and then reassured each other, and 
 said, " Yes, indeed — oh yes, really — that is Etoile with the 
 Coronis ! " in a certain tone of disappointment because she was 
 only like any other well-dressed woman after all, and humanity 
 considers that when genius comes forth in the flesh the touch of 
 the coal from the altar should have left some visible stigmata on 
 the lips it has burned, as, of course anybody knows, it invariably 
 leaves some smirch upon the character. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 11 
 
 Humanity feels that genius ought to wear a livery, as Jews 
 and loose women wore yellow in the old golden days of dis- 
 tinction. 
 
 " They don't even paint ! " said one lady, and felt herself 
 aggrieved. 
 
 Nevertheless the lady and all the rest of the crowd continued 
 to look. 
 
 Dorotca Coronis they had all of them seen many scores of 
 times through tlieir opera-glasses at Covent Garden, the Grand 
 Opera, and the theatre at Baden ; but Etoile they had hardly any 
 of them ever seen, and they stared hard with all the admirable 
 impudence of a well-born mob. 
 
 " They don't seem to see us ! " said the aggrieved lady who 
 had wondered they did not paint. 
 
 "Look deuced proud," muttered an Englishman who had 
 lifted his hat eagerly, and put it on sulkily, being unnoticed. 
 
 The carriage swept by again, and both the women in it looked 
 at the sunset, and not at the crowd. The crowd began to feel 
 neglected, and to grow ill-natured. Sovereigns took the trouble 
 to bow : why could not these two whose only royalty was that 
 of art? 
 
 " Who is Etoile ? " said the crowd. 
 
 " An enigma without an CEdipus," said one of its items, who 
 thouglit himself a wit. 
 
 _ " There is no enigma at all, except in your imaginations," 
 said another item, who was old and grave, which was a foolish 
 remark, no doubt, because an enigma that is purely imaginary 
 must be of necessity the most puzzling of all, since it follows as 
 a matter of course that nobody ever can solve it. 
 
 The carriage paused, and its occupants bought Parma violets. 
 The crowd was disposed to think there must be some motive for 
 the action, as it eyed dubiously the boarhound trotting behind 
 the carriage, and would fain have believed that his tongue 
 hanging out meant a mystery, and that he broke a command- 
 mei.t in wagging his tail. 
 
 It is one of the privileges of celebrity that the person cele- 
 brated can never wash his hands or open an umbrella without 
 being accredited with some occult reason for his proceedings. 
 
 "Is it really Etoile?" said the crowd. Generally speaking 
 people were disposed to believe that she was not herself, but 
 somebody else. 
 
 She did not see them. She had a sad habit of not seeing 
 those who surrounded her. When, recalled to a sense of her 
 negligence, she begged the pardon of others for having over- 
 looked them, she was not readily forgiven. People would rather 
 be insulted than be unperceived. 
 
 Her equipage, with its long-tailed Eoman horses, went the 
 round of the Pincio, past the cactus and aloes, the water clock 
 
12 FRIENBSmP. 
 
 and tlio kiosques for toys, the music-stands and the garden 
 chairs and the various other embellishments placed here, where 
 Augustus mused, and Ctesar and Pompeius supped. 
 
 She gazed at the lovely light, rosy as blown pomegranate 
 leaves, with little puflfs of golden cloud upon it, light as a 
 cherub's curls. 
 
 " How matchless it is ! " she said, with a sigh. 
 
 " It is Eome," said Dorotea Coronis. 
 
 And for them both, the crowd ceased to exist. They only 
 saw the slow-descending sun. 
 
 To be wise in this world one should always be blind to the 
 sunset, but never to the people that bow. The sun, neglected, 
 will not freckle us any more than if wo had penned him a 
 thousand sonnets as the lord of light. A man or a woman, 
 slighted, will burn us brown all over with blistering spots of 
 censure indelible as stains of iodine, and deep as wounds of 
 vitriol. 
 
 "Is it really Etoile ? " said the crowd eagerly, and scarcely 
 looked at the brilliant Gitana-like loveliness of her companion, 
 the great Coronis, because it was familiar, but turned and stared 
 with all the stony-hearted inquisitiveness of Society at the little 
 they could see of the one whom they called Etoile, which was 
 indeed only a heap of silver-fox furs, a pile of violets, a knot of 
 old Flemish lace, and dreaming serious eyes that watched the 
 sunset. 
 
 She herself scarcely saw that any crowd was there. This 
 kind of oblivion was usually her deadliest sin, and she was un- 
 conscious that she sinned, which made it very mxach worse. 
 People blew their bubbles, or threw their stones about her, and 
 she never heeded either, though indeed, the stones came so 
 thickly sometimes that she ought in common gratitude to have 
 been flattered : calumny is the homage of our contemporaries, as 
 some South Sea Islanders spit on those they honour. 
 
 Popularity has been defined as the privilege of being cheered 
 by the kind of people you would never allow to bow to you. 
 
 Fame may be said to be the privilege of being slandered at 
 once by the people who do bow to you, as well as by the peoplo 
 who do not. 
 
 " Who is she ? " said the crowd on the Pincio. 
 
 Nobody there knew at all. So everybody averred they knew 
 for certain. Nobody's story agreed with anybody's else's, but 
 that did not matter at all. The world, like Joseph's father, 
 gives the favourite a coat of many colours which the brethren 
 rend. 
 
 " She says herself — " hinted the old grave idler, member of 
 many clubs ; but nobody wanted to hear what she said herself. 
 Fas si hetcl Of course she told a story well and laid on the 
 right colours ; nobody had talents like hers for nothing. 
 
FBIENDSniP. 13 
 
 The old idler got no listeners, and went away pensively to 
 lean on the jiarapet. lie was so far in the minority as to bolievo 
 what she said herself; which was quite simple and comparatively 
 uneventful, and, therefore, evidently improbable. If she had 
 said she h; cl new lovers every night, and killed them in a back 
 garden every morning, like the Jewess of the French Eegency, 
 people might have believed ; there would have been nothing 
 staggeringly and audaciously impossible about that. 
 
 The crowd on the Pincio, when the whisper of her name had 
 first run tlirough it, had been alive with admiration and 
 cordiality ; but the crowd felt that it had had cold water thrown 
 on its enthusiasm, and so began to hiss, as fire under cold water 
 always does. 
 
 " Very clever, indeed," said the crowd. " Oh yes, no doubt. 
 Oh, wonderful, quite wonderful, every one knew that ; but who 
 was she ? Ah ! nobody could tell. Oh yes, indeed, it was quite 
 well known. She was a beggar's brat found on a doorstep ; she 
 was a cardinal's daughter ; she was a princess's petite f ante ; she 
 was a Ilothschild's mistress ; she was a Cabinet Minister's craze ; 
 she was poor De Morny's daughter ; she had been a slave in 
 Circassia ; she had been a serf in White Russia ; she had been 
 found frozen, with a tambourine in her hand, outside the gates 
 at Vincennes ; her father was at the galleys, her mother kept an 
 inn. No, they were both Imperial spies and very rich ; no, they 
 were both dead ; no, nobody ever said that, they said this. The 
 poor Emperor knew, beyond doubt ; and the secret had died 
 with him. She was quite out of society, she was in the highest 
 society ; she was not received anywhere, she was received every- 
 where. Oh, that was not true, but this was. Well, the less said 
 the better." 
 
 When the world has decided that the less said the better, it 
 always proceeds directly to say everything in the uttermost 
 abundance that it can possibly tliiuk of, and it did so on the 
 Pincio this day at sunset, and asked a variety of questions as 
 well. 
 
 " Why had she come ? " 
 
 " Was she going to remain ? " 
 
 " Would she go out at all ? " 
 
 " Would she receive ? " 
 
 " Would she be received ? " 
 
 " Would she go the legations ? " 
 
 " Were those Eussian furs ? " 
 
 " Was that dress Worth's ? " 
 
 " Why did she stop her horses there, with her back to every- 
 body, where she couldn't hear a note of the music ? " 
 
 So they chattered in much excitement, gazing at her through 
 their eyeglasses, or from under their parasols. 
 
 Nobody there happened to know anything, except that sho 
 
14 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 liad come to Eome from Paris, by Nice and Genoa, the previous 
 night ; but there was a general feeling that there was probably 
 something wrong. 
 
 Why did she turn the back of her carriage to them and buy 
 Parma violets? 
 
 In a little while, as the sun grew into a solemn red ball behind 
 the purple dome, and the shadows became longer, the throng 
 began to go down the great winding stairways towards the 
 square below, where the waters, fell from the marble mouths, 
 and the grave sphinxes were couched beneath the drooping 
 boughs. 
 
 A lady, wrapped in sealskin, with a sealskin hat set well over 
 her brows, began to move also with the two persons who formed 
 her escort. The trio was composed of Lady Joan Challoner, and 
 her husband and the Prince loris. 
 
 " Is that Etoile ? " said the Lady Joan eagerly, as the carriage 
 dashed past them, and she caught the name spoken by some 
 bystanders. 
 
 " Is that reely Etoile, now ? Do tell," said a fashionable 
 American of her acquaintance joining her, by name Mrs. Henry 
 V. Claras. 
 
 " They say so. I've never seen her myself," answered Lady 
 Joan. " lo, and I, and Mr. Challoner have just been to call on 
 her, but she was out. She has brought me letters." 
 
 " Eeely, now ! How iuterestin' ! " said the fashionable 
 American. " Well, it's a very elegant turn-out, now, aren't it ? 
 My word ! " 
 
 " You can get anything you like to pay for in Eome," said 
 the Lady Joan with much contempt— she herself was on foot. 
 " I must be civil to her. Voightel begs me to be so, and my 
 father too; I must have her to dinner. Will you come, Mrs. 
 Clams ? " 
 
 " Oh, thanks, now ; that's reel kind ! " said Mrs. Henry V. 
 Clams. " I'm dyin' to see her, dyin', and I've got a Ixjt in 
 N'York about the way she wears her hair. But they do say 
 she's so rude, you know; Cyrus C. Butterfield — as v/orks the 
 Saratoga press, you know — wrote to ask her to send him every 
 particular of her life from her baptism upwards, and would you 
 believe it? — her secretary — a female, I believe — sent him back 
 his own letter ! There ! " 
 
 The Lady Joan laughed shortly. 
 
 "I should say Cyrus C. Butterfleld's inquiries would be 
 particularly inconvenient to her I I wonder why on earth she 
 has come to home ! " 
 
 " Is there anything strange in coming to Eome?" s;»-itl the 
 Prince loris in his soft Eoman tongue. 
 
 " No, of course no ; what silly things you say ! Only, o( course 
 she's got some motive. She's with Coronis too." 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 15 
 
 " The loveliest woman in Europe," said Mr. Challoner with 
 solemnity and unction. 
 
 " Wretched creature," said the Lady Joan. 
 
 " My word, now, what's she up to ? " inquired Mrs. Henry V. 
 Clams with lively interest. "Why, she's Duchess Santorin, 
 aren't she ? " 
 
 " And the Duke is going to divorce her." 
 
 " My ! You don't say so ! " 
 
 " Santorin is very thankless : she has paid his debts again 
 and again," murmured the Prince loris. 
 
 " Oh, everybody that sings is an angel to you, lo ! " said Lady 
 Joan, with some irritation. 
 
 " If she's paid his debts, he's paid by the nose! Everybody 
 knows what these professional women always are. I dare say 
 Etoile herself is no better." 
 
 "My dear love," said Mr. Challoner with serious reproof, 
 '•'surely you forget. Would your father ever " 
 
 " My father's an ass where a petticoat's concerned, and he'd 
 swear it had all the virtues inside it if it had only taken his 
 fancy. He makes a great fuss about her ; Yoightel, too, who 
 believes in nobody, believes in her. It's so queer ! I suppose 
 she's only sharper than most i^eople." 
 
 " I never heard a word " began the Prince loris. 
 
 " Stuff," said the Lady Joan, " there are heaps of stories — 
 hideous stories. And there's no smoke without fire, that's certain. 
 What day shall we ask her to diuner ? " 
 
 " Well, now, I did read years ago, in our country, that she 
 lived with a stoker as she'd taken a fancy to in the Lyons cars 
 once," said Mrs. Henry V. Clams reflectively, searching into 
 recesses of her memory. 
 
 Mr. Challoner and the Prince loris laughed outright. 
 
 "I never heard of the stoker, but I dare say there are things 
 quite as fi.shy," said the Lady Joan. " What night shall we fix ? 
 Will the sixth suit you, Mrs. Clams? " 
 
 They sauntered on by the stone balustrades with the scattered 
 groups, who were all making for the Corso, or walking under the 
 Tempietto, Babuino-way, and who were all more or less talking 
 of Etoile and of Dorotea Coronis. 
 
 The groups seldom said anything that was amiable of either, 
 still less seldom anything that was true. But to be thus spoken 
 of at all constitutes what the world calls Fame, and ever since 
 the days of Horace the world has wondered that tlie objects of it 
 are not more grateful for the distinction of detraction. 
 
 " Why do you spit ? " says the glowworm. 
 - " Why do you shine ? " says the frog. 
 
16 FRIENDSHIP, 
 
 CHAPTEK III. 
 
 At the entrance of the Corso, Mr. Cballoner recollected an 
 appointment with a friend ; his wife and the Prince loris strolled 
 on down the Corso together. 
 
 It was the hour when the street was at its fullest and prettiest ; 
 the irregular casements were half-lighted, half-dark ; the painted 
 and gilded signs swung in the shadows; lamps hung above 
 balconies draped with red ; in a church doorway white priests 
 were chanting with torches flickering ; at the corners stood great 
 baskets of violets and camellias, rose and white ; knots of piffe- 
 rari droned the wild, sad monotones of the music of the hills ; 
 at a quick march a file of bersaglieri, with their plumes streaming, 
 were coming up the narrow way as up a mountain pass ; horses 
 were trampling, drums were beating loud. 
 
 " I wonder how you will like Etoile, lo; you always do like 
 queer people ! " said the Lady Joan, as they moved down into 
 that picturesque chaos and luminous mingling of the night and 
 day. 
 
 Her companion answered with gallant grace, " Whatever she 
 is, she will be only for me — la terza incommoda ! " 
 
 The Lady Joan laughed, well pleased, as she pushed her way 
 through the lively and laughing crowds down to the Palazzo di 
 Venezia. In an angle near the Ripresa dei Barberi, where two 
 streets crossed one another in that populous and convenient 
 locality, there was a small house squeezed between two grim 
 palaces, and known as the Casa Cballoner to the society and the 
 tradespeople of Eome. 
 
 The Lady Joan climbed the stone stairs of the Casa Cballoner 
 with agility, and her companion followed with the accustomed 
 matter-of-course air of a man who returns home. 
 
 The house was dusky, there was only one lamp lighted in the 
 anteroom, but she pushed her way safely into a little chamber 
 heavy with the smell of Turkish tobacco, and hung with Turkish 
 stuffs, and fitted with Turkish couches. 
 
 On one of the divans the Prince loris cast himself a little 
 wearily. 
 
 The Lady Joan lit a cigarette, stuck it between her teeth, cast 
 aside her sealskins, and began to look over a pile of letters. 
 
 " I wish she hadn't come, bother her ! " she muttered. " Here's 
 pages more eulogy from that old Tartar, Voightcl. She seems 
 to be perfection. I hate perfect people." 
 
 The Prince loris stretched himself out, and closed his eyes; 
 
^BIENDSElP. I'i 
 
 his friend continued her examination of her coiTespondcncc. 
 There was ten minutes' silence, only broken by the ticking of a 
 Flemish chime-clock. 
 
 At the end of ten minutes Lady Joan looked up impatiently. 
 
 " Don't lie there, lo, doing nothing ; tell me what we've got 
 for next week, that I may settle this dinner." 
 
 He sighed, raised himself, and took out a set of tablets from 
 his pocket. 
 
 " You have the English bishop and bishopess to-morrow." 
 
 " ' Bishopess ! ' Well, go on." 
 
 " The Echeance soiree on the 3rd." 
 
 "Can't miss that. AVell?" 
 
 " You take more English to the Opera on the 4th." 
 
 " A2ires ? " 
 
 " Fifth, masked ball at the Greek Legation ? " 
 
 " Sixth, Saturday ? " 
 
 " Two teas — names English that I cannot pronounce." 
 
 " AVe'll throw over the teas. Sixth will do. Get some cards, 
 and fill 'em up." 
 
 He obeyed and went to a little writing-table. 
 
 " She's a sensational creature to have," continued his friend ; 
 "it's best to have her seen here iirst, before anybody else takes 
 the cream off it. Whom shall we ask ? Clever people they must 
 be, and people that go in for that sort of thing. Ask Lady 
 Cardiff ; she won't mind if Etoile does startle the proprieties." 
 
 He filled in the card obediently ; and she dictated some dozen 
 other names to him, leaning over his shoulder as he wrote. 
 
 " Now fill in Etoile's," she said. " I'll send a little note with 
 it, too, to be civil. That old beast Voightel and papa make such 
 a fuss " 
 
 "I cannot put — Etoile on the card ? " 
 
 " Of course not. You must put Comtesse d'Avesnes. Did 
 ever you hear such rubbish ! And papa and Voightel believe in 
 her, title and all." 
 
 " AVhy should they not ? " said the writer, as he slid the cards 
 into their envelopes. 
 
 The Lady Joan thrust her tongue in her cheek, and jumped 
 a step of the hornpipe. 
 
 " As much countess as the cat ! Now do draw that triptych 
 that old Norwich wants so — make haste. We dine at seven, you 
 know, because of the theatre. Send Anselmo with the notes to- 
 morrow morning. Etoile's you might leave to-night. She's on 
 your way home. I'll write her note now." 
 
 She crossed over to her bureau, and wrote a pretty epistle, 
 which ended : 
 
 " Pray kindly waive ceremony, and come to us on Saturday ; 
 my dear father and so many of our common friends have spoken 
 so much of you that I cannot even think of you as a stranger, 
 
 c 
 
18 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 and my husband will be as glad as I to have the honour of 
 receiving Etoile in our Koman home." 
 
 Then she wrote another which began : 
 
 " Dearest Voightel, — The hint of a wish of yours is a delight 
 and a command to me ; you know how I love and honour all 
 genius, etc. etc." 
 
 Then she scampered through half a dozen more letters with 
 the pen of a ready writer ; jumped up and crossed over to where 
 her friend sat sketching by the light of a reading-lamp, and ran 
 her fingers through his soft dark hair. 
 
 " How slow you are, lo ! You've only drawn one wing yet, 
 and I've written fifteen letters." 
 
 That night the Prince loris, after escorting the Lady Joan to 
 and from the broad fun of the Valle Theatre walked through the 
 white Eoman moonlight to his own little ancient palace in the 
 street of the Eipetta, and pausing, as he went, at the Hotel 
 do Kussie, left the Lady Joan's note there for the Comtesse 
 d'Avesnes. 
 
 " Etoile ; it is a pretty name," he thought to himself; " whoso 
 star is she beside her own ? A great artist, all the world knows ; 
 what else may she be, I wonder ? " 
 
 Now, to wonder about any w^oman was a liberty and a luxury 
 forbidden to him. 
 
 The key of his very thoughts hung to the girdle of the Lady 
 Joan as she moved, and lay under the pillow of the Lady Joan 
 as she slej)t — or she believed it did, which satisfied her quite as 
 well. 
 
FMIENDSHIP. 19- 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Who was Etoile ? 
 
 The •\vorkl in general said it as oftcu as the crowd on the 
 Pincio. 
 
 They never attended to wliat she said herself. Nobody 
 wants facts. Facts are hardly more amusing than mathematics. 
 Unless, indeed, they are the kind of facts that you can only just 
 whisper under your breath. And of this kind of facts — the only 
 kind tliat can in any way be diverting to others — the life of the 
 great Belgian artist remained conspicuously, absurdly, incon- 
 sistently, and inconsiderately barren. 
 
 The world supplied the deficiency. 
 
 The world supplies you with history as our great tailor 
 supplies us with dresses : he surveys our face and figure and 
 selects for us what is appropriate. The world ci;ts out its 
 gossip on the same judicious lines — whether you like what is 
 given you is of no moment either to Worth or the world : you 
 have got to wear it. 
 
 Be thankful that you are Somebody. Neither "Worth nor the 
 world would trouble themselves to fit you if you were not. 
 
 In the morning. Society that had been on the Pincio read in 
 its i^apers that Etoile was in Eome on account of her health. 
 Physicians had advised perfect repose and a warmer winter than 
 Paris or Brussels can offer. Society read the paragraph, and 
 putting down the papers wondered what the paragraph was 
 meant to cover. Something, of course. Heaps of things, 
 probably. Health, indeed! What rubbish! Wasn't it a 
 sculptor ? .... No ; money ! . . . . Ah, money ? . . . . Oh, 
 indeed, much worse than that .'.... Exile was ordered, quite 
 ordered from the Elysee. You understand? Everybody 
 whispered, nodded, seemed to understand, because nol ody did 
 understand in the least ; and nobody, of course, could endure to 
 look so ignorant. 
 
 When a name is on the public mouth the public nostril likes 
 to smell a foulness in it. It likes to think that Byron committed 
 incest ; that Milton was a brute ; that Eafifaelle's vices killed 
 him; that Pascal was mad; that Lamartine lived and died a 
 pauper, that Scipio took the treasury moneys ; that Thucydides 
 and Phidias stole ; that Heloise and Hypatia were but loose 
 women after all— so the gamut runs over twice a thousand 
 years; and Eousseau is at heart the favourite of the M'orld 
 because he was such a least, with all his talent. 
 
20 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 When the world is driven to tears and prayers by Schiller it 
 Imgs itself to rememlxT that he could not write a line without 
 the smell of rotten apples near, and that when he died there was 
 not enough money in his desk to pay his burial. They malce 
 him smaller, closer, less divine : the apples and the pauper's 
 coffin. 
 
 Etoile kept no rotten apples by her, and the world sniffed in 
 vain. 
 
 Had she worn men's clothes, travelled with a married duke, 
 and had a caprice for a di'unken painter, no doubt the world 
 would have better understood her genius. As it was it felt 
 exasj^erated, and thought her ostentatious. 
 
 After all, the innocence of a woman is no amusement what- 
 ever to anybody. It only gives nothing to be said about her. 
 In any case, whenever the woman is celebrated, the world will 
 not put up with nothing. It cuts out the garment of her 
 history to its own fancy. It is like the great tailor : it knows 
 better than she does what she ought to wear. 
 
 Etoile rose and strolled through the courts and galleries of 
 the Vatican, unconscious, or indifferent, of the babble that went 
 on concerning her. 
 
 Society saw her servant and the big dog, Tsar, sitting out- 
 side with the Swiss Guard. It was almost inclined to think 
 there must be something wrong with a Cardinal. What a nasty 
 savage-looking creature that dog was ! 
 
 At noon she went back to her hotel, found a few cards 
 awaiting her, and at two o'clock was seen to be driving with the 
 Princess Vera von Eegonwalde, an ambassadress and a wit. 
 
 Princess von Eegonwalde, or Princess Vera, as her friends 
 called her by her i^retty girhsh title, was an Austrian by birth, 
 and the wife of a Minister of another great Power, not Austrian. 
 She was one of the loveliest women that ever brightened a court ; 
 she had a face like the Cenci, a walk like a young Diana's, a 
 smile like a child's, a grace like a flower's, eyes like a fawn's, 
 fancies like a poet's, and a form that Titian would have given 
 to Venus. She had beautiful children, that clung round her in 
 Correggio-like groups; and she always looked like a picture, 
 whether shining in velvet and cloth of gold in a throne-room, or 
 straying in a linen dress through starlit myrtles on Italian hills. 
 Princess Vera was a great social power ; and when Society saw 
 Etoile in her carriage it began to think that probably after all 
 the paragraph was quite true ; it began to recollect that it had 
 always heard that this gi-eat artist's lungs were not very strong. 
 And what a beautiful dog was the boarhound ! Dear fellow, 
 what was his name ? 
 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams, on the contrary, as she saw the Eegon- 
 walde carriage sweep by, said that it was right-down pre- 
 posterous, and she didn't care M'ho heard her. 
 
FBIENDSniP. 21 
 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams had passed the years of her youth in a 
 Far West sawmill, in sewing-bees, washing-bees, blackberrying, 
 and cliapel-going, in the middle of a clearing, a good five 
 hundred miles from any township ; and she had, now tliat youth 
 was fled from her, bloomed into an elegante in Europe, thanks 
 to marvellous dishes, unlimited open house, iDolitic lovers, and 
 her husband's dollars, which were many. 
 
 Still, as an elegante, Mrs. Henry V. Clams never felt quite 
 sure of her footing, and the night before, on the Pincio, at the 
 sight of Etoile in dusky olive-hued velvet, entirely unornamcnted, 
 she had had an uneasy conviction that she herself had too many 
 buttons, too many colours, too many fringes, and had a bonnet too 
 much like a firework, and that her Paris deity had been faithless 
 to her, and had arrayed her in raiment only fit for the " half- 
 world," and the feeling rankled in her and made her say, " Pre- 
 posterous ! " snappishly, though she was a good-natured woman 
 in the main. 
 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams' countrywomen are received at all the 
 Courts of Europe with no better qualification, very often, than 
 that nobody does know where they come from ; and, did any 
 ill-judged inqxiisitor seek to know, his investigations would very 
 often lead him into many unsavoury dens of the Bowery and 
 drinking-shoi:)S of " Frisco," into the shanty of many a ticket-of- 
 leave man and the pawnshop of many a German Jew. 
 
 But it is a question that Mrs. Henry V. Clams and her 
 countrywomen are very fond of asking ; and, indeed, upropos of 
 their own countrywomen, they will always tell you with the 
 utmost frankness that Mrs. Ulysses B. Washington once sold hot 
 potatoes, and Mrs. Heloise W. Dobbs shot her first husband in 
 St. Louis, and Miss Anastasia B. Spyrle, betrothed to Prince 
 Volterra, danced in tights throughout the States ; or any other 
 biographical trifle of the sort, with an impartiality scorning 
 national bias. 
 
 " Nobody can't say where she came from," said Mrs. Henry 
 V. Clams, drawing herself out a glass of Curagoa from a little 
 barrel of Baccarat glass in her own draAviug-room. It was her 
 day to receive. 
 
 "Nobody can't say where she came from," reiterated Mrs, 
 Henry V. Clams with a kind of triumph. 
 
 " Who wants to know where artists come from ? / don't," 
 said Lady Joan Challoner, with a fine sentiment worthy of a 
 great patron of the arts, which she was. 
 
 " When they stick to being artists, of course not," said Mrs, 
 Henry V. Clams. " You don't see 'em tlien, and have no call to 
 speak to 'em; but to think as Princess Vera, who, I'm sure, 
 looks as if angels and empresses weren't good enough to black 
 her shoes " 
 
 " Princess Vera's art-mad," said the Lady Joan. " I love art 
 
22 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 myself, as you know, but still there are bounds to everything. 
 Well, anyhow I must know her, so I'm glad Princess Vera will 
 keep me in countenance. lo, we ought to be going. What are 
 you looking at there ? Oh, a photograph of Etoile." 
 
 The Prince loris laid asided an album marked CeJehrites, 
 with a backward glance at the page he had opened it at, where 
 he saw a mere profile like a white cameo on a dark ground, and 
 the letters " Etoile " underneath it. 
 
 "Can one buy those portraits, madame? he asked of his 
 hostess as he hastened to follow the Lady Joan. 
 
 " Why, my ! yes. That one's five francs. I think it's one of 
 Gouj)irs," said Mrs. Henry V. Clams. " But it isn't much to 
 look at; that one of Judic's, now, or Croisette's " 
 
 But it was not Judic or Croisette that was in his fancy. 
 
 " Come along ; take Spit," said the Lady Joan, sharply, and 
 threw a small blue Skye dog into his arms as they descended 
 the broad Aubussou-covered staircase of the American's magnifi- 
 cent abode. 
 
 " That woman upstairs was quite right ; it is preposterous," 
 she continued. " But I thought I wouldn't say so, as we must 
 know her now. Where are my furs ? Take care." 
 
 The Prince loris, when in the streets, took advantage of a 
 moment when the Lady Joan was engrossed in a shop in the 
 Condotti, cheapening a piece of china, to go across to Sulcipi's 
 and order a j^hotograph from Goupil's to be got for him. 
 
 The shopman answered with alacrity that he had one 
 already. " In fact, we have several. Excellence. She is here, 
 you know, and that always creates a demand," he said, dropping 
 his voice. 
 
 loris bought the portrait, and slipped it inside his sable- 
 lined coat. 
 
 " Where have you been, lo ? I missed you a moment ago," 
 said the Lady Joan angrily, having failed to cheapen the china, 
 and feeling cross accordingly. 
 
 " I went to look if it rained. I was afraid you would get 
 wet," he answered simply, and restored the serenity to her brows 
 by buying the bowl for her. 
 
 It was a really charming piece of old Nankin. 
 
 " Etoile ! " He said the word again to himself as he left his 
 friend in her ante-room, happy with her bowl, and went to his 
 own house to dress for dinner. The name had a fascination for 
 him. He looked at the photograph by the light of the lamps as 
 he walked, and when he reached his own house put it away in a 
 secret drawer. He had here and there a secret drawer of which 
 the Lady Joan did not possess the secret. 
 
 The subject of his thoughts, and of the portrait, had been 
 called Etoile as long as she could remember; the peasant folks 
 calling her so because in her childhood she ran so fast, and her 
 
FRIENDSIIIR 23 
 
 long fair hair streamed after her so far, that she looked like a 
 shooting star as she flew by them in the summer nights in green 
 Ardennes. 
 
 To the world in general the name seemed strange, suspicious, 
 uncomfortable, indicative of that string of asterisks on a page, 
 which replaces what is too shocking to be printed. But to her 
 it had all the old familiar charm of a sound that bears all child- 
 hood in it. 
 
 The first thing that she could remember was a sunny village 
 in the woods on the banks of the bright Mouse water, in the 
 heart of that sweet green country of Jaques and Eosalind which, 
 for some things, has no equal upon earth. 
 
 Few places on the earth are lovelier than the province 
 through which the bright Mouse wanders, and the first 
 memories of Etoile were of its glancing waters, its wooded hills, 
 its rich grass meadows, its noble forest trees, its gabled houses, 
 grey and black with time, its broad yellow roads, leading west- 
 ward to France and eastward to the Ehiue. Tliere are a breadth, 
 a graciousness, a fresh find fragrant verdure in all this country 
 not to be siirpassed in charm ; it is unworn and unspoilt ; and. 
 although under its leafy woods the wheel of the gambler turns, 
 and by its limpid springs the tired hypochondriac drinks, still 
 there is much of it that neither gambler nor hypochondriac ever 
 sees, and that is solitary as Suabian or Pennine Alp, and radiant 
 with a brightness all its own. 
 
 The beautiful rapid river, foaming by mill and weir ; and the 
 hayfields, with their grand elms and walnuts ; and the high hills 
 where the pines grew, and the one little sunny paved street, 
 with the village fountain at the end, where the women gossiped 
 and the big-belled horses drank — these were the first things on 
 which the eyes of Etoile had opened, and made the first pictures 
 that her mind remembered. A brown-frocked monk, a grey- 
 frocked nun, a cowherd with his cattle, a wagon with its team, a 
 group of women with their burden of linen going to the wash- 
 ing-places in the river — these were all that passed up and 
 down the hilly road between the double row of tall bird-filled 
 aspens; the little place was sunny, sleepy, very still, but it 
 was lovely, bosomed deep in fragrant woods, and watered by 
 the Mouse. 
 
 And then what a world of wonders lay around! — the primroses, 
 the blue jays, the leaping trout, the passing boats, the foxes that 
 stole out almost familiarly, the squirrel swinging in the nut 
 thickets of the hills, the charcoal-burners coming down rough 
 and black to tell talcs of the bears and wolves high up above, 
 the great Flemish cart-horses walking solemnly in state caparison 
 outward on the highroads to France or Prussia, the red lurid 
 glow far away in the evening sky, which told where the iron- 
 blasters of stern, fierce Liege were at work — tliese were wonders 
 
24 FBIENDBHIP. 
 
 enough for a thousand years, or at least for a young chikl to 
 think them so. 
 
 Etoilc thought so, and her childhood went by like a fairy 
 tale told by a soft voice on a summer day. ^ 
 
 The house she lived in was very old, and had those charming 
 conceits, those rich shadows, that depth of shade, that play of 
 light, that variety, and that character which seem given to a 
 dweUing-place in ages when men asked nothing better of their 
 God than to live where their fathers had lived, and leave the old 
 rooftree to their children's children. 
 
 The thing built yesterday, is a caravanserai : I lodge in it 
 to-day, and you to-morrow ; in an old house only can be made a 
 home, where the blessings of the dead have rested and the 
 memories of perfect faiths and lofty passions still abide. 
 
 This house stood in a green old shady garden, and at the 
 end of the garden the trees hung over the beautiful river. 
 Etoile used to think that in just such a garden must have passed 
 the long slumbers of the Sleeping Beauty. All happy childhood 
 is like an April morning, but hers was beyond most children's 
 happy by reason of its simplicity, its unclouded peace, and the 
 fair, gay, shapeless dreams that were with it always like light 
 golden clouds about the sun. 
 
 There were sadness and mystery near, but neither were 
 allowed to touch her. She only knew peace and joy. If she 
 had been told that she had drop])ed from the stars on a mid- 
 summer night she would have believed it quite easily: no 
 healtliy child's life will ever wonder whence it comes or whither 
 it drifts. It is enough for it that it is. 
 
 This is the one felicity that the innocence of infancy and the 
 trance of passion share in common. The immediate moment is 
 the heaven alike of the child and of the lover. 
 
 She was very happy always in this, her green birth-country, 
 by the river-side. 
 
 But she was never happier than when she went out of the 
 sweet summer sunshine, from the murmur of the street 
 fountain, and from the smell of the blossoming orchards into 
 the quiet dusky den that was her study, and bent her curls over 
 the ponderous tomes and the intricate exercises with which her 
 tutors delighted in trying her patience and her powers. 
 
 Out of doors she was the merest child, happy in all a child's 
 pleasure of new-born days, and new-found berries, and new- 
 made cakes, of the old swing in the sycamore, and the first 
 swallow, tliat showed summer, and the promise of a long day in 
 the wootls to bring home violets, or any other of the many 
 simple tilings which made her childhood beautiful. 
 
 She knew the whcruabouts of every rare wild flower; she 
 knew every bird that haunted the woods or the streams ; she 
 was friends with all the peasant folk, and would find their stray 
 
FEIENDSHIP. 25 
 
 slaecp for them and tamo the clogs they were afraid of; she 
 loved the wind and the wild weather as she loved the heat that 
 tinciu-led the carnation-buds, and the still moonshine when the 
 nightingales sang in the orchards; she was not dismayed if 
 evening fell as she ran alone down a lone hill-side, or if she boro 
 down through the swift wild rain like a little white boat 
 through a surging sea ; she had the love of nature of a German 
 and the unconsciousness that she lovctl it of a Greek. 
 
 " Tit, es foUe," said her old teacher to her because she 
 laughed and cried for joy to see the first primrose break out of 
 the bleak brown earth, and kneeled down and kissed the flower, 
 and told it how glad the birds would be, and would not to have 
 saved her life have taken it away from its shelter of green 
 leaves. " Tu esfoUe," said the old teacher — it is what the world 
 always says to the poet. 
 
 In the forests on the Meuse river there lived an old man who 
 did not tell her she was foolish. He was a German, who had 
 been a noted artist in his day, until paralysis of his right arm 
 by some accident had put an end to his career and his hopes of 
 fame. He was sad and alone ; was harsh of temper and taciturn ; 
 but he took a fancy to this child who was always out of doors 
 trying to learn the secrets of the clouds' movements and the 
 waters' hues, and he guided aright her passionate instincts 
 towards the arts. By the time she was fifteen she had created 
 things that the old master thought more marvellous than he 
 would confess to her. She painted all the day in the open air, 
 on the hills and by the torrents ; she studied all the evenings 
 and half the night. She was perfectly happy. 
 
 There was another world, of course, where the hay- wagons 
 went and the barges down the river ; but she wanted no other. 
 
 Now and then there would come to the black-and-white 
 house on the river a person for whom the ways of the house were 
 changed, and who was always whispered of in words of awe by 
 the village people. He would kiss her carelessly, bid her do a 
 problem or write a poem, stay a few days, and go. She was 
 told that he was her father— the Count Eaoul d'Avesnes. 
 
 In the old fighting days the Counts d'Avesnes had been a 
 fierce and mighty race, reigning in lofty regions of the wild 
 Ardennes, Catholics always, and warriors rather than courtiers. 
 Little by little, in strife and conspiracy, and internecine wars, 
 they had lost their lands and gi-eatness, until little save their 
 traditions were left in modern times. This, their sole living 
 representative, was a man of many ambitions, of no achieve- 
 ment. A political gamester, a politi'cal conspirator, his life was 
 spent in the treacherous seas of political intrigue, and he at the 
 last perished in their whirlpool. Little was known of him— by 
 his daughter almost nothing. He had broken his wife's heart 
 and spent her money. His own death was mysterious, like his 
 life. He passed away and made no sign. 
 
26 FRIEND8EIP. 
 
 There is so much mystery in this world, only people who 
 lead humdrum lives will not believe it. 
 
 It is a great misfortune to be born to a romantic history. 
 The humdrum always think that you are lying. In real truth 
 romance is common in life, commoner, perhaps, than the com- 
 monplace. But the commonplace always looks more natural. 
 
 In nature there are milhons of gorgeous hues to a scarcity of 
 neutral tints; yet the pictures that are painted in sombre 
 semi-tones and have no one positive colour in them are always 
 pronounced the nearest to nature. When a painter sets his 
 palette, he dares not approach the gold of the sunset and da^vx^ 
 or the flame of the pomegranate and poppy. Etoile's short 
 story had this gold and red in it, and so no one believed in it 
 any more than they do in the life-hkeness of Turners Iles- 
 perides. 
 
 She, a happy and thoughtful child, lived in the little 
 Ardennes village with her mother's mother, and her two old 
 servants, and knew nothing of all this heritage of wonder and of 
 woe. Occasionally the wonderful person who was called her 
 father came and brought a wonderful breath of the outer air 
 with him. That was all she knew. 
 
 One day his shadow passed for the last time up the sunny 
 street between the aisles of aspen and was seen no more there 
 ever after, and his letters ceased, and silence fell npon his fate ; 
 and in time they came to know that he was dead and she was 
 the last that lived of the once famous race of the Counts 
 d'Avesnes. 
 
 It scarcely seemed strange to her — she had always known so 
 little. 
 
 He had been a black bead in the golden rosary of her happy 
 childhood ; she barely missed it when it dropped. 
 
 In after-years people would never believe that Etoile, beyond 
 the fact of the patrician name she bore, had known so little ; 
 they forgot how completely natural and matter of course the 
 strangest circumstances seem to one who has been rocked in 
 them, as it were, in a cradle from birth upward. 
 
 Her father had come and gone, come and gone, as comets do. 
 He ceased to come ; it did not seem strange. 
 
 She studied in the big books, and strayed about in the 
 chestnut woods and orchards, and lived in her own fancies moro 
 than in anything around her. Vague desires would ofttimes 
 touch her, as she used to stand on the brow of the reaped fields, 
 and watch the sun go down,'red and beautiful against the dusky 
 masses of the far-off woods. But they were desires whose wings 
 were still folded ; like those of fledgling birds, that flutter a little 
 way through the green leaves, and then are frightened at their 
 dreams of flight. 
 
 For the rest, her grandmother and the old servants took all 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 27 
 
 care of things bodily and temporal. Etoile was froc to think and 
 dream and study. 
 
 The treasures of scholarship are sweet to all who open them. 
 But they are perhaps sweetest of all to a girl that has been led 
 both by habit and by nature to seek them. 
 
 The soul of a girl whilst passions sleep, desires are unknown, 
 and self-cousciousness lies unawakened, can lose itself in tho 
 impersonal as no male student can. The mightiness and beauty 
 of past ages become wonderful and all-sutlicient to it, as they 
 can never do to a youth beset by the stinging fires of impending 
 manhood. The very element of faith and of imagination, here- 
 after its weakness, becomes the strength of the girl-scholar. Tho 
 very abandonment of self, which later on will fling her to Sappho's 
 death, or mure her in the cell of Heloise, will make her find a 
 cloudless and all-absorbing happiness in the meditations of great 
 minds, in the myths of heroic ages, in the delicate intricacies of 
 language, and in the immeasurable majesties of thought. The 
 evil inseparable from all knowledge will pass by her unfelt ; tho 
 greatness only attainable by Imowledge will lend her perfect and 
 abiding joys. 
 
 Whilst they w-ere only scholars be sure that Sappho and 
 Heloise were calmer and more glad than any other women ; it 
 was when they looked up from the written page to the human 
 face that their woes surpassed all others' — because beyond all 
 others' was their loss. 
 
 A year after the tidings of the Comte d'Avesnes' death had 
 come to the Ardennes, her grandmother, reflecting that at her 
 death the child would be solitary, with a slender patrimony and 
 a name whose past nobility was of no present use, resolved to 
 sacrifice her own peace and move to a great city. 
 
 They went to Paris, leaving the green Mouse waters and those 
 bright woodland villages that lie out of the beaten track and are 
 so still and fresh and charming. Etoile sobbed bitterly : yet she 
 was full of ecstatic wonder and hope. She forgot that thousands 
 have had such hope before her, and had only perished miserably 
 in the vast press of life. If youth did not thus forget, maturity 
 would have no fame to record. 
 
 They made their home in a nook of old Paris within sight of 
 the trees of the Luxembourg. A tumult of great ideas and vague 
 ambitions was in the mind of the child who had studied more 
 than many men, and had the poetry of many nations all alive 
 within her. 
 
 In the city of pleasure Etoile uninterruptedly pursued both 
 art and study. Friends they had but few ; those few were of 
 the proud impoverished families of a nobility that had nothing left 
 excei^t its traditions of honour; and such as these thought the 
 pursuit of art a degradation. 
 
 One day Etoile, however, made a friend of her own. Chances 
 
28 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 brouglit lier across the path of au old man whose name was very 
 glorious to her : a great master whose genius had been nurtui'ed 
 amidst the mighty storms of the First Empire. The old man 
 looked long in silence at her, the harsh lines of his face softening 
 and changing ; then he turned to her and uncovered his white 
 head. 
 
 " My sun has long set/' he said ; " I rejoice to see yours rise." 
 
 The word of David Istrion w^as still a law in Paris and all the 
 worlds of art. He kept her secret and sent her first picture to 
 the Salon himself. 
 
 " One of my pupils/' was all he would say when questioned 
 as to the painter. 
 
 The picture was only the study of a gleaner returning by 
 sunset over naked fields ; but it had an instant and unques- 
 tioned success. It was followed by greater and stronger works 
 signed " Etoile." 
 
 The pictures were' for some few years always thought to be 
 the creations of a man, were treated as such ; and when the 
 rumour was first current that the painter was a woman — a girl 
 — the great world of Paris laughed aloud in derision and utter 
 disbelief. 
 
 Their force, their depth of tone, their anatomical accuracy, 
 and above all their profound melancholy, made it impossible— 
 — so they said. 
 
 Nevertheless the world, which has lived to see many impossible 
 things pass into the limbo of incontestable facts, lived to see this 
 pass also. 
 
 " It is time they should know the truth," said David Istrion, 
 and told it. Etoile regretted that it should be told : to the pure 
 ambitions of the true artist creation is paradise, but the praise of 
 the crowd seems profanity. 
 
 But David Istrion had not had his own way unresisted for 
 two thirds of a centoi-y to consider such a trifle as any one's 
 personal desires. 
 
 He made the truth known ; and within a year or two, she 
 sprang at once into the fierce light that beats upon a throne — the 
 contested and bitterly begrudged throne of genius. 
 
 David Istrion lived long enough to sec her triumphs — not 
 long enough to protect her from the dark shadows that slink in 
 the path of all triumiAs. Etoile became a name on the tongues 
 of all Paris, and so on all the tongues of the world. She had a 
 fame as great and as pure as is possible in this age, when fame 
 is too often awarded by the mere screams of the vulgar. To her 
 house, in the Paris winters, came many of the greatest men of her 
 time. She influenced them much more tlian they inlluoneed 
 her. She had a life that was brilliant and rich in all fruits of 
 the intellect. 
 
 As recreations of her leisure she wrote a comedy in ver.;c 
 
FRIENDSEIP. 29 
 
 which had a tumultuous success on a p;vcat staj^c, and eomo 
 poems wore printed in great reviews, all signed " Etoilc." " She 
 has all the talents," said the world angrily. If she had only had 
 all the vices too the world would not, perhaps, have minded so 
 much. 
 
 Unfortunately for her reputation, no one conid find ont that 
 she had as much as one vice. Few women could boast of being 
 her friend, but no man could boast of being her lover. 
 
 Ten years now had gone by since she left the Meuse river ; 
 they had been ten years of brilliancy if not of happiness. Genius 
 is seldom happy— except in its dreams or the first hours of its 
 love. 
 
 With a woman, the vulgarity that lies in public adulation is 
 apt to nauseate ; at least if she be so little of a woman that she 
 is not vain, and so much of one that she cares for privacy. For 
 the fame of our age is not glory but notoriety ; and notoriety is 
 to a woman like the bull to Pasiphae — whilst it caresses it 
 crushes. 
 
 Fame brought Etoile its sweet and bitter fruits together. 
 
 " That is Etoile," said every one when she passed by. People 
 who creep by in obscurity think this notice from mankind must 
 be paradise. 
 
 All at once she grew tired of the brilliant success that sur- 
 rounded her ; it seemed tame, stupid, a twice-told tale. " Oh ! 
 old world, have you nothing better ? " she said thanklessly to 
 the world which had been too prodigal of its laurels to her. 
 
 She lost zest in it all. A cough settled on her lungs. When 
 her physicians bade her rest and go to Italy she was glad. 
 
 They said she had caught cold from working in clay. She 
 had had that desire to create something excellent in sculpture 
 which comes to most true painters ; but her malady was not due 
 to cold or clay ; it was rather the fatal revenge entailed on any 
 mortal who has exiled the passions and the aifections, and who 
 will sicken for them unconsciously ; the most splendid structure 
 of the intellect will always have this danger at its base. 
 
30 FRIEJ>1LSH11\ 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 Ox the niglit when the Priuce loris took the little three-cornered 
 note of his friend to the Comtesse d'Avesnes the note was carried 
 upstairs to a large salon on the first floor, of which the windows 
 ■were standing open, giving to view the masses of trees on the 
 Pincio and the Medici gardens and the brilliant stars of a winter's 
 night. The naked and tawdry splendour of an hotel apartment 
 was redeemed by masses of flowers that the present occupants of 
 it had brought there — pale violets, snowy camellias, and early 
 narcissi, born under glass, and showing their tender heads coyly, 
 as if cold. 
 
 Against one of the open casements leaned Etoile, wrapped in 
 her furs — for the night was chilly — looking at the stars of Orion, 
 which had arisen above the dark lines of the ilex trees, and 
 listening to the fall of the fountain water in the square below. 
 
 She was fair of skin, and in form slender and supple, from 
 living much out of doors and taking much exercise in the saddle 
 and on foot ; she had bright-hued hair that was lifted a little 
 from her forehead, and eyes like the eyes of the boyish portrait 
 of Shelley ; her velvet skirts fell to her feet in the simple undu- 
 lating folds that Leonardo da Vinci loved to draw. People were 
 vaguely disappointed when they saw her ; they woald have liked 
 her better in a man's coat, with her hair cut short, and generally 
 odd and untidy-looking. An artist that you might by accident 
 mistake for a duchess is annoying. 
 
 " What are you thinking of, Etoile ? " said her companion, 
 who was that wonderfully beautiful woman, brilliant as a pome- 
 granate flower or a sapphire, who was at once Dorotea Corouis 
 and the wife of the Due de Santorin. 
 
 " I believe I was thinking of Actea." 
 
 From the hotel she could see the dark masses of the trees on 
 the Pincio, and the round dome of the church raised to lay the 
 unholy spirit of Nero to rest. 
 
 "Poor Actea! The slave-girl redeems the age she lived 
 in " 
 
 " Eich Actea ! happy Actea ! " said Dorotea Coronis, with a 
 sigh. " Her beast was god to her. She never saw him as he 
 ■was. No doubt she thought him, too, a great artist and a perfect 
 poet. Love is blind." 
 
 " Not the highest love, surely." 
 
 " "What do you know about it ? You love nothing but vour 
 art." 
 
FBIENDSUIP. 81 
 
 " That is Voightel's complaint." 
 
 " Voightel is quite right. Why have you never cared for any 
 
 man, Etoile ? " 
 
 " Cared ? Men are so admirable as friends ; when they speak 
 of warmer things than friendship they weary or they revolt me ; 
 I lose my regard for them and my patience with them. It is hard 
 to give a reason for these things." 
 
 " You are fortunate to be so cold." 
 
 " Is it coldness ? And is it fortunate ? I am not so certain." 
 
 " Whatever it is, it makes you many foes. You seem to say 
 to men, ' You are too stupid to succeed,' and to women, * I am 
 stronger than you.' " 
 
 " 1 do not mean to say anything of the kind. It is true most 
 people tire me. There is so little profundity in them, and one 
 reads them so soon. A new acquaintance is like a new novel : 
 you open it with expectation, but what you find there seldom 
 makes you care to take it off the shelf a second time." 
 
 " I am glad I am an old friend." 
 
 Etoile smiled. 
 
 " Oh ! old friends are our Homers and Horaces, our Shake- 
 speares and Molieres : we cannot read them too often, and we find 
 something in them to suit all our moods. Why will you go away 
 from me, dear Dorotea ? " 
 
 The Duchesse Santorin laughed a little wearily. 
 
 " My dear ! when M. le Due must have two hundred thousand 
 francs as his New Year's etrennes ! You forget I am not my own 
 mistress, and the Petersburg engagement was signed this time 
 last year." 
 
 " I would give him no more. Surely your marriage contract 
 protects you a little ? " 
 
 " Entirely. But only so can I purchase his absence. He has 
 outraged me in every kind of way, but he has not lost his legal 
 rights. He never struck me before witnesses ; and though he 
 had mistresses all over Europe he did not bring one under the 
 same roof with me. You see he is blameless." 
 
 The lovely dark face of the great Spanish singer grew weary 
 and full of scorn; she rose and walked to and fro the room 
 restlessly. 
 
 " I wish you were not going to' Eussia," said her friend, in a 
 low tone, leaving the open window. 
 
 The Duchesse Santorin looked up quickly and paused in her 
 rapid and passionate walk. 
 
 " You think I shall meet Fedor. You mistake. He has left 
 the Imperial Guard and had himself ordered to the Caucasus by 
 my wish. He is there, and he will be there all winter." 
 
 " But who will believe that ? " 
 
 " It does not matter what is behoved. It matters what is." 
 
 "To ourselves and the God we hope for— yes." 
 
32 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " And what else matters? When we are 'in the light that 
 beats upon a throne ' we are at once condemned unheard — for 
 Enyy and Mediocrity sit on the judgment-seat, and whenever 
 did they wait for truth ? " 
 
 In brave old Cordova, twenty years before, a tiny child with 
 some gitafia blood in her had danced the zaronga with twinkling 
 feet whenever a Castanet clicked or a tambourine sounded — a 
 child so beautiful that when her father, a picador, lay dying in 
 the sand of the bull-ring he kissed her on the eyes and said, 
 " Though I go where I shall see the faces of the children of God, 
 there will be no face so fair amongst them as my Dorotea's." 
 
 She was only five years old then, but she never afterwards 
 forgot the circle of sand, the stream of blood, the sea of faces, 
 the great dead bull, the dying man whose last breath was a kiss 
 to her. 
 
 His brethren of the tribe, unasked, took the burden of her, 
 shared between them the cost of her small wants, and housed her 
 safely with good women, and even had her well taught by a priest ; 
 or taught, at least, as much as it is ever thought a Spanish girl 
 can want to know apart from her lore of fan and rosary. The 
 little Dorotea danced in e^ery patio where the guitar was sound- 
 ing, and sang in every church where the litanies were chaunting 
 — a wild, gay, most lovely child ; proud, too— so proud that the 
 Cordovans would say to one another that perhaps the fables were 
 true which had given to the picador the blood of an old kingly 
 stock. 
 
 When she was growing a little out of childhood some one 
 travelling through Cordova chanced to see and hear her sing. 
 
 The traveller was an old Jew whose errand in life was to find 
 great singers for great theatres. He was an honest man and 
 virtuous, though he loved money. He persuaded her protectors 
 to sell him the little Dorotea. He took her away with him, and 
 dealt gently with her, training her wonderful powers aright, and 
 letting her know and hear nothing to her hurt. At sixteen she 
 sang in Italy, at seventeen in Paris. She had one of the purest 
 voices that had been ever heard iipon the stage, and her mar- 
 vellous beauty and brilliancy made her fame even more than her 
 voice. Dorotea Coronis was one of the wonders of the world. 
 She had reached as great heights of perfection as any singer can, 
 and every note that fell from her lovely lips brought a shower 
 of gold. 
 
 Amongst her countless lovers came the Due de Santorin, Pair 
 <h France, with his heart and his couronne in his hand, to lay at 
 her feet. For it was well known that, to be won, she must be 
 wooed, with due honoi;r. After some reluctance and long refusal 
 she became his wife. His passion for herself was hot but brief; 
 his passion for her golden harvests lasted. 
 
 Tlie pride in her which the people of Cordova had seen in the 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 33 
 
 baby danciug the zarowja in their courts and gardens made the 
 dignity and ancientness of his name allure her. She had no love 
 for him, but neither had she any dislike. Those about her urged 
 and persuaded her. 
 
 " I do not care for you, but you never shall be ashamed of 
 me," she said to him. 
 
 He swore gratitude and devotion. He did not keep his word, 
 but she kept hers. 
 
 She had now been Duchesse de Santorin for some years, 
 singing in all the cities of Europe to supply his demands, and 
 with a right to a tabouret at the Court of France whenever Court 
 of France there might be. The contrast sometimes made her 
 laugh as she had used to laugh above her tambourine in the 
 2Mtios of old Cordova, only not with the same mirth. For five 
 years they had been virtually separated, though still nominally 
 of good accord. She had kept her word to him — she had been 
 faithful. But of course the world did not think so. 
 
 Men were in love with her wherever her beautiful gazelle-like 
 eyes rested, wherever her pure lark-like voice penetrated. The 
 world knew very well that some of these — oh, yes, of course — 
 and the world was inclined to pity the Due de Santorin. 
 
 " She was a gitaiia, you know, a gipsy ; a little bare-legged, 
 brazen thing, telling fortunes and rolhug in the mud," said the 
 world feminine, jealous of that sovereign grace and that incom- 
 parable art which Heaven had given to Dorotea Coronis. 
 
 Meanwhile there were many who loved and honoured her, 
 and amongst them was Etoile. 
 
 They had become friends at the house of a famous Minister 
 one night in Paris, after a representation of the " Flauto Magico," 
 and their friendship had endured. 
 
 " But the Caucasus," said Etoile this evening, " the Caucasus 
 is not so very far that men cannot come back from it. Are you 
 sure that Count Souroif " 
 
 " Will do what I wish him ? Yes." 
 
 " No ; I meant rather you of your own strength. When you 
 are in his own country, when you know him amidst a half-savage 
 people, in sickness and peril, wounded even, perhaps ;— can you 
 be sure that you will not yourself recall him ? " 
 
 " Yes, I am siire. Because my resolve is for his sake, not my 
 own. Listen, Etoile." 
 
 She paused in her feverish movements to and fro the great 
 chamber, and stood before her friend. 
 
 " A woman who thinks for herself is weak, but the woman 
 who thinks for another is strong. I will not let Fedor Souroflf 
 be my lover because I adore him with all my heart, all my soul, 
 all my life. I am a Spanish woman if I am anything ; I have 
 fire, not water, in my veins; I have no duties towards my husbancJ, 
 because he has insulted me, robbed me, outraged me, beaten me, 
 
 D 
 
34 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 aud told me a hundred times a year that I am only his bank, 
 which he honours only too much by plunging his hand into it 
 to seize its gold ; only his mechanical nightingalej of which he 
 keeps the key, with the title to wind it up and set it singing 
 when he wills ; or break it if it fail to sing. And yet — yet I 
 will not be what they say I am to the man whom I worship, and 
 who thinks holy the very stones or sand that feel my feet, and 
 gives to me the noblest, tenderest, most loyal love that was ever 
 given to a woman for her joy and pain. I will not — for his 
 sake " 
 
 " For his ? " 
 
 " For his. You have seen him so little, else you would know 
 why without asking. In the first place, Santorin would shoot 
 him dead. Santorin is base, but not so base as to sink to the 
 cocu content of the modem world ; — and Fedor would let Santorin 
 shoot him. That would be what he would call only just. But 
 this is the least thing. Fedor would gladly die so to piirchase 
 one hour with me. What would be far worse for him would be 
 to live. What man is more wretched on earth than the bond 
 slave of another man's wife. Fedor is young; he has a gi-eat 
 name ; he comes of a great family, who adore him ; he is a fearless 
 and devoted soldier. I will not ruin him — I will not. He would 
 break his career for me ; he would incur exile, confiscation, even 
 the shame of a deserter for me; yes, and adore me the moro 
 because I doomed him to them. I will not take his sacrifice. 
 My love, my love ! — he is but mortal. He will not love for ever 
 thus ; not when love is but another name for disappointment. 
 Men are not like us. In time he will fort et me; he will be free; 
 he will be happy." 
 
 She ceased suddenly ; a convulsion of violent weeping passed 
 through her ; she threw herself prostrate on a couch and buried 
 her beautiful head in her hands. 
 
 Etoile looked at her with tears in her own eyes ; she forbore 
 to speak ; she knew that all the passionate, proud, and vehement 
 nature of Dorotea Coronis was centred in this great passion, whoso 
 temptations it yet had strength to resist. 
 
 The windows were open and the stars shone in the dark ; the 
 sound of the fountains below came on the silence with the dull 
 rumbling of the night traffic of Eome ; the air was sweet aud 
 heavy with the smell of forced heliotrope with which they had 
 filled a large bowl on a marble table. 
 
 " To love like that ! " thought Etoile. " It must be worth 
 even all that pain." 
 
 Aud for the first time in her life she felt solitary. 
 
 At that moment the servant brought her the note from the 
 Casa Challoner and a bouquet of white flowers, lilies of the valley 
 and narcissi, which the Prince loris had purchased in the flower- 
 shop of the Via Condotti as he passed in the moonlight, and sent 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 35 
 
 np with liis own caixl, on one of those unthinking impulses which 
 sometimes imperilled all his prudence. 
 
 "What sweet lilies! "said Etoile, and forsook the stars for 
 them, bending her face over their fragrance. Flowers were her 
 earliest loves, and had never been displaced in her affections. 
 Then she opened the Lady Joan's letter. 
 
 A few evenings before, in Paris, Voightel, shrewdest, keenest, 
 and most merciless of wits and men, had been with her to bid her 
 farewell. 
 
 "Go and see Archie's daughter, since he wishes it; go and 
 see my Lady Joan," had said the great Voightel— traveller, philo- 
 logist, past- master in all sciences and all tongues, standing ou 
 her hearth, and glowering through his green spectacles, and his 
 grizzled beard, till he looked like a magnified and cynical tom- 
 cat. " I have often talked to Joan of you. What is she like ? 
 Not a whit like Archie, but a handsome woman, and a clever 
 woman in her way, which is not your way. Merimee calls her 
 his J efroleuse. It is inexact. Petroleuses burn with no idea of 
 ultimate booty: she would never waste her oil so. Cleopatra 
 crossed with Dame du Comptoir were nearer, I think. I admire 
 her very much. I always know she is lying, and yet I am always 
 pleased when she lies to please me. How contemptible! But 
 all men are weak. I am inclined to respect women who live 
 every hour of their lives. She does. You do not. You dream 
 too much ever to live very vividly, unless you ever fall in love. 
 I do so wish you would. It would make you so many friends. 
 Men dislike a woman who will not be wooed. Believe that, my 
 disdainful Etoile, who will be wooed by nobody. When a woman 
 is 'kind' to various men, each favoured mortal is bound, in 
 honour, to arm cap-a-pie and swear she never was ' kind ' to 
 anybody. Wliereas, when she repulses and rebuffs them all 
 round as you do, her lovers become her enemies, and will be more 
 than human if they do not take her character away, out of the 
 sincerity of their conviction that somebody must have been 
 beforehand with them. Eeasoning by analogy, I have very little 
 doubt that Faustina was a wife of remarkable purity, and St. Agnes 
 and Agatha very little better than they should have been. Go 
 and see our dear Joan. She is a faggot of contradictions; extra- 
 ordinarily ignorant, but naturally intelligent ; audacious, yet 
 timid ; a bully, but a coward ; full of hot passions, but with cold 
 fits of prudence. Had she your talent the world would have 
 heard of her. As it is, she only enjoys herself. Perhaps tho 
 better part. Fame is a cone of smoke. Enjoyment is a loaf of 
 sugar. I am not sure what she is doing in Kome, but I am quite 
 sure she is in mischief, and quite sure she is making money. 
 When the moon on the Forum has filled your brain with 
 schivdrmerei, go and see Joan. She is an admirable tonic for all 
 poets. She will be the Prose of Eome for you. You will want 
 prose there." 
 
36 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 At eight o'clock on the sixth of December, Etoile, Comtesse 
 d'AvesneSj went up the many stairs of the Casa Challoner, to 
 see for the first time the woman who was to be to her the Prose 
 of Eome. 
 
 She herself was tired, and had little colour; she wore no 
 jewels and had only a knot of pale yellow tea-roses at her breast ; 
 her dress trailed softly, it was made up of black Chantilly laces 
 and pale maize hues, and the deftest hands of Paris had cast the 
 easy and simple grace of it together. 
 
 She went carelessly, indifferently, wondering if she should like 
 these people as much as she hked Lord Archie ; went to her fate 
 as every one does, unwitting that in the commonplace passage of 
 the hours Destiny was striking. 
 
 As she entered the ante-room, and laid aside her furs, she 
 heard a voice singing a ritornello of the Koman populace, to the 
 deep dulcet chords of a mandoline. 
 
 As her name was announced the voice ceased, and from 
 between two cui-tains of Oriental silk, that shaded the inner 
 doorway, there advanced, with outstretched hands, the singer, 
 clad in black velvet, with a little collar of diamond stars at her 
 throat, which sjjarkled as she moved. She had a classic head, 
 fitly shaped for a bust of Athene, an Egyptian profile, brilliant 
 eyes, green by day, black by night, thick eyebrows, and a cordial 
 smile, that showed very white and even teeth. 
 
 " How charmed I am ! At last we meet ! How many many 
 times I have tried to see you in Paris and Brussels ! " cried the 
 Lady Joan, with eager welcome, and with honest warmth. 
 
 "Your father's daughter can be nothing but my friend," 
 answered her new acquaintance, with sincerity. 
 
 Lady Joan, her guitar still in one hand, led her guest with 
 animated and eager compliment to the hearth ; pushed a low 
 chair nearer the wood fire, said some pretty words of her own 
 father, and of their dear old Voightel, asked after other friends 
 they had in common, sj^oke of the weather, and then, as by a 
 mere careless after-thought, or accident, turned suddenly and 
 presented a person who had all the while been standing close 
 by, erect, calm, and unnoticed, like a lord in waiting beside a 
 throne. 
 
 "Prince loris— the Comtesse d'Avesnes. loris is a great 
 friend of my husband's, his dearest friend, indeed. Oh, of 
 course, he has heard of you. Who has not ? Only, of course. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 37 
 
 too, he knows you best as Etoile. We all do that. It is such 
 a charming name ! " 
 
 The Prince loris looked like a picture, and bowed like a 
 courtier, and, leaning his arm on the mantelsheli, began to sjocak 
 graceful nothings, in his melodious voice. 
 
 At that moment there entered, a little hurriedly, like an 
 actor not on the stage in time for his cue, the gentleman with 
 the Scotch face and the German manner, whom Lady Joan, with 
 a little frown on her darkling brows, presented as Mr. Challoner. 
 
 Mr. Challoner, the excellence of whose countenance was its 
 unalterability under all circumstances whatever, stared through 
 his eye-glass, bent himself stii33y, and in solemn phrase assured 
 his guest of the supreme honour that he felt she had done to his 
 threshold. 
 
 Immediately upon him there followed another of his guests, 
 I\Irs. Henry. V. Clams, gorgeous in a gown that imprisoned her 
 so tightly that it only permitted of the garb of a circus rider 
 underneath it, and weighty with a perfect Golconda of rubies. 
 
 " No stones on her ! — my word, and she must have got lots ! " 
 reflected Mrs. Henry V. Clams, staring at the tea-roses of Etoile, 
 and settling in her own mind that artists were the most disap- 
 poiutin' people to lock at, except princes, that ever she saw. 
 
 She was accompanied by the Marquis de Fontebranda, a 
 Piedmontese about the Court, a fair, graceful, and good-looking 
 man, who had trained her in the way she should go, and still 
 suffered many things from her love of colours and her need of 
 dictionaries. Her husband had been invited, of course, but it 
 was understood everywhere that he never came anywhere; he 
 had always a cold, or letters in from N'York. Fontebranda had 
 trained him as well. 
 
 The other guests arrived— an English Chief Justice, famous 
 for his wit ; a lady known to all Europe as the Marchioness of 
 Cardiff, some Italians, some Eussians ; finally, a mature pet of 
 the Lady Joan's, a white-haired and cosmopolitan Englishman, by 
 name Silverly Bell, who was a most popular person at all the 
 English tea-parties of the Continent, for nobody sugared your 
 tea more prettily, or told you nastier stories of your neighbours 
 more sweetly. 
 
 Dinner announced, Fontebranda was allotted to Etoile, Mr. 
 Challoner offered his arm to Lady Cardiff, and the hostess went 
 in with Mr. Challoner 's dearest friend. 
 
 " What do you think of her, lo ? " she murmured in his ear. 
 
 " Pas grand' chose ! " he murmured back indifferently, with a 
 little shrug of his shoulders. 
 
 The Lady Joan's grey-green eyes sparkled happily. She 
 believed him. 
 
 The dinner was well appointed, quiet, and unpretentious ; 
 the dishes were not too numeroixs, and were all good; the 
 
38 FBIENLSEIP. 
 
 flowers were in old Faeiiza bowls ; the china was old white and 
 gold Grinori, the glass Venetian, the fruit superb. All went well, 
 and there was only one discord, the v jice of Mrs. Henry V. Clams, 
 but that is a kind of discord which in the present construction 
 of society is to be heard everywhere, from mountain-tops to 
 throne-rooms. 
 
 Mrs. Hemy V. Clams thought again and again what " disap- 
 pointin' people " artists were. 
 
 Etoile chanced to say very little. 
 
 Sometimes in society she was very silent, sometimes very 
 eloquent. Minds like hers resemble running brooks : they 
 reflect what they pass through ; they are still or sparkling, dark 
 or radiant, according as they flow over sand or moss, under black 
 cloud or sunny sky : the brook is always the same ; it is what it 
 mirrors that varies. 
 
 Mrs. Henry Y. Clams — who herself was quite independent of 
 circumstances or surroundings, and .whose torrents of questions 
 and bubbles of curiosity and chatter never ceased on any occa- 
 sion, and never had been known to cease, except once at a 
 Drawing-room in London, and once at a total eclipse of the sun, 
 on both of which occasions she had owned to being " that cowed 
 she was right down mum " — stared at Etoile across the table, 
 and said to her next neighbour that " sxxvdy there was nothiog 
 like clever jDeople for being daft." 
 
 Her neighbour being the English Chief Justice, a very clever 
 and merry person himself, assented heartily to the proi)osition, 
 but begged her to reflect. 
 
 " My dear lady, if talent weren't a little daft as you say, how 
 on earth would the great majority ever be got to stand it at all ? 
 Consider the enormous utility of genius looking now and then 
 like a fool." 
 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams stuffed her mouth with a louchee, and 
 smiled vaguely. She did not understand, and Fontebranda was 
 too far oft' to be telegraphed to for explanations. 
 
 " If that he Etoile, why don't she talk and amuse us ? " mused 
 meanwhile, like IMrs. Henry V. Clams, a very diff'erent person, the 
 Marchione.ss of Cardifi", whose heart and soul had been bequeathed 
 to her unaltered from an ancestress of the days of Louis XIV., 
 and who never could see why artists wanted Christian burial, or 
 were asked to dinner, or any of that sort of thing. 
 
 "Is that really Etoile, did you say? the Etoile, you know? " 
 she asked of her host. 
 
 " Yes, yes," assented Mr. Challoner, not being certain whether 
 he ought to be very triumphant over his guest, .or somewhat 
 ashamed of her. " Dear Lord Archie is fond of her — begged us 
 to do what we could — you know his good nature — my wife 
 inherits it. Dear Lady Cardifi", do try these larded quails'" 
 
 " She looks a much better bred one than you do, my dear 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 39 
 
 sir," thotight lier ladyship, withdrawing her eyeglass from Etoile 
 to the quails. 
 
 " You said you liked to meet celebrities— that it amused you," 
 said her host with au accent of apology in his voice. " Of course, 
 of her great genius there can be no question." 
 
 " Of course, of course ! and I am charmed," said her ladyship, 
 occupied with her first mouthful of a larded quail. " Tell her to 
 come to my Mondays. I'll tell her myself after dinner. She's 
 very well dressed. Is it Worth ? " 
 
 *" Most likely ; she is said to be extravagant." 
 
 "I am sure she has a right to be; how nice it must be to 
 make your own money, and spend it, and never be bothered with 
 trustees! Oh yes, Worth, beyond any doubt. The way he ties 
 a bow one never can mistake. And just that tea-rose too — very 
 pretty, very pretty indeed. What different things he gives people 
 he likes, to what he will do for mere millionaires like our dear 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams." 
 
 Etoile, unconscious of the criticism, ruflScd the tea-roses 
 amongst her old lace, divided her few words between Fonte- 
 branda and a Count Serge Eoublezofif who sat on the other side 
 of her, looked often at her hostess, whose bright eyes flashed 
 back honest kindly smiles to hers, and, without knowing very 
 well why she did so, watched the man whom Lady Joan had 
 installed in the seat of honour. 
 
 He was very tall and slender, with that look of distinction 
 which, though not always attendant on a great race, is never 
 found outside it; he had high delicate features, and an oval 
 beardless face, a soft olive skin, thoughtful pensive brows, and 
 those eyes which at once allure and command women ; he had 
 a beautiful voice, infinite grace and softness of manner, and in 
 aspect might have stepped down off any canvas of Velasquez or 
 Vandyke. Etoile noticed that he was scrupulously alive to every 
 want of the Lady Joan's; he bowed his head in resigned silence 
 whenever she contradicted him, which she did twice in every five 
 minutes ; he called her Madame with the strictest ceremony, and 
 addressed Mr. Challoner across the length of the table as " mon 
 cher," with more friendly efiusion than seemed needful, on more 
 occasions than were natural. Occasionally he looked across at 
 Etoile herself 
 
 His eyes were thoughtful, dreamy, when he chose, absolutely 
 unrevealing ; they had the drooped languid amorous lids and the 
 long dark lashes of his country. Wherever his eyes lighted. Lady 
 Joan's followed and lighted too. 
 
 As he looked he was thinking, as long afterwards he told 
 Etoile— 
 
 " That woman is half a saint and half a muse. 
 
 " She has never loved. 
 
 " She is full of idealities. 
 
40 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " She has strong passions, but they sleep. 
 
 " Her dreams are the enemies of men. 
 
 " She does not care for the world. 
 
 " She has been used to her own way, and she has treated all 
 men with indifference ; some few with friendshijD ; none with 
 tenderness. 
 
 " She seems cold ; but I think she is only uninterested. 
 
 " She is all mind. Her senses have never stirred. She does 
 not belong to our world. 
 
 " She has thoughts that go far away from us. 
 
 " She has not enough frivolity to enjoy her own generation. 
 
 " She has lovely eyes : they say so much without knowing 
 that they say anything. 
 
 " She has beautiful hands. 
 
 " She is dressed perfectly. 
 
 " I shall detest her. 
 
 " Or I shall adore her. 
 
 " Which of the two ? I do not know. 
 
 " Perhaps both." 
 
 So he thought of Etoile, watching her across the table whilst 
 he talked with polite attention to his hostess, who snapped him 
 short with her curt, sharp, bright humour, and seldom allowed 
 him to iinish a sentence. 
 
 He looked very much like a grave slender deerhound held 
 down under a keeper's leash. 
 
 There was pride in his eyes and high spirit on his aquiline 
 features, but at the table of the Challoners he was subdued and 
 silent; or at other moments over-assiduous to please. Etoile 
 noticed this ; and wondered what relation he bore to them. She 
 gathered from what was said by him and to him that he 
 was a noble of Eome ; a courtier ; and the owner of an estate 
 to which they constantly referred as Fiordelisa, but which 
 seemed by some inexplicable arrangement to be the Lady Joan's 
 property also. 
 
 " What beautiful grapes ! " the Chief Justice chanced to say, 
 " finest where all are fine. They are your own growth ? " 
 
 The Lady Joan nodded assent. 
 
 " Yes ; they're all off my vines — down at Fiordelisa." 
 
 " You like grapes, Madame ? " said loris to Etoile, who was 
 opposite him. "Oh! you must allow me to send you some — 
 from Fiordelisa." 
 
 " What is Fiordelisa ? " thought Etoile. She did not know 
 that, although Fiordelisa was the property of loris, loris was 
 still more absolutely the property of the Lady Joan. 
 
 "What a pretty name Fiordelisa!" she hazarded as she 
 thanked him. 
 
 Lady Joan interrupted his reply. 
 
 " Yes ; it was a beastly old barrack when we went in it : but 
 
FRIENDSEIP. 41 
 
 •WG have clone no end to imi^rove it inside and out," said the 
 hostess, cracking a wahiut. 
 
 Etoilc fancied that the face of the Eoman Prince grew a shade 
 paler still, as with anger, but she thought it might be only her 
 fancy ; all artists are fanciful. He drew a flower out of one of 
 the bowls near him, and busied himself fastening it into' his 
 buttonhole. 
 
 Dinner over, they sauntered into one of the three or four 
 little salons of the house ; a little room with Smyrna carpets and 
 comfortable couches, and a great many pictures, and a great deal 
 of china. Here the Lady Joan oixned her cigar-case, threw 
 herself back at ease, and expressed her hope that everybody 
 smoked. 
 
 Everybody did, except Etoile, 
 
 " Ah ! Comtesse, you are right and wise not to do so," said 
 the Prince loris, as he crossed over to her. " Smoking has no 
 grace upon a woman's lips, and little sense on ours." 
 
 The Lady Joan hastily crossed over also, her cigar in her 
 hand. 
 
 " What things you do say, lo," she muttered, crossly. " You 
 know Lady Cardiff smokes hke a steam-engine. How stupid you 
 were at dinner, too ! Go and amuse the Chief Justice ; you see 
 Mr. Challoner's boring him to death." 
 
 He went obedient, but not resigned, to address the Chief 
 Justice, with all the warm and charming coiirtcsy of his habitual 
 manner, which, ew vrailtalien, yvas never warmer or more charming 
 than when he was somewhat annoyed and very much wearied. 
 The Lady Joan presented Lady Cardiff to the Comtesse d'Avesnes, 
 and, content with the diversion she had effected, repaid herself 
 with joining her male guests, and receiving a person who just 
 then entered, and whom she saluted delightedly as her " very 
 dear old Mimo ! " 
 
 The very dear old Mimo — otherwise Count Burletta — was a 
 very shrewd person, of some fifty years old, fat and fair, smiling 
 and serene. Fate had given him a meagre purse and a keen eye ; 
 he rambled about Eome, in and out all sorts of odd places, and 
 about three o'clock might be found at home any day, surrounded 
 with the fruits of his rambles, ivories, enamels, tarsia work, china, 
 cloisonne, lac, anything and everything that garrets and palaces, 
 cellars and convents, could be pursuaded to render ; in society 
 he was a gentleman, and could lie like one ; in his shop he was 
 honest — unless he met with a fool : fools, he thought, were sent 
 by the saints as food was sent by Elijah's ravens f he was a very 
 good Catholic. 
 
 The very dear old Mimo, dropping now down on the divan 
 beside her, murmured to her many things in a low tone, unheard 
 by ears profane, and then drew out her guitar from under a pile 
 of music. 
 
42 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 " lo ! " called the Lady Joau ; " wbere's that last song of the 
 Trastevere you wrote down for me ? — the one we heard the girl 
 sing as we came home from the Valle the other night ? " 
 
 loris left the Chief Justice and searched for the song. 
 
 Being found, the Lady Joan would not sing it — she sang 
 something else ; the riband of her old Spanish guitar hanging 
 over her shoulder ; her sweeping velvet and her shining stars 
 making a fine study for a painter ; her handsome teeth gleaming 
 and her eyes flashing up to her listeners with an amorous glitter- 
 ing gaze that burned its way straight ui? to the face of loris, who 
 leaned towards her and beat the time softly with his hand, and 
 gave back the answering glance that it was his due and his duty 
 to give. But 
 
 " That man is only feigning ; why does he have to feign ? " 
 thought the Countess d'Avesnes, and looked to see if Mr. Challoner 
 observed what she did. 
 
 Mr. Challoner was too well drilled by thirteen years of wedded 
 life ever to observe anything ; Mr. Challoner at the other end of 
 the room discussed political news with the Chief Justice in an 
 undertone, so as not to disturb his wife's singing. He never 
 disturbed his wife ; he was the marital model of the nineteenth 
 century. There are many like him ; but not perhaps many quite 
 so perfect. 
 
 His wife's singing was agreeable, though she sang out of time 
 and her accent was harsh ; still she had a rich voice naturally, 
 and could give the songs of the populace, and the erotic lays of 
 the streets and fields, with a force and a h'io hardly to be surpassed 
 by the Eomans themselves. 
 
 It was not pure execution nor perfect phrasing, and it used 
 to set the teeth of real musicians on edge, but there was something 
 contagious and intoxicating in it as she struck deep vibrations 
 from the chords and jDoured from her glances a passionate light. 
 She never looked so well as when she sang ; it sent warmth into 
 her lips and took the hardness from her face ; singing, the passion 
 that was in the woman broke up from the shrewd worldly sense, 
 and the prosaic temper, that covered and hid it ; singing, she 
 looked like the swart sovereign of Musset's jioem, who laughed 
 to see the bold bull die, and flung her broidered garter to her 
 lover the matador. 
 
 " Allow mc to compliment you on your gown, my dear Com- 
 tesse," said Lady Cardift", meanwhile seated beside Etoile. " You 
 must be tired of compliments on your talents. What charming 
 things Worth does for people of taste ! He dollus Mrs. Henry 
 V. Clams over yonder, you know ; what a difference ! I am so 
 glad you condescend to think about dress. It brings you nearer 
 our poor humanity ; genius so often, you know " 
 
 "Is too much like St. Simeon Stylites ; I quite agree with you. 
 There is more affectation in sackcloth than in silk. Besides, to 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 4a 
 
 be dressed with taste is a pleasure to one's self. What do you call 
 that remarkable person who thinks it necessary to load herself 
 ■with rubies for a little dinner party ? " 
 
 " Mi's. Henry V. Clams. Fontebranda has made her, forced 
 her down all our throats ; very cleverly he has done it. He's no 
 money, you know, and they've heaps. As somebody said of some- 
 body in the last century (Due d'Orleans, wasn't it ?), not being 
 able to make her Marquise Fontebranda, which I am sure he'd 
 be very sorry to do, he has made himself Mr. Henry V. Clams, 
 and I think it pays him very much better." 
 
 " I see. Do you visit them ? " 
 
 " Oh, of course. Everybody visits them. They entertain very 
 well ; it's all Fontebranda. Are you staying long in Eome ? " 
 
 " All the winter, I think." 
 
 " Delighted ! I hope its not true what they say — that your 
 lungs are affected ? " 
 
 " A little, I fear ; nothing serious." 
 
 "Ah, dear me. Aldebaran — you should inhale Aldebaran. 
 Do get a bottle. Consumption cured for half-a-crown; you 
 know the thing I mean." 
 
 " I have more faith in the Koman air. Who is that person 
 tuning Lady Joan's guitar ? " 
 
 "Her very dear old Llimo? Well, that is— Mimo,— Count 
 Burletta, you know. A good creature. Tradesman from twelve 
 to four ; Count all the rest of the day and night. If you want to 
 buy teacups and triptychs, ask Lady Joan to take you there ; 
 and, if you want to please, pay, and don't ask the age of the 
 object. Mean ? Oh, I mean nothing. Mimo is a connoisseur — 
 everybody is a connoisseur here — and gives ignorant people the 
 benefit of his knowledge. That is all. How do you hke her 
 singing?" 
 
 " Well, you see, I am too used to great miasic to be very easily 
 pleased. The first musicians of Paris gather at my house, and 
 then my friend Dorotea sings to me alone so constantly." 
 
 "Ah, the Duchesse Santorin. She is here, isn't she ? " 
 
 " She is gone. She only came to see me one day. She was 
 engaged at Petersbui'g. She has promised me to return in two 
 months." 
 
 "Tell me, do tell me. You must know. Is it true that 
 Santorin has sent her a citation to appear ; that he is about to 
 sue for a separation ? " 
 
 " He has sent her a schedule of his latest debts. That is all 
 that I know of " 
 
 "But there is some scandal about that handsome Eussian, 
 Souroff, that Imperial aide-de-camp —you know whom I mean. 
 What is his name '? Fedor ? " 
 
 " There is no cause for any ; that I can assure you. Count 
 Soiu'off is in the Caucasus." 
 
44 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 "Dear me!" said Lady Cardiff vagiiely, disappointed, but 
 reflecting that of course the friend of the Duchesse Santorin 
 must say that sort of thing. 
 
 " Lady Joan looks very handsome as she sings," said Etoile, 
 to change the theme. 
 
 The English peeress put her glass up to her eye, and looked 
 at the singer. 
 
 "A good-looking woman, yes, and highly born, and young 
 still, and no fool, and yet married to a Mr. Challoner ! 
 
 " There are very odd things in life, are there not? " continued 
 the Marchioness musingly. " Nothing odder than its Mr. Chal- 
 loners. You know her father ? Indeed ! A charming person : 
 very unlike her, don't you think ? Yes, I am going ; sorry to 
 leave you, but I must look in at the Euspoli's. I shall slip out 
 quietly while she is making that noise. So charmed you have 
 come to Eome, my dear Comtesse. Pray, don't forget my 
 Mondays." 
 
 " I suppose people do receive her ? " said Lady Cardiff to her 
 host, who rushed to intercept her passage, and escort her down 
 the stairs. 
 
 " Whom ? Etoile ? Oh, certainly, there never was a breath 
 against her." 
 
 " Oh, my dear Mr. Challoner, I don't mean that. What does 
 that matter ? We receive tens of thousands of people with nor'- 
 westers blowing them black and blue " — (Mr. Challoner winced) 
 — " every day of their lives. Heaps of good people are out of 
 society, and heaps of bad j)eople in ; only we can't receive any- 
 body unless other folks receive her too. Nobody can legin, you 
 know. It gets thrown against you afterwards ; if a woman is 
 really received, it don't in the least matter what she's done or 
 what she does do. Nobody's any business with the rest of her 
 life. 7s she received ? That is all. As for this particular woman, 
 she is charming. And, of course, everybody you know has the 
 passport to my house, and every other house. Coming to the 
 Euspoli's? No? Ah, true! You don't know them. Pity. 
 Many thanks. Very cold. Thanks. Good evening." 
 
 And, having wrapped up many thorns in velvet in her parting 
 speech, the Marchioness of Cardiff rolled away in her carriage to 
 the Palazzo Euspoli, leaving Mr. Challoner bowing on the step in 
 the teeth of the sharp easterly wind, with all the thorns pricking 
 in him as he turned and went upstairs. Happily for himself, he 
 had a tough epidermis, and could remain impenetrable to thorns 
 and even harpoons. Mr. Challoner knew that nothing answers 
 in the long run like invulnerability. 
 
 His wife was still singing when he entered, and her very dear 
 old Mimo was praising a little Masolino panel to the Chief Justice, 
 who did not know much about art, but was very open-handed 
 with his money, all the world knew. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 45 
 
 Tho Prince loris, liaviug gazed his heart out through threo 
 songs, and made his eyes utter more amorous lyrics than any sho 
 sang, thought he had done what duty required of him, and sank 
 away quietly into a corner of the sofa by Etoile, and picked up 
 some fallen leaves of the tea-roses, and talked with serious feeling 
 and graceful taste of various themes of art, and gazed at her as 
 he did so with that musing studious regard which is the subtlest 
 form of early homage. 
 
 The Lady Joan saw, and sang out of time for two seconds. 
 The Lady Joan threw her guitar aside with a haste and force 
 that imperilled its safety, and came out of her little circle of 
 admirmg listeners, and bore down on the sofa where loris was 
 still tossing a few fragrant tea-rose leaves in his hand and talking- 
 of art. 
 
 "Go with her to-morrow to the Logge?" she called out 
 sharply. " What are you thinking of, lo? You've got to take 
 me to the studios; and then there is that bust to see to at 
 Trillo's, and the Bishop of Melita coming to luncheon, and there 
 are heaps of things in the afternoon. You can't go anywhere 
 to-morrow. Besides, she's got old Padre Marcello— a man who 
 carries more a:-t-knowledge about Rome in his little finger than 
 you do in all your brain, which is not the very biggest to hold 
 anything." 
 
 She laughed as she spoke, and blew some smoke round her 
 classic hand. 
 
 loris bowed resignedly. 
 
 " I am at your commands, madame, of course, as always." 
 
 " Oh, are you ! " said his hostess, roughly, too out of temper 
 to be able to control the irritability she felt. " Then another 
 time don't keep me twenty minutes waiting, as you did this 
 morning at Trillo's. What were you after ? " 
 
 " I was at the Vatican." 
 
 " Well, you must be here to-morrow at ten. Mind that ; and 
 see Pippo has the new curb on ; he jibbed dreadfully yesterday. 
 Are you going ? So early ? I am so sorry ; it is only eleven 
 o'clock," she continued, with her frankest, pleasantest smile, as 
 Etoile rose from the sofa, unconscious that her rose-leaves had 
 been falling on a volcano's brink. 
 
 " We must be friends for my father's sake." said Lady Joan ; 
 "how glad I am you came to Pome!" and she followed her 
 through the rooms and the ante-room, with cordial phrases and 
 a dozen pleasant kindly plans for future intimacy and mutual 
 amusement. 
 
 loris, evading direction, reached down the furs, and enveloped 
 with them the maize and black bows of Worth, and gave Etoile 
 his arm. 
 
 " How handsome she is, and very agreeable," said Etoile, as 
 they went downstairs. 
 
16 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 loris was silent. 
 
 " You are a friend of Lord Archie's ? " he said, after a moment's 
 pause — a pause, it seemed to her, of some sh'ght embarrassment. 
 
 " Yes ; I know him well — dear gentle Lord Archie." 
 
 " I also am fond of Lord Archie." 
 
 " Are you any relation to them ? " 
 
 " None at all," replied loris, with a certain impatience. " I 
 may have the honour to call on you, madame. Perhaps I may 
 be of some little use. No doubt you will know every one in 
 Eome, but anything that I could do " 
 
 Mr. Challoner overtook them on the staircase, with Mrs. 
 Henry V. Clams and Fontebranda, who were leaving also. 
 
 " My wife wants you, loris," said the gentleman ; " there is 
 some other song that can't be found." 
 
 " You have forgotten this, madame," said loris, in the street, 
 as he escaped from Mr. Challoner, putting the big black Spanish 
 fan through the window of the carriage. " And do not heed what 
 the Lady Joan said. I will have the honour of waiting on you 
 to-morrow at noon for the Logge, and although certainly I cannot 
 compete in knowledge with the Padre Marcello, still, if zeal and 
 devotion can serve you at all in this my native city " 
 
 The horses, impatient, reared and plunged forward on the 
 uneven pavement of the street, and left his phrase unfinished 
 upon Etoile's ear. 
 
 He looked a moment into the moonlight, then reascended the 
 stairs. 
 
 " lo ! " cried the Lady Joan ; " come and make me some fresh 
 cigarettes. Now we can enjoy ourselves. Mimo's got such a 
 capital story ; awfully saluto, bvit so good." 
 
FBIENDSniP. 47 
 
 CHAPTEK VII. 
 
 Thb Lady Joan Clialloner came of a very good old stock. 
 
 The Pertla-Douglas family was one about whose ancientness 
 and admirableness there conld never be any disiDute. The Perth- 
 Dongiases had always been gentlefolks, and their names could 
 be read backwards by the light of history as far as the days of 
 Flodden and of Bannockburn. Though of such knightly descent, 
 they were very poor, and of no great estate ; but they were own 
 cousins to the mighty Earl of Hebrides, had intermarried with 
 the no less mighty Marquises of Lothian, were cousins-german 
 to the Dukes of Lochwithiau and the Lords of Fingal, and owned 
 Scotch cousinships to more peers than the Order of the Thistle 
 embraces, and as many baronets as the Nova Scotia riband 
 adorns. 
 
 Her father, Archibald Angus Perth-Douglas, fifth Earl of 
 Archiestoune — always called by his friends Archie — had no seat 
 in the Lords, and was glad of a Government place, and a small 
 office at Court. He was an infinitely charming person, whom 
 everybody loved and caressed. Her mother had been a beauty 
 and a wit; her grandmother the same. The Lady Joan, at 
 nineteen, had been married to Mr. Eobert Challoner, an obscure 
 gentleman, whose parentage was doubtful, and whose prosperity 
 was dubious. People had wondered very much why such a 
 handsome well-born girl as Joan Perth-Douglas should be 
 married to a Mr. Challoner. 
 
 If she had been a trifle cleverer than the clever woman she 
 was, of course she would have told people she had adored him, and 
 had insisted on having him and none other. But as she always 
 told everybody roundly that she had always hated him, this 
 explanation could not be put forward by even her blindest 
 admirers. 
 
 There were one or two people who did know why — really 
 why — but a popular and eminent politician had been trustee to 
 the marriage settlements, and no one could be indiscreet enough 
 to persist in inquiring why the settlements ever had been drawn 
 up at all. 
 
 The Lady Joan all her life long was rich in discreet friends. 
 
 Still even the discreetcst friends will, like the closest-packed 
 hold of a ship, leak occasionally. Salt water and secrets are alike 
 apt to ooze. So, whatever the reason might be, the Challoners 
 lived out of England. 
 
 The Perth-Douglases were clever people, and had had the 
 
48 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 knack of always frequenting the society of cleverer people than 
 themselves. Without ever having distinguished themselves 
 intellectually, they yet had thus gained an intellectual reputa- 
 tion; and on the feet of their ladies there had been often 
 stockings of blue. 
 
 For gentle, gracious, handsome Earl Archie, his women were 
 too many and too strong, and they worried him sorely ; he con- 
 soled himself with society which was always delighted to console 
 him. His wife — beautiful and masterful — and his mother and 
 sisters, not so beautiful, but masterful too, disputed and quarrelled 
 and vexed him. He was a man who thought peace the one 
 supreme good of life, but he was seldom destined to enjoy it. 
 His lot was cast throughout existence amidst maitresses-femmes : 
 they are admirable and wonderful beings, no doubt, but no man 
 ever found them conducive to his comfort as comiDanions. 
 
 Of his daughter Lord Archie had never felt that he knew very 
 much. He had thought the marriage a very odd one and a very 
 disadvantageous one, and had done his best in his gentle, sweet- 
 tempered, tranquil fashion to oppose it. But when he was told 
 by his wife and his old friend the eminent politician that it had 
 to be, and was the best thing that could be, he acquiesced, 
 because acquiescence had become his habit with his numerous 
 feminine rulers. 
 
 He was not behind the scenes ; and they told him a great 
 many fictions of the Challoner fortune and the Challoner devo- 
 tion : after all it was as the girl liked, it was her affair more 
 than any one's. 
 
 Gentle Lord Archie thought everything was for the best in 
 this best of all possible worlds. He never worried himself or 
 anybody else. He gave away his daughter at the altar, to what 
 he stigmatised in his own soul as a cad, with the same benign 
 placidity with which, a dozen years afterwards, he lay in the 
 sunshine and smoked his cigars under the walnut trees at Fior- 
 delisa : everything was all right — that was Lord Archie's formula. 
 It is the only one possible for a man governed by three genera- 
 tions of women with wills of their own. 
 
 Thirteen years had gone by since Lord Archie had led his 
 daughter up to the marriage altar, wondering why Joan, who 
 had been a good deal admired at her first drawing-room, and 
 had spirit enough for fifty cavalry soldiers, had not waited a little 
 while and done better for herself. 
 
 Thirteen years found the Lady Joan still a young woman. 
 
 She had swej^t a good deal of adventure into the dozen and 
 one seasons that Mr. Challoner's name had been her sunshade 
 in the heats of slander, and her waterproof in the storms of 
 censure. 
 
 Mr. Challoner's business, in which he had risen from a clerk 
 to a managing partnei', lying in Damascus and Aleppo, she had 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 49 
 
 liad the far East and the vague sand-plains of distant countries 
 for her theatre ; and, in sjiito of steam and of electricity — those 
 fatal levellers of illusion — the "far Orient" still remains to the 
 Eiu'opeau mind a shadowy and gorgeous panorama of mystery. 
 
 Perhaps through that golden haze of distance the European 
 mind saw the adventures of the Lady Joan, as in a mirage, multi- 
 plied ; at any rate, home-coming travellers told many tales, and 
 averred that "Archie's daughter" was "going it over there." 
 She had Asiatic ministers for her henchmen, and Turkish pashas 
 for her obedient slaves ; big bankers were as bal)ies in her hands, 
 and imperial steamers were at her beck and call ; when a good- 
 looking wayfarer chanced to have time for such pastimes, she 
 would have her Arab steeds saddled and scamjier away with him 
 over the Syrian Desert ; and a young titled Giaour on his pil- 
 grimage found no resting-place more agreeable than her flat 
 house-top in Damascus, with champagne in the ice-pails and 
 Mr. Challoner in his counting-house. 
 
 If anybody thought it odd that she should camp out on the 
 sand plains with strangers, such people were old fogies in the 
 Lady Joan's eyes; these men were all her brothers — a kind 
 providence sent them to prevent her yawning her head off with 
 the intolerable boredom of Mr. Challoner's company — and she 
 would jump on her mare, and cut her across the ears, and scamper 
 off with silver-mounted pistols in her sash, and a cigar in her 
 mouth, knowing very well that Mrs. Grundy cannot do you much 
 harm when you ride under the shadow of Mount Lebanon. And 
 even had Mrs. Grundy loomed there in the stead of Mount Leba- 
 non, she could liave said nothing, because Mr. Challoner himself 
 never said anything. 
 
 He busied himself with his exports of jewellery and prayer- 
 carpets, of spice and specie, of rubies and rice, and his business 
 generally, and his fellow merchants, and his own reflections ; and 
 moved about Damascus, and other cities of the East, a very 
 big man amongst the Jews and Gentiles, the Turks and the 
 Persians, because of the Perth-Douglas connection away in the 
 North, and the privilege it bestowed on him to ask any travelling 
 Englishman of rank to dinner and speak of " my wife's co^^sins," 
 the Countess of Hebrides, or the Duchess of Lochwitldan. 
 
 When, some six years later, having ruined a very fine business 
 by too fine speculations, he found it expedient to leave the bazaars 
 and retreat on his wife's settlements, she brought with her from 
 the red Eastern skies a duskier hue on her handsome face, a great 
 skill at rolling cigarettes, much good Turkish tolacco, and some 
 good Oriental jewellery, some trash and some treasure out of the 
 bazaars, a great many souvenirs — some tender, some fierce — and 
 a decided experience that she might play " poker " with all the 
 Ten Commandments, so long as she wrapped herself in the proof 
 armoiir of ]Mr. Challoner's ajDproval and acquiescence. 
 
 E 
 
50 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 She had learnt by laeart the Arab proverb, that " she who 
 has her husband with her may turn the ' moon around her 
 finger." 
 
 So useful was her husband, indeed, that at weak moments she 
 was almost grateful to him, and absolutely called him Eobert, a 
 condescension very rare with her, as she never let him or any- 
 body forget that she had a right to write herself " born Perth- 
 Uouglas." 
 
 But the Black Sea once crossed again, the Lady Joan saw 
 Mrs. Grundy, the British Bona Dea, looming large on her horizon, 
 as the Colossus once did upon the sea from Ehodcs. 
 
 The Lady Joan was shrewd enough to know that the British 
 Bona Dea will not believe that all men are your brothers. The 
 Lady Joan pulled her mainsail in, and tacked her course so as to 
 pass safely under the Colossus. 
 
 It had not been worth while out there, but here it was so. 
 And, after all, it was better to keep decently well with that little 
 house in Mayfair, and all the family ties and honours. The little 
 house had borne a great deal indeed, as little houses when they 
 are the abode of a Great House often do; great houses never 
 washing their dirty linen in the street. But Lady Joan knew that 
 there were some things that would be too strong even for the 
 little house in Mayfair, and that it would never do not to dine 
 there when she went over " on business " to London, though she 
 had to scream till she was hoarse into her grandmother's ear- 
 trumpet, and derived no pleasure from hearing the Head of the 
 Opposition read his " Notes on the CEcumenical Council " or his 
 conception of an obscure passage of Tertullian. 
 
 So, for sake of the little house in Mayfair, and of a great many 
 big houses all over Europe that she desired to enter, the Lady 
 Joan, leaving the Bagdad bazaars and the Great Desert, left her 
 imprudence behind her, and consigned everything of a dangerous 
 sort to oblivion, except the Sultan's inspiration of her letters to 
 the Pland newspaper, and the pearls with which the Emir ot 
 Yarkund had presented her for saving his life from poison. 
 
 For, on touching a European strand, the hand of Mrs. Grundy 
 clasped her, and the shadow of Mrs. Grundy fell on her as in 
 eclipse falls the shade of the stolid earth upon the giddy moon. 
 
 In the East, Lady Joan had been very young, very reckless, 
 with her spirits far outbalancing her prudence, and her savage- 
 ness at her exile and social extinction avenging itself by all those 
 wild night-rides with the good-looking travellers, and all those 
 campings out under the desert stars, with nobody to play pro- 
 priety except the Arab boys and the tethered ponies. 
 
 The Lady Joan in her childhood, even in the year or two 
 between her presentation at Court and her social extinction 
 under the Challoner settlements, had seen the really great world. 
 All that was best in societv liad habitually i;-athercd round liov 
 
FRIENDSniP. 5L 
 
 beautiful mother. She knew wliat mighty people and witty 
 people, and people of fasliion and people of genius were. For 
 the Anglo-Persian world of shabby adventurers, of hungry com- 
 mercial folks, of intriguing speculators, of oily Jews, of lean 
 Gentiles, and of trade- fattened nobodies her contempt had been 
 naturally boundless. She had done as she liked, and scoffed at 
 the whole lot, and only smiled on them when she wanted a steamer 
 or any such little trifle of them. She was a Perth-Douglas ; and 
 if she chose to dance the Carmagnole in all their counting-houses, 
 the mercantile mud of Asia Minor could only be honoured : so 
 she danced it. 
 
 But when the chill colossal shadow of Mrs. Grundy fell across 
 her path Lady Joan saw that she must mend her ways. It "was. 
 not steamers that she would want now, but suffrages. 
 
 Of course she despised Mrs. Grundy as much as she had 
 despised the mercantile mud ; Mrs. Grundy was an old cat, and 
 represented old cats collectively. Still it was necessary to con- 
 ciliate her, and even in the country of the cicisbei it would be 
 best to be on good terms with Society. 
 
 Of course Society should never really interfere with her 
 liberty ; of course Society should never prevent her regarding all 
 men as her brothers ; of course Society should never alter her 
 dancing the Carmagnole over the convenances, as she had done 
 over the counting-houses whenever she liked ; nevertheless, she 
 said to herself she would reconcile herself with Society. 
 
 There were many things to be got by it, and Society after all 
 asks very little. Society only asks you to wash the outside of 
 your cup and platter : inside you may keep any kind of nasti- 
 ness that you like; only wash the outside ; do wash the outside, 
 says Society ; and it would be a churl or an ass indeed who 
 would refuse so small a request. 
 
 Lady Joan set to work and washed her cup and platter with 
 such a clatter and so many soap-suds, and summoned so many 
 good people to look on at her doing it, that no one could possibly 
 ask her what she drank and_ate out of it, nor who sipped from it 
 with her. 
 
 Mr. Challoner himself set both cup and platter upon a shelf 
 in the sight of Society. Society could want no more. 
 
 As lawless free-lances in days of old entered monkish cells 
 and buried Dick the Devil or Dent du Sanglicr for ever under 
 Brother Philarete or Father Joseph, so the Lady Joan, entering 
 society, immured her Eastern escapades under the seal of an 
 entire self-oblivion. Nothing was ever to be remembered by 
 anybody that she wished to be forgotten. This was settled. It 
 is a demand that women are very fond of making on the good- 
 nature or the good taste of mankind. And if occasionally she 
 met an old friend uncivil enough or unkind enough, without 
 knowing that he did wrong, to " hint past history " and distui'b 
 
52 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 the present, slie would, with all the heartiest air of candour and 
 of wonder in the world, 
 
 " Stare upon the strange man's face 
 As one she ne'er had known," 
 
 and continue so to stare in despite of all recollections that he 
 might invoke. 
 
 It was still a marriage for which none could see any raison 
 d'etre. But when you go to the East and stay there in a kind of 
 golden mist it is easy to leave explanations behind you when 
 you return. All that trading of the Levant in various goods, 
 from bales of hay to squares of prayer-carpet, to which Mr. 
 Challoner owed his being, had come to an untimely ending, as was 
 well enough known, from Bagdad to Brindisi, by all merchants 
 and bankers. And Mr. Clialloner had only saved a few thou- 
 sands out of the crash, and was, in real truth, an unfortunate 
 gentleman with a hankering turn for speculation. 
 
 But the Lady Joan was not troubled by such little facts as 
 these ; the magnificence of her imagination raised her far above 
 all prosaic realities ; what a few old fogies in bank parlours or 
 on public exchanges might say or know was nothing to her ; 
 according to her Mr. Challoner had been Croesus ; the rice and 
 the carpets were merged vaguely into what she called "our 
 bank ; " Solomon's Temple had not been more gorgeous than the 
 fortunes to which her family had sacrificed her. 
 
 There had been failures; yes, certainly there had been 
 failures ; but then even Croesus could not escape Cyrus. 
 
 As for what those old fools of consuls and merchants said, 
 that was all rubbish ; and she would close with an apotheosis of 
 herself as a sort of Semiramis of Finance, in which the angels 
 who upheld her in the empyrean were "dear old Pam," and 
 " dear old Thiers," and " dear old Elgin," and anybody else of 
 magnitude appropriate whom she had ever had a nod from in 
 her babyhood in her grandmother's little house in Mayfair. 
 
 There was, indeed, scarce a great man in France, England, or 
 Germany whom she did not claim as her " dearest old " A, B, or 
 C ; if a critic or a chancellor, a savant or a general, a geographer 
 or a Prime Minister had ever walked thirty years before into her 
 mother's drawing-room when she was playing on the hearthrug 
 with her alphabet, the critic or chancellor, the savant or general, 
 the geographer or Prime Minister was now for over in the mouth 
 of the Lady Joan as her one dearest old friend, that was more 
 devoted to her than any other living creature on the face of the 
 earth. 
 
 Perhaps she had recalled herself once to their bewildered 
 memories in some crowded reception ; perhaps she had bowed 
 to them twice in the Prater, the Bois, or the Mall ; perhaps she 
 never had seen them at all since the days of her alphabet ; all 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 53 
 
 this mattered nothing; the critic or chancellor, savant, general, 
 geographer, or Prime Minister never were by when she dilated 
 upon them with such glowing affection; and, even if they had 
 been, would have been too polite to contradict her. Gentle- 
 men do not contradict women, nor yet show them up ; a 
 chivalrous weakness of mankind, of which the weaker sex always 
 takes the very sternest advantage. 
 
 Occasionally those disagreeable and sceptical people who are 
 to be found spoiling all society would hint that, with such dis- 
 tinguished friendships and such illimitable political and literary 
 connections, it was a little wonderful that the Lady Joan should 
 have married a Mr. Challoner and take an interest in teacups 
 and triptychs. But such people were in the minority. For the 
 most part, her use of her dearest old A, B, and C, at moments 
 when A was organising a great war, or B busied in discrowning 
 kings, or C sending forth on the world a great book mighty as 
 Thor's hammer, was of infinite gain to her ; and her allies 
 would go hither and thither, important and confidential, and 
 whisper, " She knew the declaration of war five days before any- 
 body ; " or " He wrote to her the very night he dictated his 
 abdication ; " or ' She had an early copy even before it went to 
 the Bevue des Deux-Moudes ;" and these fictions flew about lively 
 as gnats and productive as bees, and secured many cards to her 
 big Delft card-plate, because, though nobody believed all of it, 
 everybody said some of it must be true — yes, a great deal of it 
 must be true — because people never will admit or even think that 
 they are the mere dupes of a brilliant audacity. 
 
 To the world in general A, B, and C were names of magni- 
 tude and weight, of awe or of adoration, as the case might be ; 
 but to her they were only " dear old creatures." Had they not 
 stumbled over her alphabet thirty years before upon her 
 mother's hearthrug ? 
 
 It was an alliance for a lifetime. 
 
 According to the Lady Joan she was a Nausicaa, airily 
 frolicking on the edge of the vast ocean of European complica- 
 tions ; and Odysseus had gone through all his woes and warfare, 
 and only lay in wait under the waves, just to be ready to catch 
 her ball for her — only just for that. 
 
 Odysseus never even saw her, never even thought of her, as 
 he waded in his deep dark seas ; but all that did not matter to 
 her. 
 
 Nor to her associates. 
 
 " Such a woman ! ah, such a woman ! " would murmur plump 
 Mimo Burletta. " Palmerstone relied on her for all his secret 
 information of Oriental things ; Palmerstone told her when she 
 was eighteen that if she were bixt a man she would die Prime 
 Minister of the Crown ; Palmerstone was not one to call a lemon- 
 pip a lemon — ah, no, no, no ! — Palmerstone knew ! " And Bur- 
 
54 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 letta would walk about and spread out his fat hands in honest 
 adoration of her mighty powers and of himself for being the 
 confidant of so great a creature ; and in his mind's eye, when it 
 was not concentred on teacuj^s and triptychs, always beheld 
 the Lady Joan seated as on a throne within the sacred recesses 
 of the Privy Council chamber of the Universe, for he knew as 
 much about such things as a French grocer in the provinces 
 knows of the Lord Maire de Londres, and the Lady Joan's 
 magnificent confidences had dazzled him too much to much 
 enlighten him. 
 
 Exaggeration aside, she had very great connections and 
 relationships, and never forgot or let anybody else forget that 
 she had them. When a cousin of high degree came near she 
 proclaimed the fact as loudly and loyally as heralds in days of 
 old shouted the titles and tidings of a new king, and these 
 mighty personages did her unwittingly yeoman's service. 
 
 They were her cork buoys on the yeasty seas of European 
 society. Big people liked her because sTie took such infinite 
 trouble to please them, and little people liked her because she 
 could bring them in contact with the big people. 
 
 Both big and little people always apologised to one another 
 for knowing her ; every one excused their own esi:)ecial counten- 
 ance on some especial plea in their own especial society. But as 
 she never knew this it did not affect her comfort ; indeed, Lady 
 Joan was of that happy disposition which coiild ignore all enmity 
 and accei^t all slights unmoved ; and if she knew some one had 
 been abusing her would meet the offender with such a smile, 
 and such an emphatic cordiality, that she was the best Christian 
 that ever, being buffeted on one cheek, turned graciously the 
 other. 
 
 It was thoroughly sound policy. 
 
 Proud women, and sensitive women, take hints and resent 
 rebuffs, and so exile themselves from the world prematurely and 
 haughtily. They abdicate, the moment they see that any desire 
 their discrowning. But Lady Joan was not troubled with this 
 Ivind of delicacy. Abdication is grand, no doubt. But jiosses- 
 sion is more profitable. " A well-bred dog does not wait to be 
 kicked out," says the old see-saw. But the well-bred dog thereby 
 turns himself into the cold and leaves the crumbs from under 
 the table to some other dog with less good-breeding and more 
 worldly wisdom. The sensible thing to do is to stay wherever 
 you like best to be ; stay there with tooth and claw ready and a 
 stout hide on which cudgels break. People, after all, soon get 
 tired of kicking a dog that never will go. 
 
 High-breeding was admirable in days when the world itself 
 was high-bred. But those days are over. The world takes 
 high-breeding now as only a form of insolence. 
 
 Lady Joan saw this, and never troubled the world with it. 
 
FBJENDSIIIP. 55 
 
 " The old eat slangs me like a pickpocket," she •vronkl say ot 
 Bome dowager-conntess who did not return her card. But whcu 
 she met the dowager-countess she would say, " Ah, dearest Lady 
 Blank! Where are you staying? I am s> sorry I have seen m 
 little of you. You'll come and dine with us? What night, 
 now ? Do fix a night — pray do." 
 
 And nine times out of ten the Lady Blanks would relent and 
 leave a card, and even go and eat a dinner at the Casa Challoncr. 
 For the Casa Challoner dinners were good, and the Casa Cha!- 
 loner understood the axiom that it is not what comes out of your 
 own mouth, but what you put into other people's, that makes 
 your friends or enemies. Besides, " you can't cut a woman who 
 won't know when she's cut," said a Lady Blank once : — Lady 
 Joan had this most useful ignorance. 
 
 So on the whole she managed to enjoy life in Europe as in 
 the East. There were always times when she could " throw her 
 cap over the mill," and dance the Carmagnole, if there were also 
 many seasons that she had to put on her meeting-house clothes 
 and curtsy to Mrs. Gruudj'. 
 
 And besides, be the season what it would, there was always 
 — Fiordelisa. 
 
 CHAPTEK VIII. 
 
 On the morrow the Prince loris, faithful to his word, went as 
 noon chimed from all the bells of Eome to the Hotel de Eussie 
 and inquired for the Comtesse d'Avesnes. But he learned that 
 she had already gone out, alone ; had been out since sunrise. 
 He left his card and turned his steps along the Corso to the Casa 
 Challoner. He was a good deal disai^pointed and a little irri- 
 tated — more irritated than was reasonable. 
 
 " How late you are, lo ! I told you ten o'clock," said the 
 Lady Joan, in high wrath. 
 
 She was ready-dressed for the streets, with her hat set well 
 over her black brows, and her person muffled in sealskin. Her 
 friend noticed for the first time that her skirts were too short, 
 and her boots were ill-made, and her eyes were green in the 
 sunlight. 
 
 He pressed both her hands in his own and dropped on one 
 knee before her sofa. 
 
 " You must forgive me. My head ached, and I had many 
 letters to see to and answer."' 
 
56 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " I thotiglit you were gone to Etoile. You talked of it," said 
 the Lady Joan, -nith an angry suspicion flashing in her eyes. 
 
 " Etoile ! Cara mia, what living woman could keep me away 
 one second from here ? " 
 
 Kneeling still on the tigerskin before her, his lips caressed 
 her with more softness than the words. 
 
 " Don't be a goose, lo ; we're past all that — at least so early 
 in the morning," said the Lady Joan. But she smiled as she 
 pushed him away, and was well pleased that he should be what 
 she called a goose. Had he not been thus a goose, darkest 
 wrath would have gathered on her stormy brows. 
 
 " Let's get off, though," she said, disengaging herself, but 
 sweeping his hair off his forehead with a rough caress as she 
 rose, " We're so late as it is, and I am awfully afraid that the 
 dealer from Paris will have got those little pictures of Cecchino's 
 — the boy's beginning to know his value and ask a price." 
 
 loris loaded himself with her vrraps, her umbrella, and her 
 little dog, and followed her down the stairs to the ^ac?-e. 
 
 When she did not take his ponies out she drove in _a hack 
 carriage. Not to keep a carriage was an economy on which she 
 prided herself. 
 
 " A carriage is only ostentation — snobs want one : I don't," 
 she would say in her blunt, pleasant manner. " I always tell 
 Mr. Challoner I Uke my own legs ; and when they're tired there's 
 always a cab ; cabs are so cheap." 
 
 And so, indeed, they were, since loris always paid for them. 
 
 The hired carriage started off, Mr. Challoner regarding its 
 departure placidly from a window, for his friendship and his 
 faith were both strong, and the wheels rattled noisily up and 
 down the hilly streets of Eome. 
 
 "What did you think of Etoile?" she asked loris as they 
 drove. Etoile was very much in her own thoughts. 
 
 " She does not please me particularly," he answered carelessly 
 as he lighted a cigar. 
 
 " Do you think her attractive ? " 
 
 " No, not at all." 
 
 " We must see a good deal of her. Voightel recommends her 
 to me so strongly." 
 
 Her friend shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " Why do you do that ? Will she bore you ? " 
 
 " I think her manner insolent. She seems to see no one. 
 She is nonchalante : she is indifferent. I should think her 
 cold." 
 
 " She must warm for you, lo ! " said Lady Joan, with a gleam 
 of anxiety and irony in her eyes. 
 
 " Oh ! Dieu m'en garde ! " 
 
 It was said with so genuine an emphasis, and so careless and 
 gay a laugh, that Lady Joan was quite satisfied as she ascended 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 57 
 
 and descended scores of dark, foul-smelling stairways, her friend 
 behind her, into the garrets of the young painters. The Chal- 
 loners were well-known patrons of young painters, and especially 
 given to such patronage when those studious lads had a talent 
 for ruaking new canvases look like old. 
 
 The Lady Joan adored art : she told everybody so. She 
 passed half her present life striding in and out of ateliers, and 
 petting painters, and buying canvases ; the cheaper she bought 
 them the better was she pleased, for of course the Challoner 
 purse could not aiford a large purchase except now and then on 
 speculation. 
 
 The old masters, fortunately for the Challoner purse, were 
 so bounteously thoiightful of those who would come after them 
 (and sell them) that they all had their schools. Now, ' Scuola 
 di Perugino," " Scuola di Tiziano," sounds almost as imposing as 
 Perugino and Tiziano alone ; and, what is still more advan- 
 tageous, these schools have been prolonged into the present day, 
 and have many disciples hard at work still in the various styles, 
 on impasto and chiaroscuro with varnish and smoke, in many 
 attics and cellars of Florence, Naples, and Eome. To these 
 young disciples the Lady Joan was a goddess; and if they 
 grumbled now and then at her prices, that was but youth's idle 
 ingratitude, Minerva was not worse than a dealer; whilst away 
 in Great Britain acres on acres of new plaster walls bloomed with 
 fair Madonnas and glowed with fierce martyrdoms ; and Shoddy, 
 that had built the walls, was satisfied and triumphant. So much 
 joy can one clever woman diffuse. 
 
 The young painters did, indeed, say savage things of these 
 kind patrons of theirs in moments of confidence, when together 
 over maccaroni and wines in an osteria outside the gates. But 
 this was only the ingratitude of the artistic nature, which, it is 
 well known, always does turn against its best benefactors. And 
 when one was born a Perth-Douglas, and has been obliged to 
 marry a Mr. Challoner, and has never had as much money as 
 one wanted for anything, it w^ould be hard indeed if one might 
 not enjoy such innocent compensations as may lie for one in the 
 fine arts. 
 
 Most peojDle (except artists) carried off the impression tha^ 
 Lady Joan knew a good deal about art. She had a bright, firm^ 
 imposing way of declaring her opinions infallible that went far 
 towards making others believe them so. She knew that in this 
 Age of Advertisement modesty is your ruin ; what one has does 
 not matter much, it is by what one seems to have that one rises 
 or falls nowadays. 
 
 Connoisseurs and scholars found Lady Joan appallingly 
 ignorant, and looked at each other helplessly when she swore a 
 Byzantine crucifix w-as a Cellini, or a bit of Berlin pdfe dure was 
 Capo di Monte ; when she assigned rococo jewellery to Agues 
 
58 . FEIENDSEIP. 
 
 Sorel, and a panel of the Bologna Decadence to Andre 
 Mantcgna. 
 
 Btit then those connoisseurs and scholars arc not all tlie 
 world, and Lady Joan addressed herself to that mr.ch larger 
 body — the great majority of the uneducated. Indeed, pcrha^ps 
 nobody can comprehend how utterly uneducated it is possible 
 to be, who has not lived entirely with the educated classes. 
 
 Before the mass of idle people, moneyed people, ladies of 
 fashion, and princes of shoddy, she found an ar.dicnce credulou^s 
 of her assertions and uncritical of her pretensions, and very 
 easily dazzled and bewildered with a little talk about schools 
 and tones; about early painters-whom they did not like to avow 
 they had never heard of ; about Frankenthal, which they vaguely 
 mixed up with Frankenstein; about Marc Antonios, which they 
 confused with Marc Antony ; about Nankin, which they thought 
 was a stuff, and found was a china ; of Eose Dubarry, which they 
 fancied somehow was something immoral ; of Certosina, which 
 they had an idea must mean something monastic ; and of Bra- 
 mante, which rhymed with Eozinante, and must be Spanish, they 
 felt sure. 
 
 To rely on the general ignorance of mankind is usually safe, 
 and Lady Joan did so rely not in vain. She was often found out 
 in her blunders, indeed, and often laughed at ; but then, as she 
 was a gentlewoman, and not a tradesman, nobody ever told her, 
 and people only laughed behind her back. That she could by 
 any possibility ever be laughed at, never entered her own 
 imagination. 
 
 This morning she raced up and down innumerable stairs, 
 and in and out innumerable workshops of painters and sculptors 
 and wood carvers, her hat well puiled down over her broad 
 black brows, and her friend labouring under her wraps behind 
 her. She cheapened everything she saw; made a million mis- 
 takes, which her friend softly corrected sotto voce ; sat down 
 astride before the easels, smoked the artists' cigars; dil'tused 
 generally a sense of her own enormous influence with the English 
 press and the English purchasers ; bought a good deal of cauva5> 
 and terra-cotta at dealers' prices ; wearied her compauioa anc 
 bullied him, slapped students on the shoulders and rallied them 
 with boisterous good fellowship; enjoyed herself exceedingly,- 
 and then, as the clock struck one in a neighbouring chuich- 
 tower, "pulled herself together," and recollected her. social 
 duties. 
 
 " Come to luncheon, lo," she said, after the last studio, fling- 
 ing away her last cigar-end. " Yes, you'd better come. It's the 
 Bishop of Melita and roast mutton. Oh yes, a horrid bore ; but 
 you'd better come. If the Bishop lunch with you, it'll shut 'em 
 up for a twelvemonth." 
 
 Who were to be "shut up" she did not explain, but her 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 59 
 
 companion understood that the indefinite expression alluded to 
 Mrs. Grundy and her myriad mouths. 
 
 " Qui est Madame Oriindee, ma cliere ? " the Prince loris had 
 asked in surjirise on first hearing of tliis mighty dame ; but he 
 never asked now : he had learned that Madame Griindee was the 
 Bona Dea of the Lady Joan. 
 
 " My dear lo ! you don't know Mrs. Grundy ! " Lady Joan 
 would retort, when he wondered to see the cigars banished, the 
 laugh hushed, the propriety donned, the domestic scene set, 
 and Mr. Challoner taken about in the stead of himself, when the 
 mighty Northerners came down with all pomp into Eome. She 
 herself did know Mrs. Grl^ndy ; had felt that lady's buffets, and 
 knew the power of that lady's smile. She was aware that Mrs. 
 Grundy represented money, dinners, court balls, embassy 
 receptions, and all the rest of the advantages of society, and in 
 her heart of hearts, though she would boast otherwise, was 
 afraid of Mrs. Grundy — sorely afraid sometimes. 
 
 There is no such coward as the woman who toadies society 
 because she has outraged society. The bully is never brave. 
 
 " Oignez vilain il vous poindra : poignez vilain il vous 
 oindra," is as true of the braggart's soul still, as it used to be in 
 the old days of Froissart, when the proverb was coined. 
 
 Lady Joan was a bully by nature, and gave way to her 
 nature without scruple "or jiity ; but she knew that society was 
 a bigger bully than herself, and did homage to it in the dust 
 accordingly. 
 
 On this occasion Prince loris shuddered at the idea of cooked 
 sheep as even one of his own peasants would have done ; and an 
 English bishop was to him a nondescript animal of appalling and 
 inexplicable anaton;y ; but he was well used to surrendering 
 his own will, and accompanied his hostess submissively to her 
 house, where he brushed the dust off himself and washed his 
 hands in Mr. Challoner's own sanctum in that amicable com- 
 munity of goods which characterised his and that gentleman's 
 friendshij). 
 
 The Lady Joan carefully deodorised herself of all traces of 
 cigar-smoke, brushed back her hair, and, sitting down for ten 
 minutes by her dressing-room fire, glanced hurriedly through an 
 article in the Contemporary Revitw on the d .spute between 
 "N^alentinian and Damasus in the days of the Early Church ; 
 then, telling loris to come in five minutes after her, as if he ca!i:c 
 through the hall-door, went herself ready primed in all the pro- 
 prieties to receive the Anglican Bishop of Melita and his wife to 
 the roast loin of thoroughly domestic mutton. 
 
 The Anglican BishojD of Melita was a spare, solemn, scholarly 
 person, who had been head of a House in Cambridge in his 
 time. His wife was a no less solemn but much stouter person- 
 age, who) had been the daughter of a dean, and was the niece. 
 
60 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 sister, and sister-in-law of quite countless canons, rectors, and 
 pastors of all kinds. They had been presented to the Chal- 
 loners two days before ; and Mr. Challoner, who could bring up 
 heavy artillery when required not unsuccessfully, had immedi- 
 ately engaged them for luncheon at once and a dinner at eight 
 days' notice. 
 
 Mr. Challoner's own recollections of the island of Melita were 
 not agreeable ones ; but for that very reason he desired that all 
 the world should behold how intimate he was with the Bishop 
 of that valuable English possession. It was, indeed, by atten- 
 tion to such trifles as these that Mr. Challoner had succeeded in 
 burying from the eyes of his wife's world all the uncomfortable 
 little secrets that Melita had known of him and his. In this 
 matter he and the Lady Joan were almost of accord. Whatever 
 else they disagreed about (and they did disagree about nearly 
 everything), they always agreed that it was absolutely necessary 
 to muzzle Madame Griindee. Madame Griindee is the one deity 
 that English Society recognises— indeed, the only one that makes 
 it go to church at all. 
 
 Lady Joan, a bold woman, grinned and grimaced at the 
 goddess in the jDrivacy of her life ; but, being a wise woman, she 
 did decorous worship to the goddess in the sight of others. She 
 snapped her fingers at her Bona Dca behind her back ; but she 
 took care to bow with the rest in front of the altars. 
 
 This is the true wisdom of a woman. A poet's brain leaks 
 through dreams, and is too big to hold such knowledge; but 
 brains like the Lady Joan's are long andclose and narrow, and 
 shrewdly contain it. 
 
 Lady Joan thought that only a fool never hedged. 
 
 She liked her pleasures, certainly, but she liked still better a 
 good balance of many figures at Torlonia's. Illness might come, 
 disfigurement might come, accident might come ; age certainly 
 would come. In those events lovers grow scarce, but the cosy 
 swansdowns and sables of society and a safe income will console 
 for their absence. We weaker mortals may find an infinite sad- 
 ness in the picture of Sophie Arnould, once the Goddess of Love 
 of all Paris, sweeping in her trembling old age the snow away 
 from her miserable door ; Sophie Arnould, once the lovely, the 
 incomparable, the twin sister of the Graces, muttering, with the 
 wind whistling round her witliered limbs, of the dead days when 
 all the Beau Siecle raved of the beauty of those feet and ankles ; 
 but the Lady Joan would only have laughed and said, " Old ass ! 
 she should have laid by her golden eggs while she got 'em." 
 Lady Joan felt thit she herself would never derive any consola- 
 tion for being the subject of other people's tears; she meant to 
 live and die comfortably, and never sweep the streets for other 
 people : so she hedged. 
 
 Luckily for herself Lady Joan had as many manners as there 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 61 
 
 are changes in a child's box of metamorphoses. Now and then, 
 indeed, she overdid her part. Now and then she danced the 
 Carmagnole, as one may saj', by mistake, in lier meeting-house 
 clothes, or grinned when she should have pulled a long face. But 
 on the whole she trimmed her candle cleverly, whether it had to 
 be burned before the altar of the British Bona Dea, or whether 
 it might flare as it liked amongst the dancing tapers of joyous 
 Giovedi Grasso. 
 
 On such occasions as this luncheon, the Casa Challoner was a 
 temple of family felicity; it had Bass's beer and household 
 harmony ; it had the Times on the table, and said " my love " 
 every five minutes ; it had plain English cooking and simple 
 English affections ; it talked politics from English points of view, 
 and sighed tliat its general health compelled it to be out of dear 
 old England so much. 
 
 Indeed, if only Mr. Challoner could have managed to look a 
 little less wooden, and Lady Joan would not now and then have 
 put her tongue in her cheek and grinned with an " aside " to her 
 friend, the whole thing would have been perfect ; even as it was 
 it was masterly, especially when Mr. Challoner explained, under 
 his breath : " a great friend of ours— poor fellow, his affairs were 
 very involved— estate going to rack and ruin. I think we have 
 helped him— yes, I may say we have helped him ; " and when 
 the Lady Joan, at the top of her table, sighed as she spoke of 
 her beloved and lamented mother, talked a great deal— "so 
 openly; oh, so openly!" as her guests said afterwards, "there 
 could be nothing in it ! "—of Fiordelisa and of its owner, whcf 
 was hke a brother to her and her husband, and made effective 
 tableaux of maternal devotion with her little daughter, Effie, 
 who was twelve years old and very timid and shy, but who con- 
 tributed not a little to the effect of the entertainment, especially 
 when, with Lady Joan's arm round her, the little girl called the 
 Prince loris — " lo." 
 
 " An excellent creature, let them say what they like," thought 
 the Bishop's wife, whose cole faille was motherly excellence. 
 
 "A very charming woman," thought the Bishop, while the 
 Lady Joan listened, with her eyes brightly shining in most eager 
 interest, to his account of his new system for the religious super- 
 vision of ships' crews, and displayed her thorough comprehension 
 of his recent article in the Contemporary Bevier. 
 
 Luncheon over, she carried off the Bishop and his wife and 
 Mr. Challoner in a landau from a livery stable, and drove them 
 about on to the Pincio, and up and down the Corso, in the sight 
 of the city, which was in itself sufficient to silence slanderous 
 tongues for a twelvemonth ; and, bowing to her friends in the 
 streets, with the shovel-hat in the front seat before her, felt she 
 could go to as many masked balls as ever she liked with 
 impunity. 
 
62 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Then slie went to tea with the Bishop and his wife, at their 
 rooms in the Piazza cU Spagna, and met many English digni- 
 taries and dowagers, and many demure spinsters, to whom she 
 talked of all her great Scotch cousins, and told them the dear 
 Hebrides had taken Villa Adriana, outside Porta Pia, and offered 
 her assistance in a lottery for the building of another Protestant 
 church within the gates, for which they were petitioning the 
 Government. After that, having bored herself to death with 
 estimable energy and endurance (for the root of her success lay 
 in never showing that she was wearied), she justly thought she 
 had earned her rest and recreation, and told her husband to go 
 home without her, which he did obediently, and she lay back in 
 her landau on the cushions so lately ecclesiastically sanctified, 
 and laughed till she cried, and lighted a dozen cigarettes, and 
 called for loris at his own house, and had a gay little dinner 
 with him and three or four pets of hers, who accompanied her 
 afterwards to the Capranica Theatre, and saw one of the wittiest 
 and least decorous of the popular comedies, and amused herself 
 vastly, and went homeward singing snatches of airs in chorus, 
 and so upstairs into the Turkish room, where she sang more 
 songs, with the guitar on her knee, and drank black coffee, and 
 smoked, till the room was one dun-coloured cloud such as was 
 wont to hide from mortal eyes the tender hours of Jupiter. 
 
 Thus did she make her grave bow in the face of her Bona 
 Dea, and dance her mirthful capers behind her, in one and the 
 same day, and make the best of both worlds, and smoke her cigar 
 at both ends. 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 It was four by the clock when loris found himself tree to walk 
 home across the intense blackness and the brilliant whiteness of 
 Eoman shadows and Eoman moonlight. 
 
 He drew his sables about him with a low sigh of relief as the 
 porter closed the door behind him ; he looked up at the stars, 
 lighted a cigar, and paced homeward thoughtfully. 
 
 He was so used to it all that he had ceased to think about it, 
 but this night it had bored him : the songs heard five hundred 
 tiines, the furtive glances that told so old a story to him, the jests, 
 the inquiries, the insistant passion — it was all so tiresome, and 
 he was glad to get away from it and be by himself quiet in the 
 mild moonlit winter's night. 
 
 To loris, Nature had been kind, and Chance had been cruel. 
 
 He was tall and slender of form, with a delicate dark head, 
 and a look of thoughtful and reticent calm which would have 
 made the white monastic robes of a Dominican or the jewelled 
 costume of a Louis Quinze courtier suit him better than the 
 dress of the world that he wore. People looked at him far oftener 
 than they did at still handsomer men. 
 
 It was one of those faces which suggest the romance of fate, 
 and his eyes under their straight classic brows and their droop- 
 ing lids could gaze at women with a dreaming amorous meaning 
 that would po;ir trouble into the purest virgin soiil. 
 
 Women never saw him for the first time without thinking 
 of him when he had passed from sight. He had the charm of 
 arousing at a first glance that vague speciilative interest which 
 one felt so easily grows little by little into love. loris was a man 
 whom women always loved when he wished them to do so. 
 
 He was a Roman and a patrician : the purest blood and the 
 most ancient lineage were his ; they were all that remained to 
 him of the vanished greatness of a race which had been second 
 to none through a thousand centuries for valour, power, and all 
 noble repute: he had fought, he had travelled, he had studied ; 
 he had the taste of an artist and the manner of a courtier ; he 
 looked like a picture, and he moved like a king. He had an old 
 estate and an income slender in comparison with his rank, but 
 sufficient for his habits, which, .though elegant, still were simple. 
 He loved his country and his dependents, and was happy in the 
 life of an Italian noble, which is, perhaps, as lovely a life as there 
 is to be led in this world. Alas! in an evil hour of his destiny 
 the bold eyes of a new-comer, roving over the crowds of a Coiu't 
 
€4 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 ball, had fallen on him, and his last hour of peace had then 
 struck. 
 
 When the Lady Joan first arrived from the East, life seemed 
 to her grown very dull. It was before the season had begun ; the 
 air was heavy, the streets empty ; she missed the red burning 
 skies, she missed the fast desert scampers, she missed the noisy 
 bazaars, she missed the camping out ; she felt dull and depressed : 
 the men around had not yet become her brothers ; she was in 
 that mood which, when an Englishman is in it, makes men of 
 other nationalities say to him " that he wants something to kill." 
 Lady Joan wanted something to kill, and she found it. 
 
 At various balls when the season came on she noticed a man 
 who did not notice her. There was something in his slender 
 grace and his delicate face, in his unrevealiug eyes, in his cold 
 glance, which fascinated her. What fascinated her much more 
 was, that though when he bowed to other women his eyes were 
 amorously soft and his laughter light and gay, his gaze if it 
 chanced to light on her was chill and indifferent, and at all times 
 he avoided her. In vain did she drift near him constantly, cast 
 countless glances after him, waltz furiously past him, and flirt 
 with his best friends ; he took no notice of her, and seemed rather 
 repelled than attracted. One evening she who was not easily 
 baffled insisted that he should be presented to her. He tried to 
 avoid his fate, but it was written ; a friend, who cared more to 
 please the imperious and handsome stranger from the banks of 
 the Euphrates than to please him, entrapped him ; escape was 
 no longer possible without looking like a boor. He was brought, 
 bitterly against his will, to her side : he was called Ireneo, Prince 
 loris. 
 
 " She makes one think of a snake," he thought. Some fancies 
 of the Nile had entangled themselves with this new acquaintance 
 in his mind. She was everything that he disliked in woman ; 
 her voice seemed harsh to him, her gestures rough, her attitudes 
 masculine, her look unfeminine. She had none of the soft charms 
 of womanhood ; she danced ill, she dressed ill ; she was dis- 
 tasteful to him : she saw all that well enough, but she resolved 
 to avenge it. 
 
 She bade him call on her : he could do no less. When he 
 entered she seemed not to hear ; her head was resting on her 
 hands ; she turned surprised and embarrassed ; there were tears 
 in her eyes ; she sjDoke vaguely and hurriedly of quelques amer- 
 tumes; she hinted a vie incomprise ; she let fall a murmur of a 
 marutge mal assorti. 
 
 It startled him. 
 
 To be astonished is in a sense to bo interested. 
 
 This woman, who waltzed so madly, rode so recklessly, and 
 looked like a young black-browed hcsagliere, was not happy at 
 heart — had a brutal husband — sighed restlessly for a happiness 
 
FBIENDSniP. 65 
 
 slio had never known— concealed weariness and bitterness under 
 the mask of a defiant courage and gaiety ! 
 
 The strange contrast of it arrested his attention, and she 
 appeared to place confidence in him — a stranger who liad for 
 six months persistently avoided her— in a manner which per- 
 plexed as much as insensibly it flattered him. Men are always 
 inclined to be pitiful to the woes of a woman when they are not 
 woes which they themselves have caused. They will stone away 
 without mercy a woman whom they themselves have wounded, 
 but for the victim of another man they are quick to be moved to 
 tenderness and indignation. 
 
 The Lady Joan, knowing this, having in vain tried all other 
 sorceries, took her attitude as a victim. Whenever she found 
 any one w'hom she thought would believe it, she always became 
 the victim of Mr. Challoner and of the rapacity of her family, 
 which had sacrificed her to a Brute because he was a Crcosus. 
 To be sure the riches were all left behind in the sands of Abana 
 and Pharphar, and the brute was the most well-trained and 
 patiently-enduring of maris complaimnts ; but at this time the 
 Brute was absent in London, and her listener had never seen him, 
 and of Croesus he was not incredulous, because an Englishman 
 is always supposed to be one, and on the Continent is given an 
 unlimited credit on account of that supposition, of which lie 
 Beldom fails to avail himself. 
 
 When loris left her presence that day she had gained her 
 point with him so far that, although she still half-repelled, she 
 had begun to startle and interest,"liim, his thoughts were busy 
 with her — a woman need ask no more. As for herself, the Lady 
 Joan's pulses stirred as they had not done for many a day; the 
 dulness and apathy that she had felt passed off her like a vapour ; 
 she had wanted something to kill, and she scented prey. Besides 
 which she was already in love. 
 
 Her spirits rose at once ; she rang and ordered her horse. She 
 rode with great courage and skill; she flashed past loris like a 
 meteor out of the gates to the open country. As he bowed to 
 lier in the sunset he mused to himself : 
 
 " Why did she confide in me ? " 
 
 Eeason and vanity both could give him but one answer. 
 
 There was a woman at that time who loved him well, and 
 whom he had loved well also— a countrywoman of his own. As 
 he went to her, that night, he thought of those new strange 
 darkling brows ; as he sat with her, she — whose stars and sun 
 and heaven and earth he was— felt that his attention wandered 
 and that his mind was absent. 
 
 _ When a woman like the Lady Joan is in love, escape for him 
 with whom she is in love is not easy. 
 
 "She has the stride of a carabineer, the feet of a contadina, 
 
 F 
 
66 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 the teetli of a gipsy, the eyes of a tigress, the manners of a fish- 
 woman," he told himself : and thought so ; and yet, do what he 
 would, he could not forget the strange glitter of those eyes ; he 
 could not forget how he had seen this self-willed, daring, sun- 
 browned rider from the Syrian Desert melted to tears and wooing 
 his sympathy with hesitating words of confidence. 
 
 The very strangeness of the contrast heightened its enigma 
 for him. 
 
 Long rides in the rosy summer hours, with the wind blowing 
 over the flower-filled grasses; early mornings, when he carried 
 her knapsack for her in breezy pilgrimages to forest sanctuaries 
 or movintain heights ; lonely evenings, when the guitar was got 
 out and the people's ritornelli tried over to his teaching, with 
 gay laughter and amorous gaze to suit the words ; late nights, 
 when the Turkish tobacco was smoked, and the Eoman songs 
 sung, and the Persian sequins glittered in the lami^-light on her 
 dusky braids, and the shining fierce eyes glistened with fervid 
 invitation and flashed with eloquent meaning — one by one these 
 succeeded each other with feverish rapidity vmtil their work was 
 done, and he was whirled into a fancy as sensual as her own, if 
 not as durable, and lost himself in it for a brief while, and woke 
 to find the chains fast-locked about him and his place assigned 
 to him for good and aye in the triangle of the Casa Challoner. 
 
 Of course gradually he became aware that the Croesus was a 
 gentleman not too well off, and very fond of speculating in what- 
 ever chanced to come in his way, from railway companies to 
 Capo di Monte cups, and that the Brute was a jDerson who would 
 dine with him every evening and be shrouded amicably behind a 
 newspaper after dinner ; who would grumble and quarrel certainly 
 about the soup or the salt or the servants, but who would never 
 by any chance ask him if he had a preference for pistols or 
 swords. 
 
 Of course little by httle he became aware that a good many 
 fictions had been spread out for his attraction, and tliat if any 
 one were a victim in the household it certainly was not the Lady 
 Joan. Little by little he saw all this byplay and all the shifts 
 and straits with which the Casa Challoner was kept straight in 
 the world's eyes ; and he grew so iiscd to the inventiveness of 
 his mistress that when she did chance to speak the truth he 
 never believed her. But to all this knowledge he only came by 
 such slow degrees that he grow used to it as it stole upon him ; 
 and in her passion for him he could not choose but believe — it 
 was too jealous, too violent, too exacting, too terribly ever-present 
 with him, for him to have a chance of doubting its vitality and 
 reality. 
 
 There were times when his own exhausted passion roused 
 itself, with infinite effort and with a weariness that was almost 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 67 
 
 repugnance, to respond to the unending insistance and undying 
 tires of hers. 
 
 A woman who is ice to his fire, is less pain to a man than tho 
 woman who is fire to his ice. There is hope for him in tlic one, 
 but only a dreary despair in the other. The ardours that intoxicate 
 him in the first summer of his passion serve but to dull and chill 
 him in the later time. 
 
 loris, in certain passing moods, would think almost with a 
 shudder, " Heavens ! will she insist on these transports for everV" 
 
 This evening, walking homeward, he felt tired of the day, 
 tired of the evening. He had had so many like them. 
 
 He knew the songs by heart and the smiles too. The routine 
 of the hours, so carefully balanced between the decorum that 
 imposed on the little world she studied, and the amusement and 
 abandonment that were the real delights of her nature, seemed 
 to him wearisome and vapid. It was always the same thing. 
 She could take a genuine zest in the small Tartufferies of tho 
 tea-parliament; she could take a sincere delight in the jokes of 
 the Capranica and the jests at Spillman's. She had this supremo 
 advantage — she loved the life she led in both its extremes. But 
 he did not. 
 
 He had a contempt for the conventicle ; he was tired of the 
 theatre. He bore his share in both psalm and play because he 
 had grown into the habit of doing anything that she dictated to 
 him. But all the same he had too much good taste not to be 
 tired of both. 
 
 He walked through the dusky shadows and across the wide 
 white squares to his own little house on the bank of the river, 
 down by the Piazza del Gesii. He let himself in, took the lamj) 
 that was burning in the entrance, and went up the staircase to 
 his own favourite chamber. 
 
 The house was cumbered with busts and bronzes, and rolls 
 of old tapestries, and rococo bits of china and carving, and broken 
 fragments of sculpture. For it was in a manner the warehouse 
 of the Casa Challoner, which could itself not decorously be strewn 
 about with more things than would look natural. 
 
 He went up to his own room and threw his coat off and lighted 
 a cigar. It was a pretty room, looking on a garden that in 
 sju'ing was green with lemon and orange trees, and had an old 
 statue or two in it, and a wide-arched loggia hung with creeping 
 plants. 
 
 There was one portrait on the wall among landscapes and 
 weapons and etchings, relics of the time when he had been au 
 art-student at San Luc's and a duellist in grey old I'isa. 
 
 It was a portrait with an Egyptian profile, a classic head, a 
 cruel jaw, and a hard mouth ; he glanced up at it and turned 
 away with a sort of restless impatience at its presence there.' 
 
68 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Indeed, it had no place of riglit tliere — being, as it was, tlie 
 portrait of another man's wife. But it was not this scruiDle 
 which troubled or distracted him. It had hung there for seYeral 
 seasons. 
 
 What made him feel impatient of it now was, that for the 
 first time it occurred to him, with a chill, that throughout all 
 the days of his life he would never be able to escajje from the 
 staring watchfulness of those menacing eyes. 
 
 He was like one of those magicians of fable who, having 
 mastered spirits of good and evil for many a year in safety, at 
 last siimmons from the nether world a spirit that defies his sj^ells 
 to banish it again, and abides with him, to his misery, growing 
 stronger than himself. 
 
 This night he turned restlessly and uneasily from the 'gaze 
 of the portrait, moved his lamp so that the picture was left in 
 darkness, and took out from his bookshelves some old numbers 
 of a great European review. He searched through them until 
 he found certain poems signed " Etoile." 
 
 He sat reading until the lamp grew dim and the sparrows in 
 his garden below began to twitter at the ajiproach of dawn. 
 ■ " Can it be possible that this woman has never known what 
 love is ? " he said to himself as he shut the book and went to 
 his bed. 
 
 The morning had risen. 
 
 CHAPTEE X. 
 
 "1 WONDER what Voiglitel has told her?" thought the Lady 
 Joan to herself on the morrow. 
 
 She felt a little uneasy : just as she had used to feel under the 
 gaze of the great explorer's green spectacles on the housetoiD in 
 Damascus, when the champagne was in the ice-pails and Mr. 
 Challoner in his counting-house, and A'"oighters little cynical, 
 self-complaisant chuckle had sounded scarcely more welcome to 
 her than if it had been the hiss of a cobra. She was uncomfort- 
 ably conscious that Yoightel knew much more of her than was 
 agreeable to herself; besides, he was the bosom friend of that 
 brilliant politician who had been trustee to her marriage 
 settlements. • 
 
 ," I dare say she knows everything, and I'm sure she's good for 
 nothing," she reflected at noonday ; thereupon she dressed herself 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 69 
 
 in her best, took out of lier wardrobe •witli Iiev Astracan furs an 
 admirable manner — frank but not free, bhtnt but not bold, cordial 
 and good-natured and high-spirited — which she kept on hand 
 for people with whom it was not necessary to don the meeting- 
 house clothes, yet with whom it might be dangerous to dress 
 quite en debardeur ; and thus arrayed, with her pleasantest smile 
 shining honestly in her grey eyes, she drove herself across the 
 city to the old palace by the Colonna Gardens, in which the 
 Comtesse d'Avesnes had established herself on the previous day ; 
 and finding her at home, would take no denial from Etoile, but 
 insisted on the friend of her father and of dearest Voightel pass- 
 ing the rest of the day with her. It would be such a charity. 
 She was quite alone, she said : Mr. Challoner was gone to Orbctello, 
 and lo — poor lo — was obliged to bore himself all day at the Court 
 with some newly-arrived foreign potentate. 
 
 " Of course she must have led the very deuce of a life, but 
 nobody would ever think it to look at her," the Lady Joan re- 
 flected in perplexity as she surveyed her guest at her own 
 breakfast-table. She was quite honest in her conviction. Given 
 a woman with overy opportunity to — amuse — herself, why, of 
 course the woman had — amused — herself: every idiot knew 
 that. 
 
 She did not like her guest. She could not make her out ; she 
 was irritated by her own suspicions that Voightel had told her 
 disagreeable things ; and though she liked patronising artists she 
 did not care for artists of European celebrity when they were of 
 her own sex, and were as proud as Lucifer, as she said angrily 
 to herself, aud looked round her rooms with eyes that seemed to 
 her to detect at a glance the china that was mended, the canvases 
 that were restored, the antiquities that had been made yesterday, 
 and the certosiua that had been glued together last week. Never- 
 theless she made herself charming; got out some really good 
 things, which she was never without in case any real connoisseur 
 should happen to call ; and over the plump quails, and light 
 wines, of her breakfast-table was the very model of a clever, 
 good-humoured, candid, and hospitable hostess. 
 
 No one could play the part better than she when she liked ; 
 and Etoile, won by her cordial good humour and bright intel- 
 ligence, reflected that Voightel, when he was prejudiced could 
 be very unjust. Great men can be so, as well as little ones, 
 sometimes. 
 
 " Dear old Voightel ! " said the Lady Joan fervently. " I am 
 BO fond of him. People call him a cynic, but I'm sure his heart's 
 in the right place. He was like a father to me in Damascus." 
 
 She had hated Voightel ; as a woman who loves adventures, 
 yet wishes nobody to know that she has any, does hate a grim 
 old ironical onlooker, with keen eyes watching through his 
 
70 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 sj^ectacles and the raciest luimour in Christendom, on whom 
 all her prettiest fictions and sharpest devices fall harmless as 
 feathers on bronze. But she had always met Voightel with both 
 hands extended and the pleasautest of smiles. " Ah, mir zu liehe, 
 meiii Herri" she would always say to him with the frankest 
 delight when they crossed each other in any of the cities of 
 Europe; and Voightel would go and dine with her and enjoy 
 his dinner— as, indeed, there was no reason that he should not ; 
 for it does not matter if you think very ill things of a woman, so 
 long as she is good-looking and makes a fuss with you. 
 
 "She would pounce on me like a tiger-cat if she dared," 
 Voightel would think to himself as she smiled on him and gave 
 him mocha, Turkish fashion, and prepared with her own hands 
 for him his water-pipe ;— and it tickled his fancy so much that 
 he was always at his pleasantest with her; so that though she 
 knew that ho did not believe in her one bit, she was quite suro 
 that he liked her. 
 
 So runs the world away; and so, amongst all the spiders 
 cheating all the flies, a spider makes a meal for another spider 
 now and then. 
 
 Etoile, as she heard Voightel's praises, felt almost guilty for 
 the guilty and absent man who had called this ardent and 
 grateful friend of his the " Prose of Eome." 
 
 Before she could reply there entered the Count Mimo Burletta, 
 plump and busy, his mouth full of new scandals and his hands 
 full of new laces. 
 
 " Am I in your way ? Is that your tailor ? " asked Etoile ot 
 her hostess, in perfect good faith, not recognising him by day- 
 light, and only seeing the filmy heaps of the laces he carried. 
 
 Lady Joan laughed, frowned, whispered hurriedly that he 
 was an old friend— very poor— snubbed the ill-timed visitor and 
 his laces, and dismissed him ; then, thinking better of it, ran 
 after him into the ante-room and consoled him, and told him, 
 with a smile, that the Comtesse d'Avesnes had taken him for a 
 man-milliner. 
 
 " Maladetta sia ! " swore Burletta, dropping his laces in his 
 rage, till he looked like a large fat ram dropping its fleece. 
 " Maladetta sia ! " 
 
 " With all my heart ! " laughed the Lady Joan, and returned 
 to her drawing-room, taking a piece of yellow Venetian point 
 with her as a reason for her absence in the ante-room. 
 
 "A collar of Marino Faliero's," she said as she entered. 
 " Isn't it interesting ? Perhaps the very one he was executed 
 in — who knows ? " 
 
 " Who knows, indeed ? " said Etoile, with a smile. " But why 
 not say Desdemona's at once ? It would be more poetic." 
 
 The Lady Joan threw the lace aside crossly. She had a 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 71 
 
 suspicion that Yoightel's fricntl was laughing at her, and sho 
 did not hkc to be laiighed at ; moreover, she preferred people 
 who lielieved in Faliero, or in anything else that she might 
 choose to tell them. 
 
 Slio had some odds and 'ends of real art and real history 
 jnmliled together in her brain like the many-coloured snips and 
 shreds in a tailor's drawer in Spain. But they were all tumbled 
 about pell-mell, and the wrong colours came up at the wrong 
 time ; and she had so unfortunate a i:>i'eference for always drag- 
 ging in the very biggest names and the very grandest events 
 upon every occasion, that her adorer, Mimo Burletta, who really 
 was learned in such matters, was constantly made very nervous 
 by her blunders. 
 
 "La Challoner is beautiful, noble, chaste — a very pearl and 
 queen of women," he would say in his enthusiasm about her. 
 "But she makes one little, very little mistake — a pot baked 
 yesterday is always a vase of Maestro Georgio's ; all her fiddles 
 are Cremonas ; all her sprigged china is Saxe, all her ugly plates 
 are Palissy's ; all her naked people are Michael Angelo's ; all her 
 tapestries are Gobelin; all her terra-cottas are Pentelic Marbles. 
 Kow, that is a mistake, you know ; the world is too little for so 
 very much treasure. She forgets that she makes her diamonds 
 as cheap as pebbles. But she is a divine creature for all that," 
 would the loyal Mimo always cry in conclusion. 
 
 At this moment she looked at the lace with regret. It was 
 very yellow, very full of holes, and not very much coarser than 
 what the women make every day along the Eiviera. Why would 
 her guest not believe in it ? 
 
 " Would you mind driving me about to-day ? " she said, 
 glancing at the clock, reflecting that she might as well get 
 something in return for this breakfast. " The ponies are tired. 
 Mine? — no, they're not mine exactly : they're lo's; but of course 
 I have them whenever I like. Yes, they're nice little beasts — 
 little Friuli nags — fast as steam and surefooted as goats. They're 
 very useful. Will you drive me ? Thanks. Perhaps you will 
 go with me to a few studios, if you don't mind ? Of course it 
 will bore you. You'll find it all second-rate, but to have your 
 opinion will be such a treat to me and such an honour to them ! 
 Are you ready ? " 
 
 Of course she carried her point and got into her guest's car- 
 riage and began a round of visits. She was not quite the Lady 
 Joan of the bib-and-tucker, nor was she quite the Lady Joan of 
 the loup-and-domino, but the same adi'oit mixture of the two, 
 that she had been througliout luncheon. 
 
 She was sincere, in her eager invitation ; she had a genuine 
 zest in exhibiting any celebrity in her companionship. It gave 
 her a cachet of talent. She liked to aflect artistic society, her 
 
72 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 family had always done so; only, where they had had all that 
 was greatest in all Europe to choose from, she had to take such 
 offshoots of intellectual power as she could obtain. Sculptors 
 who thought it high art to imitate in stone, schoolboys and 
 sucking babes, cloth trousers and silk gowns; painters who cut 
 colour like butter and like butter sjiread it with a knife, then 
 called the mass a chord in colour or a prelude in carmine; 
 clever writers who appraised their age aright, and saw that it 
 needed not high purpose nor high thought, and trained their 
 gifts accordingly, and, instead of dying like Keats or Buckle, 
 took good incomes from great newspapers, and were not too 
 clever for their peace or price — these and their like she would 
 get round her, and make them useful to her in many ingenious 
 ways. 
 
 But when a great fame came within her reach, she grasped it 
 eagerly, and always was the first to ask it out to dinner. 
 
 These pastiles of art and intellect burned in her rooms gave 
 it a fine aroma, and she liked people to run about and say, " I 
 met Pietra Infernale there last night; he means to have his 
 illustrated Furioto ready by New Year ; " or, " I dined at the 
 Challoners', to see the Eussian novelist, Sacha Silchikoff — 
 wicked, if you like, biit then how witty ! " or, " I lunched yester- 
 day with Lady Joan, and met Tom Tonans : he says there is no 
 art nowadays in the E.A. — nothing but millinery and nursery 
 elegiacs." 
 
 This kind of thing gave her house a smell of the Muses and 
 the Graces, and took olf any possible likeness it might otherwise 
 have had to a hric-h-hrac shop. Therefore, having now secured 
 the friend of Voightel for all the remaining daylight of a fine 
 mild afternoon, she drove up and down many streets, and went 
 in and out many studios ; smoked a cigarette here and there ; 
 and finally, at five o'clock, thought it better to wind up with a 
 little tableau of respectability and begged to stop before an old 
 dark house, in an old dark quarter. 
 
 " I must make you know my dear friends the Scrope-Stairs," 
 she said, entreatingly. " It's their day, and I promised I would 
 bring you if I could. You won't mind coming, to oblige me ? 
 I've told them so much about you. They're such dear, good, 
 clever people : and they're dying to see you — dying ! " 
 
 AVith which she went through the dusky doorway and 
 began to mount steps innumerable and very steep and dark. 
 Etoile followed her, unwilling to seem discourteous in such a 
 trifle, and willing to please Lord Archie's daughter when she 
 could. 
 
 "I've told lo to meet me here. The Scrope-Stairs are so 
 fond of him," said the Lady Joan as she clambered up with 
 agility to the fourth floor. "Oh yes— it is an awful height; 
 
FEIENDSHIP. 73 
 
 liut they are so very ill off, poor dear peoijle. Dear old Lord 
 George managed to make ducks-and-drakes of five fortunes." 
 
 She interrupted herself to put aside a dingy tapestry, and led 
 the way through ill-lit passages to a large, dim, naked-looking 
 chamber, where there were congregated in solemn congress some 
 forty or fifty ladies of that age once described as somewhere 
 between twenty and sixty, whose centre of attraction was a tea- 
 table, about which they revolved as planets round a sun. 
 
 " How do you do, dears ? " cried Lady Joan, kissing a gi'eat 
 many of them one after another with ardent effusion. " Is lo 
 come ? No ? Oh, just like him ! Ah, I beg your pardon ; how 
 careless I am! Yes, I have persuaded her, you see. Let rao 
 present you to my friend the Comtesse d'Avesnes. You know 
 her best as Etoile. Allow me " 
 
 Lady Joan saw an electric shock of amazement, a nervous 
 thrill of curiosity mingled with terror, palpitate through all her 
 assembled friends at the name of Etoile — such a tremor of trepi- 
 dation as thrills through a dovecote when in the blue sky hovers 
 a hawk. 
 
 She enjoyed it. amazingly. 
 
 Though so careful to conciliate Mrs. Grundy she cordially 
 detested that august personage, and loved to " tie a cracker to 
 her tail," as she phrased it, whenever she could do so with 
 impunity. 
 
 " So honoured, so enchanted, so more than flattered ! For years 
 you have been our idol ! " murmured the youngest of the Scrope- 
 Stair sisters in a twitter of excitement, whilst old Lord George 
 wandered in and made his dignified old Eegency bow, and put 
 his glasses to his dim eyes and turned a pretty compliment for 
 sake of Etoile. 
 
 " But will not people think it a little odd to see Tier in our 
 house ?" murmured the youngest sister, Marjory, a thin, eager 
 person, with a fringe of hair above a nervous face ; whilst her 
 father occupied Etoile. Lady Joan filled her mouth with tea- 
 cake. 
 
 " Oh no, dear ; she goes everywhere ; she's hand-and-glove 
 with Princess Vera. Of course there are very queer stories ; 
 but you know I'm never censorious. Where on earth can 
 lo be ? " 
 
 Marjory Scrope coloured; she always did so at a certain 
 name. 
 
 " We have not seen him yet to-day," she murmured. " As 
 for your friend, I am delighted. Only I thought Mrs. MidJleway 
 looked a little— a little— astonished. But you know best 
 always, darling Joan; and any one dear Lord Archie recom- 
 mends " 
 
 Mrs. Middleway was the wife of one of those Anglican clergy- 
 
7i FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 men whose flocks are all the straying Protestant sheep, black 
 and white, who dance their cotillons, enjoy their nias(|ucrades, 
 play their roulette, drink their pick-me-ups, propitiate heaveu 
 with their bazaars, and shriek at trumpery French plays, all 
 over Italy in the winter-time, and of whom the Eoman shep- 
 herd, or the Neapolitan beggar, or the Tuscan vinedresser, 
 staring sullenly at them as they fly by on horseback, will 
 generally mutter, " Non sono Christani." 
 
 Mrs. Middleway was a large, faded, shabby woman, with two 
 daughters to marry. She was extremely particular as to whom 
 she visited, and had a very small income. She would stay at 
 Fiordelisa in the summer, and if any one hinted that, " Well, 
 yes — well, was it not rather — rather strange, you know? " Mrs. 
 Middleway would reply, " The dear Challoners ? Oh ! what a 
 cruel censorious world we live in ! As if the very openness of 
 the friendship were not sufficient guarantee ! Why, Lady 
 Hebrides lunched there yesterday — I met her ! " 
 
 But Mrs. Middleway being the soul of propriety, and having 
 two daughters to marry, looked askance at the entrance of a 
 celebrated person, whose name she was inclined to think 
 synonymous with Tophet; wondered what that brown velvet 
 gown had cost, drew herself up a little stiffer than usual, and 
 murmured to her neighbour that that sweet Lady Joan was 
 always so imprudently kind-hearted ; Lady Joan, judging by 
 her own noble self, never would believe there could be anything 
 wrong anywhere. 
 
 The neighbour, who was a very solemn spinster, with blue 
 spectacles, who had written a very learned book upon the 
 Privileges and Penalties of the Vestals, murmured back that 
 society was so mixed nowadays that it was really dangerous to 
 enter it at all ; one never knew whom one might not be exposed 
 to meeting. 
 
 " Ah, no, you may well say so. There is no line drawn," said 
 the clergyman's wife, with a sigh, as she broke a tea-cake. 
 " What can society be without a line ? " 
 
 And she smoothed her shabby silk gown, and, good Christian 
 though she was, could not help disliking a woman who wore 
 brown velvet, silver-fox fur, and silk-embroidered cashmeres, and 
 had old Mechlin lace at the hem of her skirt. 
 
 To the Countess of Hebrides such vanities were permissible ; 
 they were, like other evidences of the favouritism of Providence, 
 not to be questioned in justice or propriety. But on only an 
 
 " When one thinks how they must have been purchased ! " sho 
 murmured to the spinster who had written the learned book on 
 the penalties of the Vestals. 
 
 The spinster shook her head. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 75 
 
 " Very wrong of Lady Joan to have brought her," she said, 
 in a severe and choleric whisiDer. " Here one always was safe." 
 
 " Dear Lady Joan ! she is so imprudent and so good- 
 natured ! •■' sighed Mrs. Middlcway, and had her fctdings further 
 harrowed by a glimpse of the old Mechlin lace of the bulayeuse 
 underneath the immoral brown velvet of Etoile. 
 
 The glimpse she got of the Mechlin hahiycuf^e filled her with 
 a kind of savage jDain. L'cal old Mechlin ! — sweeping the dust ! 
 These were the kinds of things that made it at times almost hard 
 even for a chaplain's wife to believe in a beneficent Creator. 
 
 Meanwhile Etoile, unconscious of the emotions she excited, 
 smiled on the antirpiated homage of Lord George, wondered why 
 she had been brought to this parliament of dames, and remained 
 as indifferent to the stare of the fifty ladies as she was to the 
 crowd on the Pincio, or to the monstrari digito at all times. The 
 millclack of tongues grew very qiiiet round her; the tea did not 
 circulate briskly, the muffins were not buttered with honeyed 
 welcome; they did not like to talk before her; she had come 
 from Paris, and had the reputation of a wit. Altogether she 
 made them very uncomfortable. 
 
 "So kind of Lady Joan," whispered the clergyman's wife. 
 " And so kind of the Stairs — they always were kindness itself — 
 but it is a pity, because to this house every one has always 
 thought they were quite safe in bringing their daughters. Yes, 
 a mistake certainly, though well meant, no doubt; but when one 
 has young girls can one be too careful ? " 
 
 "Delighted to have had the honoiir of receiving so much 
 genius and so much brilliancy into my sad old house," said 
 quivering old Lord George, with a bow of Brummell's time, and 
 his hand on his heart. He was a feeble old man, but had becii 
 very liandsome in his time, and still knew a woman to his taste 
 when he saw one. Lady Joan was not to his taste : only he 
 never dared say so in his daughters' hearing. 
 
 " So charmed to have had such an honour, and any use we 
 can be, — and we may be allowed to call, may we not ? — and pray 
 remember our Thursdays — every Thursday till June— though 
 we may hardly hope that yoii will deign," etc., etc., said Marjory 
 in her most fervent manner, her beads, and her trinkets, 
 and her spare figure, and her little rings of hair all eager with 
 courtesy. 
 
 Under these cordial valedictions Etoile went to her carriage 
 wondering why she had been taken to these excellent folks. 
 
 Lady Joan's brow was stormy ; it was half-past five, and her 
 friend, the Prince loris, had not come. 
 
 She loved to take him there — in the first place, because it 
 wearied him to death, and in the second because it amused her 
 extremely to stride into that cii-cle of " goody-goodies," as she 
 
70 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 termed them, with her hands in her pockets and her Prince at 
 her heels. The incongruity of it tickled her fancy, and she knew 
 how well it served her for all these matrons and spinsters to cry 
 in chorus to any calumniators that she might have, " Oh ! the 
 IDurest friendship ! The most innocent intercourse ! Why, those 
 excellent Scrope-Stairs receive them together — as if they ever 
 tvould, if there were" etc., etc. 
 
 The Scrope-Stairs sisters were charmed to have him brought 
 there at any price ; he was their one court-card, their one riband 
 of grace and honour. The " sex of valour " was never repre- 
 sented in their rooms save by some clergyman, or missionary, or 
 unwary traveller caught in his ignorance, or on occasion by Mr. 
 Silverly Bell, if he had any particular enemy that he desired to 
 drown in the teapot, with Mrs. Grundy to say the De Profundis 
 over the defunct. 
 
 Lord and Lady George Scrope-Stairs, with their daughters, 
 were the chief mainstay and prop to that Temple of All the Virtues 
 which Lady Joan had set herself to build. They were, indeed, 
 very poor, but in compensation they were so eminently, so pre- 
 eminently — respectable ! 
 
 Not because their names were in " Debrett " and " Burke " — 
 plenty of scamps are in both, who will hurt you very much if 
 you are seen with them — but because from their fourth floor there 
 went out an eternal odour of the very severest morality. 
 
 To have sipped of the tea from their teapot was to have been 
 baptised with the waters of respectability for life, and to have 
 eaten of their mufiins was to have been sealed with the seal of 
 purity for all time. True, their teaiwt was terrible as the 
 cauldron of Macbeth's weird sisters, and hissed till youth and 
 innocence, excellence and genius and honour were all stewing, 
 cold, drowned things, in its steam. But what of that ? Mrs. 
 Grundy does not mind a little scandal— if you will only 
 whisper it. 
 
 Lord George had been a dandy and a beau when the century 
 and himself were both young; he had had big fortunes and 
 spent them all, and had lived many years in exile, a sad and 
 broken man; shivering by his chilly stove, and tottering out 
 when the day was fine to have a mild little joke, when his 
 daughters were out of hearing and any chance word awoke the 
 old memories in him, as a trumpet-call wakes the spirit in the 
 worn-out charger waiting death wearily between the waggon's 
 shafts. 
 
 In his own house his daughters cowed him ; they were iron 
 to him though wax to the rest of the world ; taking in the workl's 
 eternal comedy those indispensable but subordinate rules known 
 in stage-talk as " utility parts." 
 
 They were plain, ;i)ussees, perfidious ; but the people they 
 
FBIENDSIIIP. 77 
 
 toadied, and the friends they flattered, rather liked them the 
 better for this. 
 
 If anybody wanted a shoolgirl looked after, a bore taken olT 
 their hands, a disagreeable errand done, or a train met on a 
 rainy day, there were the Scrope-Stairs to do it. 
 
 Provided you were only quite a i:)ropcr person, you could 
 always have a Scrope-Stair to do what you wanted — from ringing 
 your bell to slandering your enemy, from pouring out your tea 
 to escorting your coffin. Their usefulness was of an elasticity 
 quite inexhaustible, and their ingenuity in consolatory sophisms 
 was as great as that of the chamberlain of Marie Leczinska, who, 
 when she longed to play cards on the day of a funeral, assured 
 her that the game of fiquet was deep moiirning. And, consider- 
 ing what a comfort they were, the Scrope-Stairs were not expen- 
 sive — some drives, some dinners, some visits to you in the 
 summer, some boxes at the opera in the winter — with these 
 trifles these treasures were secured. 
 
 Lady Joan, whose unerring eye for her own advantage never 
 misled her, had discerned the capabilities and the advantages 
 of friendship with these excellent young persons when first she 
 had wintered in Italy. She saw that they had not, like her, the 
 l^ower to make all men their brothers, but that they were exactly 
 what was wanted to induce Society to let her enjoy herself with 
 her brothers. Determined, like the spirited woman she was, to 
 dance her Carmagnole over the conventionalities, she saw the 
 necessity of having somebody to swear that she was only 
 curtsying, and not dancing at all. So she instantly rushed into 
 devoted friendship, kissed them all at every meeting, and wrote 
 them a dozen times a week sugary little notes beginning " Dearest 
 darling," and ending " "With a thousand loves." 
 
 It was not the style that suited her best, but she could do it 
 when it was wanted. 
 
 This effervescence had cooled down a little by this time, but 
 it had left a valuable residuum ; the froth was gone, but the 
 wine remained. 
 
 The Scrope-Stairs had found out what her " thousand loves " 
 were worth, but they kept their knowledge to themselves ; and, 
 pouring out her tea on their Thursdays, continued to kiss and 
 be kissed. 
 
 The loyalty of the Scrope-Stairs (whom the profane jesters of 
 Society would call the Sweej)-Stairs) was quite priceless in its 
 unutterable value to the Casa Challoner. Indeed, but for the 
 Scrope-Stair friendship) Society might perhaps never have been 
 friendly. But these young persons were so well-born, so 
 decorous, so eminently estimable, so sternly resjiectable, and so 
 stitfly irreproachable, that they really could have made Society 
 accept even odder things than Fiordelisa, and stranger things 
 
78 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 than the Lady Joan, with her hands in her coat-pockets and her 
 lovers behind her, striding in to a clergyman's tea-party. 
 
 They were, it is true, very jealous, very curious, very cruel, 
 could slander viciously, toady rapaciously, and injure irrepar- 
 ably ; but these were trifles, and were, indeed, quite lost sight of 
 under the throng of amiable qualities which they developed for 
 people richer than themselves. Their moral qiialities were their 
 strong point; they were armed cap-a-pie in every hind of 
 virtue ; they had even charity — when they were paid very well 
 for it. 
 
 The old folks did not very cordially join in the charity. They 
 belonged to an old-fashioned school, and did not understand the 
 comprehensiveness of modern friendship, which means anything 
 anybody likes, from rapturous love to deadly hate. 
 
 But their money was spent, their daughters were formidable, 
 their home was dreary, and so they obediently did as they were 
 told, and the old courtier put on his faded red riband to grace 
 Lady Joan's respectable parties, and the old wife carried her 
 knitting-needles and lambswool on to the terrace at Fiordelisa : 
 and all was as it should be, and their venerable names and 
 persons were as towers of strength built up beside the Casa 
 Challoner. 
 
 A bolder woman would not have cared for these things, and 
 a sillier woman would not have known their value; but Lady 
 Joan was not above using these trifles and turning them to good 
 account. Even an old red riband, and a pair of knitting-needles, 
 she knew were not weapons to be despised in her battle of life. 
 
 Lady Joan was like that well-trained elephant which can at 
 will root up an oak or pick up a pin ; and Lady Joan knew that 
 there are many more pins than oaks, and that a pin stamped on 
 too hastily may lame even an elephant for life. So nothing was 
 too small for her, wise woman that she was, 
 
 A pattern of a new pinafore for an anxious mother ; a 
 damascened scimetar lent for a tableau vivant ; a compliment at 
 the right minute to an ugly woman ; a young baritone allowed 
 to scream himself hoarse over her guitar ; a shoddy Croesus 
 dazzled with the statesmen and the duchesses in her photograph 
 book ; a frank, beaming smile in the face of a bore ; a pressing 
 invitation to a nervous nonentity ; a flattering deference to a 
 wealthy i)omposity ; a pretty set of conventionalities put on stiff 
 and new like her ruffs and her cuffs; a present of fruit to folks 
 rich enough to buy ui^ Ilesperides ; a loan of the i)ony-carriage 
 to people who owned great studs and rare racers in Suffolk or 
 Norfolk ; nothing wasted, nothing thrown away, every one con- 
 ciliated, everything remembered — herein was her success. She 
 beamed on the old folks and the rich folks, no matter how they 
 bored her, because they were solid as bullion, bought pictures, 
 
FRIENDSniP. 79 
 
 and were the St. Peters of the gates of Society. And she beamed 
 on the young ones and the poor ones, because wlio could tell 
 •what they might not turn out to be some day ? The corporal's 
 knapsack may hold the marshal's truncheon, and a little lad 
 once trotted about with baskets of washed linen who lived to be 
 King of Sweden. Thus she got her pa3ans sung in all stages of 
 society, and broke down her oaks and picked up her pins and 
 made her path clear, and endured an amount of cnmii incalcul- 
 able, and listened radiantly to platitudes interminable, and made 
 herself as agreeable to poor little Doremi screaming his cadenza 
 and talking of his theatrical future, as to solemn Sir Joseph, 
 with the face of a pig and the art-knowledge of a butler, and a 
 huge art gallery in England, smelling of paint and plaster, and 
 requiring many framed acres of " Guides, Correggios, and stuff." 
 
 Of course all this cost her trouble, unending trouble. But 
 she kept foremost before her the final words of Candide : " II faut 
 cultiver notre jardin." She had a passion-flower in her garden, 
 of course ; but her real care and culture were her cabbages. 
 
 She enjoyed her cabbages as much as her passion-flowers. 
 
 "Whether she were sending her horse at racing pace across 
 the grass that covers the dead Etruscan cities ; or waltzing at 
 topmost sjDeed down the vast palace ball-rooms; or bargaining 
 for old gems in dusky cellars of the Trastevere ; or outwitting 
 the Ghettos in the purchase of brocades and canopies ; or smiling 
 in the faces of haughty or witty women whom she hated ; or 
 swinging through the feathered maize to call the lazy peasants 
 to their duties; or launching shafts of malice through her black 
 satin vizor at the Veglione — whatever it was that she was doing 
 she did it with zest and force, and with a reality of enjoyment 
 that was contagious. 
 
 Here was the secret of her success. To her nothing was 
 little. 
 
 This temper is always popular with Society. To enjoy your- 
 self in the world, is, to the world, the prettiest of indirect 
 compliments. 
 
 The chief offence of the poet, as of the philosopher, is that 
 the world as it is fails to satisfy them. 
 
 Society, which is after all only a conglomerate of hosts, has 
 the host's weakness — all its guests must smile. 
 
 The poet sighs, the philosopher yawns. Society feels that 
 they depreciate it. Society feels more at ease without them. 
 
 To find every one acceptable to you is to make yourself 
 accei^table to every one. 
 
 Hived bees get sugar because they will give back honey. All 
 existence is a series of equivalents. 
 
 " What do you think of my dear friends ? " asked Lady Joan, 
 as they drove away. 
 
80 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Etoile hardly knew what to say. 
 
 " Ko doubt they are very estimable persons," she answered. 
 '• But I admit, a society like that is hardly what I am vised to. 
 I counted thirty-eight ladies, very ill-dressed, who I am sure 
 were all muttering Apage Satanas, and most of them looked in a 
 fierce state of warfare with a world which had failed to appre- 
 ciate and — to marry them." 
 
 Lady Joan laughed. 
 
 " Oh, they're horrid old cats ; I quite agree with you there. 
 But cats scratch, you know. It's best to coax them. As for 
 the dear Scrope-Stairs, I assure you to know them is to admire 
 them ; they are so indefatigable, so true, so charitable. I love 
 them all so much ! " she added, with an irrepressible grin on her 
 handsome face. "Besides, you know, women are so useful — 
 haven't you ever found that out yet ? " 
 
 " No ; perhaps because I want nothing of them." 
 
 Lady Joan decided in her own mind that Yoightel must have 
 told her everything. Voightel never had ; — but conscience is a 
 magic-lantern that throws distorted figures on any white blank- 
 wall. 
 
 "I think you are wrong," she answered aloud, with the odd 
 candour which sometimes characterised this woman, who perhaj^s 
 had been born for better things than slie had achieved. '• I think 
 you are wrong. Nobody knows what they may want. Things 
 hinge so horribly on accident. People who used to snub Louis 
 Napoleon thought themselves quite safe; they were always afraid 
 he should borrow a sovereign. I knew a man who gave liim a 
 drop of sherry out of a flask in a hunting field after he had had 
 a heavy fall one day in Leicestershire ; and twenty years after- 
 wards that very drop of sherry got the man a concession for 
 public works that brought him in half a million of money. 
 There ! " 
 
 "But surely he gave the sherry out of good nature, not 
 calculation ? " 
 
 " Humph ! I don't know. He was not the sort of man to stop 
 his horse to pick up a farmer. At any rate he did the civil thing, 
 and see what he got by it. Now, that is just what I mean by 
 being civil to women. They bore you ; well, they bore me. I 
 don't deny that. But they can do one so much good— just for a 
 drop of sherry they can get you such a big concession." 
 
 " You would make a good political leader," said Etoile, with 
 a .smile. 
 
 Lady Joan was flattered ; though perhaps she would not have 
 been so much so had she seen into her companion's thoughts. 
 
 Etoile descended at her own resting-place and sent her horses 
 home with Lady Joan, who, when out of her hearing, had them 
 turned in the direction of the house of loris. 
 
FBIENDBHIP. 81 
 
 " The Priuce not homo yet? " sho said sharply to his servant. 
 " Well, tell him I've been here ; and tell him if he's not in at 
 half-past seven he'll get no dinner ; we shan't wait for him." 
 
 The servant bowed humbly, and in his soul prayed heaven to 
 send his master's dama an accidtnte. 
 
 Then she had herself borne again along the twilit Corso 
 homeward, and laughed as she lay back amongst the cushions 
 recalling the faces of the thirty-eight matrons and virgins around 
 the sacred sun of the tea-urn. 
 
 " How scared they looked ! " she thought to herself. " 'Wdl, 
 it may all come in useful some day." 
 
 For Lady Joan was a long-sighted woman. 
 
 When Etoile went up her wide steps into the great palace, 
 pale and melancholy with Overbeck's frescoes, she saw a coat 
 lined with furs lying on the couch of the antechamber, and in 
 the dusk of her rooms, that were filled with the aromatic scent 
 of the wood fires, and burning pine-cones, a slender hand was 
 held out to her, and a soft melodious voice said : 
 
 " Will you forgive me that I ventured to wait for you ? I 
 could not bear to be turned away a second time." 
 
 The dark, delicate head of the Prince loris was seen fitfully 
 in the gloom of the evening light. 
 
 Dinner at the Casa Challoner that night was on the table at 
 half-past seven. The husband and wife sat down alone. Her 
 brow was as the thunders that rest on the brow of Soracte. 
 
 At a quarter to nine loris entered. 
 
 " I was kept late at the Casa di Eisparmio," ho explained. 
 He endeavoured to awake their interest in that excellent institu- 
 tion, but vainly. 
 
 Lady Joan ordered up for him the shreds of the fish and the 
 legs of the woodcocks. Such discipline she considered to be good 
 for him. Mr. Challoner grumbled over his claret that the sauco 
 had been ruined by waiting ten minutes for nothing. 
 
 It was a silent repast, only varied by scolding from the top of 
 the table, as a long dull day of rain may be varied by mutterings 
 of thunder from on high. They had many such. Life, when it 
 runs on three castors, seldom runs upon velvet. 
 
 She was of opinion with Sganarelle, that "cinq ou six coups 
 de batons entre gens qui s'aiment ne font que ragaillardir 
 I'afi'ection." 
 
 But, like Sganarclle also, she always premised that the right 
 to give the blows should be hers. 
 
82 FRIENDSHIF. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 " You must come up to Fiordelisa," said the Lady Joan with 
 much urgency, a few days later. 
 
 Prince loris looked uneasy and ill-pleased, but added with 
 courteous elTort: "Piordelisa may be so happy as to interest 
 you, perhaps, by its age and its story ; its greatness has long 
 dej^arted." 
 
 " What can Fiordelisa be ? " thought Etoile. 
 
 The Lady Joan explained, unasked, as she drove over the 
 Campagna. She was always explaining. Explanation is a 
 blunder usually: whoever explains is, by self-implication, in 
 error ; but she was a mistress of the art, and found it answer 
 with most people. 
 
 She lived in a state of perpetual apology. The meeting-house 
 clothes were a standing apology for the cakes and ale. 
 
 It half-amused Etoile as she began to perceive it, and half- 
 disgusted her. To a woman who was utterly indiiferent to what 
 the world said of her at any time, this struggle in another to 
 combine self-indulgence with self-justification seemed the drollest 
 of anomalies. 
 
 " Why not be Messalina, if it please her ; or why not be St. 
 Cecilia, if she liked it ? " thought Etoile. " But why pass her life 
 trimming up wrong as right, in sipping brandy and declaring it 
 is cold tea ? " 
 
 But that was the mistake of a careless and contemptuous 
 temper ; Lady Joan knew better. She knew that it was much 
 wiser to pass off your cognac as souchong, and that you may 
 take as much brandy as ever you like, if only you can convince 
 everybody else it is tea. 
 
 When Theodore Hook wanted to get drunk, not to scandalise 
 the club he was in, he called for lemonade— the waiters knew 
 what to bring him. 
 
 Lady Joan called for cold tea so loudly that she might have 
 boon heard from the banks of Tiber to her own old hunting grounds 
 by Abana and Pharphar. Those who waited on her knew what 
 to bring her. Meanwhile that overgrown club, Society, was quite 
 fcjure it was only tea. 
 
 Society will believe anything rather than ever believe that 
 Itself can be duped. 
 
 If you have only assurance enough to rely implicitly on this, 
 there is hardly anything you cannot induce it to accept. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 83 
 
 Her society, haviug once decided to believe that Lady Joan 
 only drank cold tea, were ready to go to the scaffold in a body 
 rather than admit that she even knew the colour of brandy. 
 
 Her society -was limited, indeed ; but then it was the club she 
 was in — the only one that mattered to her : all her dear passers-by 
 that wanted teacups and triptychs, and all her small gentilities 
 and freeborn republicans that asked her to dinners and dances. 
 
 Besides, her brandy would not have tasted half so good if she 
 had not had the fun of persuading everybody else it was tea. 
 There is an indescribable delightfulness to a certain order of 
 minds in smuggling. 
 
 She now proceeded to explain elaborately: Fiordelisa was 
 loris' old castle, but they lived there ; it helped him a little. lo 
 was so poor ; lo was so weak ; they were so fond of him — poor 
 lo! without her eye over him and Rlr. Challoner's counsel he 
 would be ruined to-morrow. Yes, of coiirse, it did aid him very 
 much, their living there ; and they had done no end of good to 
 the place. Such a wretched old barn as it had been when they 
 had gone there first of all ! Nobody could imagine the trouble 
 she took ! But then when she went in for anything she always 
 did do it thoroughly ; not like lo — poor lo ! — who would never 
 have a centime off the estate if she did not get it for him. How 
 she slaved over those silkworms, for instance! such beastly- 
 smelling things as they were ; and she scarcely stirred out of the 
 house for three months, she had to watch them so ; but then she 
 made three hundred pounds nearly by the raw silk in the year; 
 and only think what three hundred pounds meant to poor lo ! 
 Thus she discoursed, whipping the ponies. She was so used to 
 making the discourse that it ran off her tongue like her raw silk 
 off the reels of the winder. More or less varied, according to 
 her auditors, it did duty to a thousand listeners in the twelve- 
 month's time, and induced Mrs. Grundy to submit to Fiordelisa, 
 and even sometimes to visit there. 
 
 _ " The place was quite poverty-stricken when we came," she 
 said, with a cut of the whip to the pony Pippo. " When we knew 
 him first he was on the brink of ruin ; ice pulled him straight. 
 Through extravagance? — oh no, weakness. lo's as weak as 
 water — give his head away if he'd got nothing else to give. Just 
 like St. Martin and his cloak. He is like a child about business, 
 too ; a baby would wind him round its finger ; he can't say no. 
 If it wasn't for me he'd maintain all the ague-shaking souls of the 
 Agro Eomano, I'm siare he would." 
 
 '' Is he duly grateful to you ? " — Etoile, lying back in the 
 carriage, began to pity the absent man vaguely. 
 
 Lady Joan shot a glance at her. 
 
 " Oh, I don't know," she muttered, a little sullenly. " Ho 
 kncws he couldn't keep straight without me, if you mean that. 
 
84 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 We've spent a great deal on tlie place too ; but tlien we've got 
 very fond of it. I've made three new vignas this year ; got my 
 vines out from Portugal. I grubbed up an old garden and planted 
 it with Xeres. I shall make sherry in three summers more." 
 
 "And if your friend ever marry?" said Etoile, with the 
 indifference she felt, only hazarding a natural conjecture. 
 
 The Lady Joan's eyes flashed as steel does in the rays of the 
 sun. 
 
 " Marry ! " She drew her breath and set her teeth, but in 
 another moment she smiled. 
 
 " Ah, yes, I do so wish he would, if he married jjrqpe?-??/. But, 
 you see, poor lo — well, he's very silly about me ; thinks there's 
 nobody like me, and all that. But it's all nonsense. I'm always 
 telling him not to be a goose." 
 
 " He lives in hopes of Mr. Challoner's euthanasia ? And yet 
 he lets Mr. Challoner plant his vines ? " 
 
 " Bother you ! How much has Voightel told you ? " thought 
 the Lady Joan, with wrath in her soul ; but she laughed and 
 grinned pleasantly. She had a trick of grinning, but then she 
 had very handsome teeth to show. 
 
 " Mr, Challoner die ! My dear, he'll live for ever ! I believe 
 he was cut out of a tree of lignum- vitse. I'm sure he looks as if 
 he had been. By-the-by, he wanted to come to-day, but some 
 telegrams came in and kept him — heaven be praised for all its 
 mercies ! "We get rid of him in the summer, you know. He goes 
 to the German baths somewhere or other with little Effie ; and 
 Effie's Swiss governess. Have you seen that Swiss girl ? Horrid 
 little upstart; I believe she came out of a cafe-chantant at Vevey. 
 Mr. Challoner chose her. Of course Effie's taught to disobey me, 
 and lie, and be rude in all kinds of ways that she can. Oh, my 
 dear, you don't know half the troubles / have to put up with." 
 
 " And people think Mr. Challoner such an excellent man ! I 
 suppose you did also once ? " 
 
 " I — I always thought him the most odious cad in the whole 
 universe. I've never changed about that," responded his wife, 
 with one of those sudden bursts of temper and truthfulness which 
 occasionally upset all her best plans and tallest card-house of con- 
 ventionalities ; then, conscious of a slip of the tongue, she 
 coloured, and was glad that Pippo took to pulling. 
 
 " lo's very unhappy about you," she said suddenly. " He 
 declares you don't like him — is it true ? " 
 
 "Not at all; he has beautiful manners. I think him an 
 admirable laquais de place." 
 
 Lady Joan screamed with laughter, well pleased. 
 
 " "Won't I tell him that ! Poor lo ! I suppose you wonder to 
 see him about our house so much ; but, you sec, he's very useful 
 to us and we're useful to him, and he's all alone at home, and 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 85 
 
 " I do not wonder at all." 
 
 Lady Joan was silent. She was revolving in her mind whether 
 it was worth while to try and impose the fiction of friendship on 
 a woman who lived in Paris and who knew Voightcl. There were 
 persons before whom Lady Joan threw off her meeting-honso 
 clothes and danced her Carmagnole in all the frank and boisterous 
 abandonment natural to her. She wondered whether it would 
 be safe to do it here. Etoile made her uneasy-; she could not 
 tell what manner of woman this great artist was. 
 
 A grave, studious, contemptuous contemplation that seemed 
 to gaze at her from the eyes of her new acquaintance worried 
 her, and made her feel unsafe and uncertain. Like all cowards, 
 she was occasionally nervous. Etoile made her so. She desired 
 to conciliate her ; but she did not know how to do it. She desired 
 to blind her, but she had a restless feeling that it would not be 
 safe to do so. 
 
 All the weapons with which she was accustomed to fence 
 with most people, and all the ruffs and farthingales with which 
 she arrayed herself to please the meeting-house and Mrs. Grundy, 
 seemed all of a sudden blunt and useless, coarse and foolish. She 
 could not take them up and put them on with the fortunate 
 mixture of swagger and propriety common to her. 
 
 " I wish she had never come near me," she thought with a 
 useless irritation, as she turned the ponies up the rough grassy 
 road which led to Fiordelisa on this balmy and sunny morning 
 of earliest winter ; and she said aloud : 
 
 " I sent lo up after breakfast ; he'll have everything ready, 
 unless, indeed, he's given the luncheon to the dogs and the wine 
 to a pack of beggars — which would be very like him," she added, 
 with a laugh that was not easy or good-tempered, as she rattled 
 the ponies up the sloping way between the reddening maples and 
 the leafless vines. 
 
 loris came out of the wide-arched doorway to meet them as 
 the ponies — his ponies — were pulled up before the entrance. He 
 wore a black velvet dress; he had a broad-leafed felt hat in his 
 hand; he had a red ribbon round his throat, and a hound at his 
 side. He looked like an old Velasquez picture as the sun fell on 
 his face and the depth of the shadow of the door was still behind 
 him in tlie background. 
 
 " Take my furs, lo. Oh, how stupid you are ! " cried the 
 Lady Joan. " Do you know what the Comtesse d'Avesnes says 
 of you? She says — (now, mind that basket!) — she says she 
 thinks you are an admirable laquais de place ! " 
 
 loris reddened under his delicate dark skin, but bowed low. 
 
 " I am glad that the Comtesse d'Avesnes can think that I have 
 even so much small merit as that in me," he answered, lifting 
 eyes of soft reproach. His eyes obeyed his will and uttered 
 
86 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 what he wanted for liim more eloquently than most men's tongues 
 will do. 
 
 " M. le Prince," said Etoile, with a smile, as she gave him her 
 hand, " when I see you mounted higher in the social scale, I will 
 accredit you with it. At present — mind that basket ! " 
 
 loris gave an impatient gesture, and Lady Joan laughed, not 
 altogether well pleased at the imitation of her tones and her 
 order. 
 
 "How he will hate her!" thought the Lady Joan, consoling 
 herself with the reflection as they strolled through the house on 
 to the terrace, with the dusky wooded hills and the heights of 
 Eocca di Papa behind them, and, before them, beyond the now 
 leafless vineyards and the gardens golden with orange fruit and 
 bright with Bengal roses, the width of the green Campagna, with 
 the sun shining on the far yellow streak that was Tiber, and the 
 purjile cloud which they knew was Eome, dusky with her many 
 roofs and ruins. 
 
 But for once Lady Joan was mistaken: loris was rather 
 inclined to hate himself. 
 
 " Do I indeed look such a fool to her ? " he thought constantly as 
 they went through the house, showiug her the various old pictures, 
 and marbles, and tapestries, and Etruscan treasures found in the 
 soil without. The old castle had lost much of its whilom mag- 
 nificence, but it was very ancient, and had a noble and honourable 
 melancholy in it which ill-accorded with the Lady Joan's cigar- 
 boxes and ulsters, crewel work and caricatures, coats of new 
 paint, and panes of crude glass ; it looked jorofaned and disturbed, 
 and had that air of resentment at its own profanation which ancient 
 places do seem to wear under sacrilege, as though they were 
 sentient things. 
 
 They lunched in the dining hall, where Lady Joan had arranged 
 all her china, pottery, porcelain, and the rest ou shelves, to be 
 handy for the eye and purse of that much-suffering and largely- 
 spending class of society, " the people passing through Eome." 
 
 loris sat at the bottom of his table, but Mr. Challoner's wife 
 sat at the top, and gave all the orders of the day, and chattered 
 throughout the meal of her wines and her pheasants, her fowls 
 and her fruits. There was a portrait of the dead mother of loris 
 on one of the walls. Etoile wondered that he left it there. 
 
 " Is Fiordelisa really yours ? " she said suddenly to him when 
 the Lady Joan had for a moment left them, her voice alone being 
 heard from afar off in violent altercation with the hcnwifo, who 
 had let the last score of fowls be sold too cheap in the market. 
 
 " Fiordelisa ! " he echoed in surprise. " Yes, certainly — it 
 has been in my family twelve centuries." 
 
 "Mr. Challonerhas a lease of it, I suppose? " 
 
 " Oh no ; I would never let it." 
 
FEIENDSUJF. 87 
 
 "You lend it to them, theu?" 
 
 " Ladj' Joan does mc the honour to like to use it — yes." 
 
 " And do your people like to be scolded ? " 
 
 " Oh, that is nothing ; they do not mind." 
 
 " But what right has she to scold them ? Because she scolds 
 you ; is that it ? " 
 
 " Because she scolds everybody and everything. Some women 
 do," said loris, with a shrug of his shoulders. 
 
 Etoile smiled, and the smile made liim restless. It was only 
 amusement, but he thought it contempt. 
 
 From the other side of the tall cypress hedge the voice of 
 Lady Joan came in strong anger, high above the cackle of poultry 
 and the shrill outcries of the peasants. In another moment sho 
 appeared in sight, a mangled mass of feathers dangling from one 
 hand and a hunting-whip in the other. 
 
 " Why will you let that beastly dog loose ? " she said to loris. 
 " He has killed two of my best Brahmas, I bought them only 
 last week — forty francs a pair, and such layers ! I have told 
 them if I catch him loose again I'll hang him." 
 
 loris looked up with a flush on his face. " You have never 
 beaten Im per at or a gam ? " 
 
 "■ Haven't I ? — within an inch of his life. He won't forget 
 killing the Brahmas. "What did you let him loose for ? I told 
 you he never was to be loose — great clumsy brute, breaking the 
 plants to pieces." 
 
 "Cara Joanna! It is impossible to keep a dog always 
 chained." 
 
 " Don't keep him at all, then. I shall hang him if I catcli him 
 loose, that's all. I have just told Pietro so, and he's sobbing like 
 a baby, and Mariannina screaming ! — I should think you heard 
 them here. Break Impcrator's heart? Eubbish ! Break his 
 bones, if you like. I shall if he kills my poultry. I'ou are such 
 an idiot, lo, about that dog." 
 
 And she went back as she came. 
 
 " Will you forgive my leaving you a second ? I miTst look at 
 the dog," said loris hurriedly, with the colour still in his checks. 
 
 " I will come and see him too," Etoile answered him. " But 
 why do you let him be beaten ? She can have no right to do 
 that." 
 
 loris gave one of those gestures with which an Italian says, 
 better than by all words, that what the gods will he must suffer, 
 and their fiat is stronger than he. 
 
 They found the hound in his kennel, and he crept out 
 timidly, and shivering still, with pain as with fear, and fawned 
 upon his master. loris caressed him, kissed him, called him 
 endearing words, and did his best to comfort him. 
 
 " But why not have sooner protected him ? " thought Etoile, 
 
88 FBIENDSHIP, 
 
 watching the mutnal affection of the man and the animal, and 
 making friends with the hound herself, whilst loris called to his 
 land-steward : 
 
 "Tista, will you see to this? Take care that when the 
 Signora is here Imperator is kept always in kennel. Of course 
 he is to be loose at all other times ; and if he kill or break any- 
 thing, do you replace it, and keep it out of the accounts. I will 
 pay you for it apart. Only take care that the Signora does not 
 see him free, and that she never hears it if he hunts anything. 
 You understand '? " 
 
 " I understand his Excellency. But in the summer ? " 
 
 " There are months before that," said loris impatiently ; and, 
 turning to Etoile, he excused himself for giving orders before 
 her, and asked her to come round with him to see from another 
 i:)oint of view where Kocca di Papa hung above in the fir- 
 woods. 
 
 " Will you not let Imperator loose to come with us? " she 
 asked. 
 
 " I could not do that. She would not like it." 
 
 " Is the dog hers, then ? " 
 
 "No, mine." 
 
 " And you cannot do as you like with your own ? " 
 
 He was silent. 
 
 "I heard all your orders to your bailiff," she pursued. 
 "Forgive ine; but, instead of all that complicated arrangement 
 with him about the dog, wm;ld it not be straighter and simpler 
 just to say to Lady Joan that you do not allow him to be beaten, 
 and that you always wish him to be free ? If she be only a 
 guest, how can you object? " 
 
 loris sighed impatiently. 
 
 " Oh, that would not do with her. You scarcely compre- 
 hend. She is so used to have her own way — I could not dis- 
 please her." 
 
 " Poor Imperator ! And yet you seem fond of him." 
 
 " Imperator only bears what I do." 
 
 He muttered the words low, as if they escaped from him 
 against his will, as they reached the little path that wound up 
 into the hills amongst the myrtle-bushes, and the tufts of 
 tramarina, and the wild growth of oleander which made the 
 mountain-side a blaze of rose-colour in the days of June. 
 
 " What is the secret of Fiordclisa ? " Etoile wondered, as the 
 ladies of Craig Moira had wondered before her. 
 
 Fiordelisa was the Lady Joan's fee-simple of loris. Had ho 
 never let her within the walls of Fiordelisa, Liberty would not 
 have outspread its wings and fled away from him. 
 
 Fiordelisa, crowning its hillside amidst cypress woods and 
 olive groves warm in the light of the western siin, and facine 
 
FEIENDSHIP. 89 
 
 the opal and amethyst lines of the mountains— Fiordelipa was 
 the last bead of a long chaplet of noble strongholds once bclong- 
 iDg to tlie great Princes of loris. 
 
 When Lady Joan had been seven months in Eome, still 
 languid from the heats of the East, the summer in the city 
 alarmed her. She averred that she would die of malaria, and 
 that her lord was such a churl he would never give her the 
 means to get a breath of freslier air. 
 
 The churl had but recently joined her, and could be repre- 
 sented in any colours she chose ; and she, and the churl also, 
 had breakfasted and lunched several times at that sunny solitary 
 palace standing empty on the fair hillside, and the lust ot desire 
 for it had entered into her soul. Therefore she wept, she went 
 into hysterics ; she had even a week's fever. 
 
 loris laid the keys of Fiordelisa at her feet. What less could 
 he do? 
 
 She affected reluctance ; suggested danger from the wrath of 
 the churl ; but in the end relented and accepted. 
 
 It was but a dreary old place, said its master, and he sent 
 up from the city all the modern necessities oi daily life ; had its 
 mighty old chambers swept out, the wild garden put a little in 
 order ; sent his horses up there, and welcomed the wife of Mr. 
 Chal loner to a viUeggiatura. 
 
 Figuratively, he had put handcuffs on his own wrists. 
 
 "What a madman!" thought Mr. Challoner when he heard 
 of the arrangement; but aloud he said merely, "You are very 
 good. Will it not bore you ? No ? I fear, indeed, my wife is 
 not strong enough for travel. It is most unfortunate." 
 
 For Mr. Challoner of the unchanging countenance always 
 bore himself to loris as he had done to his wife's friends in tho 
 East, with the grave face and the ceremonious manner with 
 which one Eoman augur of old addressed another augur in 
 public. 
 
 Mr. Challoner was like Mrs. Siddons : he never left off the 
 stage face and tho stage tone even if he were only buying a yard 
 of huckaback and inquiring if it would wash. 
 
 " Go to the castle," he said to his wife ; " go to the castle, since 
 you wish it, but take some good girl or other with you. Mind 
 that." 
 
 And having thus made due provision for the safety of 
 appearances, he departed for the baths in Germany, leaving his 
 wife on tho hillside — to recover her health. 
 
 People wondered at the husband's complacency. They would 
 not have wondered if they had been able to see into his recollec- 
 tions. Everything is comparative. Fiordelisa, as compared 
 with Orontes and Euphrates, Abana and Pharphar, seemed to 
 Mr. Challoner propriety itself. He himself wondered very much 
 
90 FEIENDSniP. 
 
 at loris. But this is a bad compliment that husbauds will 
 always pay their wives. 
 
 Lady Joan's eyes sparkled as she crossed the threshold. 
 Here was an occupation of territory that meant (to her far- 
 seeing eyes at least) an annexation for life. Like Prussia and 
 Eussia, she only wanted to get her foot once across the frontier, 
 and the soil was hers for ever and aye. Once installed in 
 Fiordelisa, who should live, bold enough, or shrewd enough, 
 ever to turn her out of it ? 
 
 There are some women so happily constituted that they con- 
 sider that for the gifts of themselves all the treasures of earth 
 would be scarcely recompense enough. 
 
 Lady Joan was one of these. 
 
 When he surrendered Fiordelisa he had surrendered his 
 future into her hands. 
 
 He had not known it. But she had. 
 '. To dislodge a tenant unwilling to go is at all times difficult; 
 the tiles must be taken off ere even law can aid. But a woman 
 like the Lady Joan would sit still, bareheaded and fast-rooted, 
 under the open skies till the tiles were put on again, and defy 
 heaven and earth and all their elements to move her. 
 
 Possession is nine points of the law ; and with nine points it 
 would have been odd indeed if Lady Joan should not have 
 managed, by hook or by crook, to obtain the tenth. 
 
 loris, with that touch of simplicity that a man's finest 
 astuteness is always mingled with, imagined that he only lent 
 Fiordelisa for a summer or two. Lady Joan laughed to herself 
 to think how easily she had drawn away this trump card from 
 him. 
 
 " Get me out ! " she thought to herself. " Not when I'm 
 once let in." 
 
 A great statesman being once asked what was the surest 
 method of success, replied, " Lnmovability." 
 
 Lady Joan understood the wisdom of the saying. When she 
 installed herself at Fiordelisa gaily as one who only bivouacs for 
 a midsummer picnic, she hung her cashmere upon the first peg 
 she saw in the hall. 
 
 " There is my fee-simple for life," she thought. 
 
 What can any man do against a woman who, long ere a hint 
 be given her, has resolved that she never will take one ? 
 
 loris, who thought of his country as Musset did — " Que Jen 
 f;oleiIs de Jidn font Vamour passager " — in the midsummer 
 months looked forward to a romance bright and brief as the lile 
 of the fireflies amongst the corn ; a midsummer madness befit- 
 ting the months when the oleander burns on the world like fire, 
 and the nightingales sing imder flowering myrtles. But Lady 
 Joan knew better. 
 
FRIENDSniP. 91 
 
 The castle was ancient, honourable, majestic: like an old 
 greybeard who has lived long enongli to see his children and 
 friends all die before him. These old places, grand with the art 
 and architecture of a statelier and freer time than ours, touch 
 strangely poets, artists, thinkers — asses, as the Lady Joan 
 "would have said. 
 
 Its antiquity could not " scare " her, nor its sanctity silence 
 her. • 
 
 She entered on its possession with the zeal of an encamping 
 gipsy and the ruthlessness of an army of occupation. 
 
 She drew on a big pair of i;utauued boots, strode over the 
 lands, marked the waste there was, and said to herself that she 
 would soon alter all that. Before the summer was gone she had 
 installed herselt mistress there; before the winter had come 
 she had taught its master that she meant to be mistress and 
 master both. When next the springtime came round she did 
 not consult his pleasure, or feel any necessity for hysterics ; she 
 took for gi-anted that she should go to Fiordelisa. 
 
 She did go. This time Mr. Challoner accompanied her, and 
 took with him some packets of English seeds and the model of a 
 kitchen boiler. 
 
 The family installed itself at Fiordelisa audaciously as 
 Tchiganes, sagaciously as Prussians. They cut walks, levelled 
 trees, made the garden a fair imitation of the gravelled 
 parallelograms of South Kensington, closed in the loggia with 
 doors of coloured glass as nearly like a railway station as they 
 could manage to make them ; asked out Euglish and Americans 
 to dinner and breakfast, and began to interest themselves in 
 breeding pigs and chickens. 
 
 " We've done so much for the old place ! " said the Lady 
 Joan, working a chair-cover, while her husband brought up 
 Tegetmeier on Poultry. 
 
 " L'audace, Vaudace, toujours de I'audace," was her motto; 
 and it is wonderful how very far one may manage to go by a 
 diligent adherence to it in the world, as in war. 
 
 Five years and more had now passed by since that first mid- 
 summer day when she had gone up as an occupant to Fiordelisa, 
 and had turned out all the old pottery, and tapestries, and 
 artistic lumber it was full of, with the zeal and zest of a 
 victorious trooper ransacking a wine-cellar ; and by this time 
 the Lady Joan honestly considered herself the legitimate occu- 
 pant of it, and would have looked on the establishment of any 
 more lawful mistress there as an invasion of her rights as grave 
 as an Irish peasant regards a writ of evictment to be. 
 
 She had stuck her staff in the ground at Fiordelisa, and 
 never henceforth discoursed of it but as hers. When obliged to 
 acknowledge the fact of its master's presence and possession 
 
92 FBIENDSEIF. 
 
 she would allude to " poor lo " airily, as though he could not 
 have afforded a dinner unless they had been there to give 
 him one. 
 
 She set the china that she meant to sell on the shelves, 
 spread the carpets he paid for on the floors, and then talked of 
 how much she had done for him ; invited people under his roof, 
 and got credit for " such hospitality ; " gave away his fruits, and 
 eggs, and flowers, and wines, and was cited as "so generous;" 
 and, further, amused herself throughout the spring with having 
 out there to dine and to sleep every good-looking man who 
 lingered in Eome and was glad to come and smoke under the 
 stars in the old grey cortile. 
 
 Fiction is a greyhound and Truth is a snail. She set Fiction 
 flying over the course. She had, indeed, once ordered out from 
 England at her own expense two peach-trees and a Berkshire 
 pig. It was all she ever had done; but, as everybody ate a 
 peach and tasted the ham, and heard what she had done, every- 
 body took all the rest for granted. 
 
 " 1 do so love my bees, and my beasts, and my pigs, and my 
 poultry ! " she herself would echo gushingly to the goody-goodies, 
 to whom she was careful to ajDi^ear as a kind of Harriet Martineau 
 ■with a model farm of four (thousand) acres that was always, 
 sleeping or waking, upon her mind. 
 
 "I am sure, most laudable," said the goody-goodies, quite 
 impressed with the spectacle of a person born a Perth-Douglas 
 absorbing herself in bees, and beasts, and j)igs, and poultry. 
 Higher society, less reverent and more debonnuire, laughed till 
 it cried. But, whether leaving admiration or ridicule behind 
 her, to Fiordelisa she went when the April narcissus was in 
 bloom. She conceived a kind of passion for the place, it was so 
 useful to her. 
 
 That dual character in her, which Voightel had chuckled 
 over, had full luxury of expansion both ways at Fiordelisa ; all 
 the various and opposing passions of her nature found vent 
 therein at Fiordelisa — she could be Cleopatra at sunset and a 
 huckster at sunrise. 
 
 With a guitar on her knee and amorous eyes shining under 
 the passion-flowers in the court by moonlight, one side of her 
 temperament had its sport and play; with her skirts tucked 
 about her knees, a memorandum-book in her hand, and a fierce 
 vigilance in every one of her searching glances, striding through 
 granaries, wine-cellars, and cattle-stalls; pursuing missing cen- 
 times through columns of figures, and making the bailiff 
 wretched for a lost franc, the other side of lier had its fullest 
 and sweetest sway also. 
 
 To be sure, she never reflected that one view of her might 
 spoil the other to the person by whose permission she was there ; 
 
FBIENBSniP. 93 
 
 she never reflected that the prosaic God of Business might take 
 Love by the shoulders and turn him out of doors. 
 
 If Antony had seen Cleopatra squabbhng for a coin over a 
 basket of fish or a basket of dates, he might probably have 
 recovered his senses and avoided Actium. 
 
 But she did not think of this. 
 
 She had become so used to loris, and so certain of her 
 dominion over him, that she had altogether ceased to preserve 
 for him those gi'aces of appearance which the -woman who is 
 truly wise never neglects before the man whose passion she 
 desires to keep alive. 
 
 Familiarity breeds contempt in the lover, as in the servant. 
 
 Lady Joan's vanity made her too forgetful of one supreme 
 truth — that the longest absence is less perilous to love than the 
 terrible trials of incessant proximity. 
 
 She forgot that love likes to preserve its illusions, and that it 
 will bear better all the sharpest deprivations in the world than 
 it will the cruel tests of an unlovely and unveiled intercourse. 
 
 She had committed the greatest error of all : she had let him 
 be disenchanted by familiarity. Passion will pardon rage, will 
 survive absence, will forgive infidelity, will even thrive on out- 
 rage, and will often condone a crime; but when it dies of 
 familiarity it is dead for ever and aye. 
 
 The Lady Joan in her Oriental jewellery and her Asiatic 
 dresses was a woman for Velasquez to paint, and most men 
 to admire, and some to sigh for with ardour and desire. But 
 the Lady Joan with thick untanned leather boots on, hair pulled 
 tight from her face, and a grey skirt tucked up about her legs, 
 or astride upon a donkey in a waterproof in muddy weather, 
 counting the artichokes and tomatoes before they went to market 
 • — Lady Joan was not a woman to adore or to portray; and 
 loris, artist as Nature had made him, and lover as he was ex- 
 pected to be, opening his window in the lovely rosy dawn and 
 looking down on her thus occupied, would sigh and wonder 
 whatever he had seen — why ever he had sacrificed himself; — 
 and so, tired, and nerveless, and discontented, and afraid to 
 show his discontent, he would go down his staircase and into 
 the radiant balmy morning that itself outshone all the 
 dreams of all the poets, and would hear her delighted voice 
 ring out, " Seven robins and a nightingale shot before break- 
 fast, lo! "What do you think of that?" and dared not say 
 what he thought of it, but had to smile and praise her 
 skill, and look at the little pretty ruffled blood-stained heap of 
 feathers ; and submit to have the hand that was black with the 
 cartridges passed through his arm to draw him into the loggia, 
 where the morning meal was spread ; and had to take his coffee 
 and fruit seasoned with stories of how Nannia had been caught 
 
94 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 sneaking off with a stolen cabbage, and how Pepe had been 
 detected filling his pockets with green peas as he had weighed 
 them ; and all the while to himself watched drearily the silver 
 threads that the light found out in his mistress's hair, and 
 wondered wliy she dressed so shabbily because she was in the 
 country, and thought how large her hand looked as it plunged 
 amongst the strawberries, and felt vaguely that this was not the 
 companion fitting to that old sunlit, air-swept, flower-scented 
 loggia, with the roses round its columns, and beyond its arches 
 the wide blue hills. 
 
 But she did not dream of this ; she dug and planted, and 
 bought and sold, and planned and bargained ; she kept a sharp 
 eye on the weights and measures, she ran up model styes and 
 breeding-pens ; she got up at five to count the potatoes and 
 melons, the cherries and cabbages that went to the market ; she 
 rode his horses, and ordered his bailiffs, and strode about in grey 
 linen and big boots, and did on the whole most admirably— for 
 herself. 
 
 No doubt if he had overheard her explaining to her English 
 and Americans how all this was done only out of charity, to 
 help, " poor lo," it would all have speedily come to an end. But 
 then he never did hear — except just what was meant for his 
 ear. 
 
 He had an uncomfortable feeling that it was all disagreeable, 
 and tedious, and noisy ; and he prized the affection of his peasants 
 and farmers, and their irritation under the new reign oppressed 
 and saddened him. In his remembrance there might have been 
 a great deal of waste, but there was a great deal of feudal affec- 
 tion. In other years at his annual visits there had been only 
 smiles, laughter, music, rejoicing ; now there were often rebellion, 
 discontent, imprecations, and sullen silence. 
 
 Of course, however, she, like all other great improvers, was 
 not to be daunted by such a trivial thing as poor folks' devotion 
 and mere clinging to old landmarks. She brought her new 
 brooms and swept away with them vigorously ; and if the brooms 
 caught at such old trumpery tapestries as custom, tradition, 
 and loyalty, and pulled them down in fragments, so much the 
 better, she thought ; she cared for no old rubbish— that wouldn't 
 sell again. 
 
 He sighed and let her sweep on. 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. Challoner was always careful to set the seal 
 of his presence, with his flower seeds and his kitchen boilers, on 
 the private life of Fiordelisia, and at the beginning of each 
 summer was always to be duly met with by any passing visitors 
 gravely contemplating his wife's poultry-pens or solemnly 
 watering his own stove-plants, and in his pursuit of those 
 innocent occupations would always find some occasion to say, in 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 95 
 
 ao abstracted manner, leaning over a model pig-stye, " Yes, yes, 
 we have done a good deal for the place; my wife is never so 
 Lappy as when she is doing good ; yes, we brought over those 
 Berkshires. Notliing like English breed, nothing." 
 
 Society thought Mr. Challoncr very amiable and strangely 
 blind. 
 
 Mr. Challoner suffered neither from amiability nor blindness. 
 He quarrelled incessantly with his wife about everything else, 
 little and large ; but he never quarrelled about loiis. 
 
 What could a blade of steel in a wintry dawn have given Mr. 
 Glialloner of vengeance comparable to that which he smiled 
 grimly over as he saw another man, daily and hourly, bullied, 
 ridiculed, stormed at, ordered about, driven to account for 
 every absent hour, and deprived of every vestige of a will of 
 his own V 
 
 ]\Ir. Challoner was like the Dauphin who kept the luxury of 
 a whipping-boy. 
 
 Yengeance ! — 
 
 " N'allons pas clierclicr k fairo une querelle 
 Pour un alfront qui n'est que pure bagatelle ! " 
 
 There was no one living on earth to whom Mr. Challoner 
 owed so much comfort as he did to loris. And, indeed, he 
 would say, with quite a cordial ring in his voice, " loris ? Oh, 
 a very good fellow — the best friend we have ! " 
 
 A quiet, excellent woman, who was his father's widow and 
 no relation to him, but whom he called his " mother," because it 
 is always so respectable to have a mother, would occasionally, on 
 visiting at the Casa Challoner, observe with disquietude the 
 Lady Joan disporting herself in a break full of masks on Giovcdi 
 Grasso, or going out shooting, with her gun, and her hessiaus, 
 and her Eomau nobles ; and on svich occasions old Mrs. Chal- 
 loner would murmur to the master of the establishment, " Puir 
 laddie ! it's a great name and a braw house to have married into, 
 and that there's no denying ; but I'm thinking, my poor Eobcrt, 
 that you have paid a muckle price for the gentility." 
 
 " Joan has high spirits ; it is merely high spirits," Mr. Chal- 
 loner would return, with an austerity that closed the dis- 
 cussion. 
 
 For Jlr. Challoncr never told anybody w-hat price he had 
 paid, whether muckle or micklo. He had never given any 
 living soul the right to say that he was other than a most con- 
 tented husband. 
 
 He had made his bargain with his eyes open, and the bargain 
 had been that he was to keep his eyes shut. Aud he fulfilled it 
 loyally. 
 
 Now and then he winced — now aud then he smiled. But it 
 
96 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 was only to himself. Lady Joan, who quarrelled with him to 
 his face, and railed at him behind his back, could not resist a 
 sort of admiration for his impassibility. " The creature might 
 be cut out of wood 1 " she said often. Now, a wooden husband 
 is the most convenient of all lay figures. 
 
 This winter afternoon the real master of Fiordelisa, with his 
 guest, strolled upward by the hill-paths bordered with aloe and 
 cactus, and shaded with cereus and cistus, towards the yet 
 higher lands of Fiordelisa, where the stone-pines reigned alone 
 with the tall hlac heather at their feet. 
 
 He strove to understand, to interest, and to amuse Etoile, 
 and he succeeded. He had at command graceful thoughts and 
 picturesque diction ; he loved art, and had studied it pro- 
 foundly. He had been irritated because this stranger, herself 
 eminent in the world's sight, seemed to think him a slave with- 
 out power or purpose, and the unlikeness of her to any other 
 woman that he had ever known stung him to interest and moved 
 him to exertion. 
 
 loris, like many men before him, had sunk into an existence 
 in which his mind had no share. 
 
 It was as nearly brainless as a naturally intelligent man's life 
 can ever be. 
 
 To obey all his ruler's desires ; to attend to the thousand and 
 one trivialities that she daily imposed ; to see that what she 
 ordered was done, and what she wanted found ; to follow her 
 hither and thither ; to avert the tempest of her temper by pre- 
 vision of her wishes, and to be careful that his servants, his 
 horses, his house, his patience, his presence, his endurance, his 
 exertions were all ready to the moment that she might call on 
 them — all this made his day one incessant and joyless routine of 
 obedience. He woke in the morning with the dreary round 
 before him, and he lay down at night seeing nothing better for 
 the morrow, or for fifty hundred other morrows, if he lived long 
 enough to have them dawn on him. Such a life killed his 
 intelligence. The pure impersonal efforts of the mind may be 
 heightened by a great joy and may be deepened by a great sorrow ; 
 but a life of perpetual triviality, yet of perpetual conflict — a life, 
 in a word, which has been condensed into the one common com- 
 prehensive word of ivorry — does so irritate and yet benumb the 
 faculties that all intellectual effort dies out under it. It had 
 been so with him. 
 
 Lady Joan was no fool ; but she was one of those women who 
 lower all they touch more than many fools. 
 
 No dehcate thought could live under one of her loud laughs ; 
 no impersonal discussion could survive her boisterous person- 
 alities. Art itself looked ridiculous beside her pretentious 
 patronage of it and mercenary traffic in it. And the obliquity 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 97 
 
 of her mental vision seemed to communicate itself to those 
 about her till in her presence a praying angel of IMino da 
 Fiesole's soilless marble looked no better than a squat bonze 
 from a Chinese temple. As there are women who exalt all that 
 conios iu contact with them, so did she lower all things. 
 
 It was not her fault. ISature had made her so. 
 
 But the effect on the mind of loris had been that of smoke 
 on painting : it had dulled all the colour and obscured all the 
 lines. 
 
 A certain lassitude crossed by a certain irritation had grown 
 on him ; and the scholarship of his early youth, and the pro- 
 ficiency of art which had distinguished him at one time, had died 
 down into silence and obscurity. 
 
 They were not needed for the wrangles of the house he fre- 
 quented, and the scenes of barter that he was called upon to 
 assist at in antiquity shops. 
 
 With Etoile they awoke. For the man who is a scholar by 
 culture will never altogether lose delight in it, and the temper 
 that is born with the poetic element in it will never absolutely 
 fail to answer to the right touch. It becomes like a harp whose 
 silver strings ai-e covered with dust, entangled, jarred, and 
 mute; but are still silver, and still keep song in them when 
 they are struck aright. 
 
 Not such a song, indeed, as when the chords first were 
 strung, for time and wrong usage have done much to 
 mar them; but still a song — a song sadder than tears some- 
 times. 
 
 The hill-paths were steep and the way long, but it seemed to 
 have been short to them both, when at last they reached the 
 pine-wood, where Eoccn di Papa was visible. High above hung 
 the little grey tower oi the rock where Juno once stood to watch 
 how the battle went ; at least, we believe so, if we hearken to 
 Virgil ; and if we will not believe Virgil what right have we in 
 Kome at all ? 
 
 The sun was bright on the Volscian hills, and the snow on 
 the line of the Leonessa and on the heights of the Sal>ine moun- 
 tains glowed like an opal in the light. The low lands looked 
 dusky and bronze-hued from clouds that hung above them, and 
 a ])urple cloud shrouded the wild dark mountain of Soracte and 
 floated midway between earth and heaven — far, far away was a 
 glancing line that showed where the sea was beating on the 
 sad sands by Ostia; and aloft, white and stern as an Alp, rose 
 Monte Gennaro, who wraps his mantle of frost around him till 
 the maize is tall in the plains, and thi; girls are singing amongst 
 the poppies. And in the centre of it all was Eome, with the 
 cross of St. Peter's clear against the light, and all the vast 
 cloud-world around it. 
 
98 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 There is no view on the earth like this from one of the 
 heights of the mountains of Rome. 
 
 Etoile looked and was silent. The great tears gathered in 
 her eyes, but did not fall. 
 
 He watched her. 
 
 "You feel things too much," he said softly. 
 
 She had forgotten him ; and she looked up with the surprise 
 of a sleeper awakened from a dream. 
 
 " Oh nOj I think not," she answered him. " I pity those to 
 whom the world is not so beautiful as it is to me." 
 
 " And yet there are tears in your eyes." 
 
 " Are there ? I cannot tell you — you, who have always lived 
 here, cannot know, I think — all that one feels in looking so on 
 Eome. One seems to see as God sees— all the hosts of the dead 
 arise." 
 
 He was silent. The words moved him. He bowed his head 
 and stood in silence, like one who will not break in upon a 
 woman, at prayer. 
 
 At that moment his name echoed shrilly on the clear air. 
 He started and listened. 
 
 " Forgive me," he said quickly. " She is calling us. In a 
 little while it will be dark." 
 
 " Where on earth have you been ? " said the Lady Joan, with 
 her face black as a lowering thundercloud as it loomed upon 
 them through the lines of the tall polished laurel trees. " Where 
 on earth have you been, lo ? The idea of climbing np here ! 
 and without me! I asked for you everywhere. The coffee is 
 cold, and we shall have it pitch-dark to drive home; and there 
 is that young idiot's opera to-night. What could you be doing 
 up here all this time ? " 
 
 " We have consoled Imperator ; and we have trodden in the 
 steps of Juno," Etoile made answer for him ; and she looked 
 Lady Joan straight in the eyes as she spoke. 
 
 There was something in the look of contempt and of 
 challenge : she herself was unconscious of it, but the other was 
 alive to it. 
 
 " If she dare to cross me here ! " thought Lady Joan ; and 
 her brow darkened in storm and her eyes glittered till they were 
 green as an angry cat's. She was sullen and silent as they 
 descended to the house and drank the coffee which was awaiting 
 them in the square stone court. 
 
 Fiordelisa was the apple of her eye. 
 
 It was not, perhaps, very dignified work — squabbling with 
 peasantry, counting potatoes and beans, ousting old folks from 
 little territorial rights, keeping a sharp eye on the olive-presses 
 and the wine-tubs, and hunting up the Cochin China eggs out of 
 the straw and thatch. 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 99 
 
 But what would you ? 
 
 Jolni Vaticos, Emperor here iu Rome, gave his wife a costly 
 crown of emeralds and diamonds that was bought with the 
 ]iroceeds of his poultry, and why should not the hens of 
 Fiordelisa lay rings of sapphire and earrings of turquoises ? 
 
 Lady Joan pulled on her thick driving-gloves with a jcik 
 before the coffee was fairly drunk. loris and Etoile were talk- 
 ing gaily and laughing together, 
 
 "I am sorry to hurry you," she said coldly. "But tlio 
 moment the sun goes down the nights are so bitter. And lo 
 has a fancy, you know, for us to hear the new opera. A boy, 
 who lived in a dirty little poking town of the Maremma, has 
 dreamt that he is Mozart and Eossini combined, and lo devoutly 
 believes in him. lo's geese are all swans." 
 
 " A more amiable optimism, at any rate, than the common 
 one, which swears there are no swans at all — only a few ducks 
 in a pond," said Etoile, taking her coffee from him. 
 
 She smiled at him as she spoke. Almost insensibly she felt 
 drawn into defending him against these persistent mockeries, 
 which had so little wit or wisdom in them. 
 
 "Perhaps we are only ducks," she added. "But we are 
 always grateful to anybody who will believe in our snowy 
 plumage, and who will vow for us that our stagnant little pond 
 of vanity is a lake in which the mountains of the world are 
 mirrored. Who is this young composer come out of the 
 Maremma ? " 
 
 "A boy of great genius," said loris; "very yoting — only 
 twenty-two. He has had no education, except a year in Bologna ; 
 but he has, with many faults, many excellences. This is his 
 first opera. It is on the theme of Persephone. Parts of it are 
 
 very fine; and I think the choral renderings " 
 
 " It is hideous rubbish," said Lady Joan, roughly. " Just 
 singsong out of Verdi and Gounod, and the 'infernal ' part of it 
 all borrowed wholesale out of ' Lohengrin ' — growl, growl, growl 
 — bang, bang, bang — that's all. Besides, it's been done in Orpltci 
 aux Enfers." 
 
 " That is not quite the same thing," said loris, with an 
 involuntary smile. 
 
 " The same story," sajd Lady Joan confidently, turning to 
 Etoile. " The opera's stuff. But the boy happened to get hold 
 of lo last year ; and lo thinks he knows counterpoint and all 
 that ; and so he's flattered, and believes in the trash, and uses 
 all his influence to get the opera put on the stage of the Apollo. 
 I dare say, if the truth were known, the dresses and things have 
 come out of his own pocket. If he'd only a crust he'd give it to 
 the first creature that squealed out for it. Oh, you know you 
 would, To, if I didn't keep you straight. Give me a cigar. No, 
 
100 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 there's no time for more coffee. See they put those grapes in ; 
 I want them for the Bishop of Melita. And they're to kill that 
 sheep for me to-morrow. Mind Tista don't forget. And they'd 
 better shoot a few hares and send me them with the mntton in 
 the morning ; there's that big dinner we have to-morrow, and 
 Marjory wants one to jug for her father. And mind you tell the 
 man to' get that fence done by Monday ; and if the blacksmitli 
 don't come and put the padlocks on those gates directly I won't 
 pay him one farthing — not one farthing ! " 
 
 " If I didn't see to the things he never would," she explained 
 as she took the reins of the ponies. " He'd let people dawdle on 
 for ever, and pay 'em just the same for doing nothing. They 
 know I won't stand that nonsense. I've had all the gates put up 
 and padlocked : the whole land used to lie open." 
 
 " The people here must be very fond of you," said Etoile. 
 
 Lady Joan did not feel the satire. 
 
 " Oh, I don't know. They ought to be. I physic 'em when 
 they're ill. Such wry faces they pull ! Of course I'm very kind 
 to 'em all ; but first of all one must make a thing pay — in lo's 
 interests, you know." 
 
 " And you are of opinion with Zoroaster that to reap the earth 
 with profit is of more merit than to repeat — or win — ten thousand 
 prayers ? " 
 
 " I am rather of Plutarch's," said loris, joining them, and 
 stroking his ponies. 
 
 "Was Plutarch an ass, then?" asked the Lady Joan witli 
 supreme scorn. 
 
 " You would have thonght him so; he could never bring 
 himself to sell in its old age the ox which in its youth had served 
 him faithfully. Voila tout." 
 
 " That is just the sort of sentimental stuff' to please you. 
 The ox would make very good beef," retorted the Lady Joan. 
 " Mind ! my sables are over the wheel." 
 
 She cut the ponies sharply over their heads with the whip 
 and started them off full gallop down the rugged slope, leaving 
 their master to spring up behind as best he might. The ponies 
 were his own : spirited little cobs from Friuli, with jingling silver 
 bells, and swinging foxes' tails hung at their ears ; but no sort 
 of possession was he allowed to enjoy of them. 
 
 " I want Grillo and Pippo to-day," he would say of a morning ; 
 and his groom would answer, " I am very sorry, Excellence, but 
 the Signora has ordered them." loris had to shrug his shoulders 
 and see his ponies depart to the Casa Challoner. Why did ho 
 never rebel ? He began to ask it of himself, leaning with hi.s 
 arms on the front seat of the carriage, looking at the profile of 
 Etoile before him in the twilight. 
 
 "I do so wish you would come to the theatre to-night. rK> 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 101 
 
 change your mind. There are only tlio Ph'nh'mmons at dinner- 
 bores, I know; but we should cut it short with the Opera," 
 urged Lady Joan as she stopped the ponies to set her guest 
 down in the Quirinal Square, and pressed an invitation which 
 she knew was quite safe, since she had chanced to hear that 
 Etoile would pass that evening with the Princess Vera, who had 
 ■•'two or three people" — i.e., about two or three hundred. 
 
 " The idea of her going to Princess Vera's!" she muttered as 
 she drove away. " Preposterous ! " 
 
 " Why that ? " said loris, lighting a cigar, as the ponies dashed 
 down the street of Four Fountains. 
 
 "Good gracious, lo! can you want to ask? But Princess 
 Vera will know any artistic trash that takes her fancy — rude ar 
 she can be to every respectable person." 
 
 And she slashed Pippo across the ears again. She herselt 
 was among the respectable persons whom the Princess Vera 
 treated with a calm ignorance of their existence very exasperating. 
 
 The ponies rattled up the steep stones to her house; and her 
 husband, who was just then going in at the door, stopped, aided 
 loris to unload her furs, and hoped they had had a pleasant day 
 at Fiordelisa. 
 
 "Are you disposed to let Lady Norwich have your tur- 
 quoises '? " asked Mr. Challoner, ten minutes later, following his 
 wife into the privacy of her own room. 
 
 " Yes, she may have 'em. I only bought them to sell again." 
 
 "I thought of saying two thousand fiancs ? " 
 
 " Yes— that won't be bad. I gave eight hundred ; but then 
 the woman was hard up at Homburg, you remember, and glad 
 to let 'em go cheap. I grudge 'em to that old cat. Mind, she 
 thinks we brought 'em from Persia, and had 'em polished in 
 Vienna." 
 
 " You'll never do better with them : I think it is a very good 
 price." 
 
 " Tolerable. And they don't suit me. Bine's for blondes. 
 Besides, they're nasty uncertain things : one never knows they 
 won't change colour. What about the Urbino jar ? " 
 
 " I got it. It is genuine. An incomparable bit. You always 
 make horrible mistakes, but you did not blunder there. The 
 fellow had no idea of the value of it. I bought it like a common 
 bit of kitchen pottery." 
 
 " Yes, I know — the man kept his sugar in it." 
 
 "By the way, old O'Glennamaddy wants an antique altar- 
 screen." 
 
 " Very well. We haven't one ; but Mimo shall draw one, and 
 little Faello can carve it. It can be ready in twenty days. O'Glon 
 is a goose — he'd take anything." 
 
 " Yes. But people are not all geese that will go to visit him. 
 Remember that. You had best show him good things." 
 
102 FEIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Don't you preach. I know O'Glen as I do my alphabet. 
 He used to give me burnt-almonds when I was a baby. I say — 
 mind you go yourself about that little Pieta to that man in 
 Trastevere. lo was going, but I wouldn't let him ; he never beats 
 the people down ; and he talks some rubbish about the man's 
 wife being ill with the ague — as if that had anything to do with 
 it ! That's just like lo. He bought a little plate of Gubbio ware 
 yesterday ; the woman that owned it asked him fifteen francs, 
 and he went and gave her seventy — seventy! — ^jnst because the 
 thing was worth it — so he said ; but I believe it was only because 
 she was crying about her landlord pressing for rent. That's just 
 like lo — cry a little, and his hand goes in his pocket in a second." 
 
 Mr. Challoner smiled grimly. 
 
 His wife was very fond of airing her contempt for her friend's 
 weaknesses before him. Not that there was the slightest occasion 
 to do so. Mr. Challoner had left all remnants of jealousy long 
 buried in the delta of Orontes and Euphrates, of Abana and 
 Pharphar. And besides, there was such perfect confidence 
 between his wife and himself that there was never any need for 
 explanations, 
 
 " I have boundless trust in her," he would say austerely with 
 injured dignity if some old friend, too officious, ventured to hint 
 that Lady Joan was a little — a little — perhaps a little too original. 
 And, like all people who have boundless trust, he would shut his 
 eyes when bidden. 
 
 This kind of business-conference was a closer tie between them 
 than any the marriage-altar could forge, and at discussions of 
 this sort they were always good friends, finding each other's 
 views and principles often identical. Indeed, so sound w^ere his 
 wife's ideas about business, that Mr. Challoner could use his pet 
 phrase with perect veracity when speaking of her. 
 
 " You'll come to the Opera to-night ? " asked the Lady Joan 
 now. 
 
 "No— no." 
 
 " Oh, you'd better. The Norwiches will be there, and that 
 old cat Plinlimmon is coming with us. They'll all talk if you 
 don't." 
 
 " Very well," said Mr. Challoner : he was always resigned to 
 self-sacrifice for the piiblic good. " You told them at Fiordelisa 
 that I should bring Lord Norwich up to shoot on Monday ? " 
 
 " Yes. Mind, though ; Norwich thinks we've bought the 
 place. You'd better make a party and take up a cold luncheon. 
 Echeance will go, and Plunkett, and Gualdro Malestrina, and 
 perhaps some of the attaches would if you asked 'em, though I 
 hate all that OhanceUerie lot — stiff as lookers ! By-the-by, since 
 Ave put up the trespass-boards all round, the game's in much 
 better order. lo protests, and says the people will knife him for 
 
FlilENDSniP. 103 
 
 it some day, because they've always netted the hares and birds 
 as they wanted them ; but tluit's all rubbish, I think. Anyhow, 
 they shan't get a head of game if I can help it. There's such 
 heaps of partridges ! I shall have 'cm trapped for market when 
 we've had the pick of the shooting. 1 wish you'd write to England 
 about those pigs ; and tell 'em to send out some pink kidney 
 potatoes for planting — the Early Emilys are the best. lo settled 
 that bill for the last, and never struck the wharf-duties off it, 
 though I told him the shipper ought to pay them; but he's 
 always so careless about money. That's the door-bell, isn't it ? 
 — that horrid Plinlimmon woman — she's got up like a parrot, 
 green and red and yellow and blue, I dare say. What a nuisance 
 it is to have to do the polite ! Go in and say all sorts of things 
 to her while I dress." 
 
 Mr. Challoner went in, obedient, and welcomed the Plinlim- 
 mons, who were very rich people, who had made a vast fortune 
 by a new kind of candle, warranted never to melt or to splutter, 
 and fulfilling its warranty nobly. He apologised for his wife's 
 tardy ai^pearance, and quite affected the Plinlimmons, who were 
 simple, sentimental folks, oppressed with the extent of their 
 own wealth and their own ignorance, by the tender manner in 
 which he regretted his wife's imprudence in being out so late in 
 the cold, thereby endangering her lungs and his happiness — but 
 she was so wilful, and so fond of art, and so charitable — and she 
 had been visiting a poor painter, who had been laid up with 
 fever, etc., etc., etc. 
 
 From painters to painting is a natural transition, and led 
 naturally to the sight of some landscapes which were on sale for 
 a charity, and which the Plinlimmons fell in love with, and 
 begged might be sent to them at the Hotel Constantia ; and so 
 the time was whiled away until the Lady Joan entered, radiant 
 in amber, and black lace, and Etruscan ornaments, and greeted 
 her dearest Mrs. Plinlimmon with that cordial and honest 
 warmth which was her greatest attraction to shy women and 
 timid men. 
 
 Then there entered silently without announcement one whom 
 Mr. Challoner presented to the good Monmouthshire folks aloud 
 as " our valued friend — the Prince loris," and, with a sotto voce 
 whisijer, " A Spanish duke as well as a Eoman prince — a godson 
 of the Pope's." 
 
 And the valued friend bowed with a calm, ceremonious gi-ace 
 not common in Monmouthshire, and said some courteous phrases 
 in French, and then fell back and gazed at Mrs. Plinlimmon in 
 her gorgeous attire with grave amazement, and murmured to 
 himself, " Dio mio I Dio mio 1 " 
 
 " You must be very civil to 'em ; they're awfully rich— made 
 pots of money by candles," whispered Lady Joan in his ear as 
 she bade him fasten her bracelet. 
 
104 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 He had learned what people who were rich meant in the Casa 
 Challoner, and was silent. 
 
 He was ordered to give his arm to the Pliulimmon daughter, 
 who had red hair, and was dressed in green ; and he failed to 
 comprehend a word of her French, and wished those stupid, ill- 
 dressed islanders would not come to bore him ; and felt more 
 tired all through the dinner than he had ever done in all his 
 life. 
 
 " How absent you are, lo ! " said Lady Joan sharply as the 
 Fiordelisa woodcocks went round. 
 
 " loris is thinking of Mademoiselle Etoile," said Mr. Chal- 
 loner, with a grim smile. " You have often heard of Mademoiselle 
 Etoile, no doubt, Mrs. Plinlimmon ? " 
 
 And they discussed Mademoiselle Etoile with asperity, as 
 became people at whose table she had dined six nights before. 
 
 loris sat silent, with a flush on his face. 
 
 Lady Joan looked at him from time to time with suspicion — ■ 
 it was not possible that he was really thinking about anything 
 but herself? 
 
 " What is the matter with you to-night ? " she muttered 
 roughly as she rose to go to the Opera. 
 
 loris shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "Oh, ma cfiere! when you weigh me to the earth with a 
 red-haired demoiselle, with teeth like a wild boar's and the 
 bones of a giantess ! " 
 
 Lady Joan laughed and told him to hold his tongue ; they 
 were as rich as Crcesus. Then, quite satisfied, she let him fold 
 her cashmeres about her and take her to the carriage. 
 
 A very vain woman is always so easily lulled into content- 
 ment. 
 
 She ridiculed every note of the " Persephone " all the way 
 through it, because it amused her to do so, and because she had 
 begrudged the money he had spent in helping the boy-composer 
 of it. But loris, sitting in the shadow, scarcely heard her. He 
 was thinking of the sunset on the hill under Eocca di Papa. 
 
 He was glad when the tedious evening drew to its close and 
 left him free. 
 
 Meantime the Pliulimmons went to their hotel, enchanted 
 with having met a live Italian Prince, and such attention from 
 so charming a household, and when they should depart to be in 
 time for the assembling of Parliament (Plinlimmon being- 
 member for a borough), would tell everybody that the Casa 
 Challoner was the most delightful house in Rome. To shy 
 people the Lady Joan's ardent cordiality was unspeakably 
 precious, and to ignorant people her extensive artistic allusions 
 were unspeakably imposing ; besides, she was really a Perth- 
 Douglas. To nervous persons who have made candles such a 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 105 
 
 union of rank and good-nature as she presented was altogether 
 
 irresistible. 
 
 " Yes, yes ; they were chosen for us by a friend of ours, L;ifly 
 Joan Cluilloner; she'd just got the like for her own cousin, the 
 Countess of Hebrides," Mrs. Pliulimmon would say before ran y 
 obj'^icts of Italian art in her London reception rooms ; and wo ild 
 feel hapjiy and glorious in the possession alike of high art and 
 high acquaintances. Such general felicity could a clever woman 
 diifuse only by smiling and selling a few trifles. 
 
 The Lady Joan was catholic in her sympathies in society, 
 and obeyed the mandate of Edward the Third to his ladyelovc — 
 
 " Bid her be free and general as the sun, 
 Who smiles upon the basest weed that grows 
 As lovingly as on the fragrant rose." 
 
 For the Lady Joan never forgot that there are weeds by 
 which an attentive gatherer has before this discovered a vein of 
 gold in common soil, or found a fortune in a pool of borax. 
 
 Lady Joan knew that after all it is Vinfiniment petit that is 
 infinitely great. 
 
 A woman like Etoile will be blind to this. She will be touched 
 instantly by pain ; she will be moved to quick charity ; she will 
 be capable of strong deed and deep thought ; she will answer 
 trust or appeal as a golden harp the player's touch ; but the 
 small things of life will pass by her — what is antipathetic to her 
 she will offend by unconscious neglect, what is distasteful to her 
 she will turn hostile by careless disdain ; she will go through 
 the world doing good where she can, cleaving to what seems to 
 her to be truth, and seeking unwittingly only what responds 
 to her own temperament ; so the world is set thick with foes for 
 her, as the path of the jungle with snakes. 
 
 Lady Joan was a proud woman in her own odd fashion, and 
 it hurt her pride bitterly sometimes to do so much homage to 
 the Infiniment Petit ; but she did do it, and she secured the 
 suffrages of all the little people who wanted to look great, of all 
 the frogs who wanted to be bulls, of all the geese who wanted to 
 be swans, of all the free and enlightened republicans w'ho fle^v to 
 a title as a moth to a light, of all the small gentilities who were 
 nobodies in their own counties at home, but abroad gave th(m- 
 selves airs, and had quite a number of figures to their bank 
 balance — in francs. 
 
 It hurt her pride sorely, yet she did it; and, like everybody 
 who is wise in his own generation, she reaped her reward in 
 kind. 
 
 When the Norwiches dined there on the next night, Lady 
 Joan was different in character. The Norwich people were 
 great, solemn, stupid, and of vast influence. He was a marquis 
 
106 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 of long descent, she the daughter and sister of a duke ; they 
 were very fussy, very pompous, very proud. Lady Joan dressed 
 herself in rigid black velvet, and only wore a string of pearls ; 
 she was very quiet, looked classic and hanclsome ; talked of her 
 cliild, showed only really good things, set loris at the far end of 
 the table, and spoke, if at all, distantly of Fiordelisa as " a place 
 we go to in the summer. Mr. Challoner likes farming." 
 
 For the Norwiches, and such persons as the Norwiches 
 generally. Lady Joan was as much of a gentlewoman as she 
 could be — nervous a little, a little abrupt, too anxious for 
 approval, and too careful to conciliate, but otherwise quite irre- 
 proachable. 
 
 The Norwiches and such people as the Norwiches, going 
 home, would say : " That daughter of Archie's lives at Eome. 
 Oh yes, we dined with them ; oh yes, grown a very agreeable 
 woman, too — quite quiet ; a good mother, and seems to agree 
 with that person she married very well. Oh, of course we dined 
 there. One must always stand up for a Perth-Douglas." 
 
 Now and then, indeed — for no human mind is so godlike 
 that it can altogether foresee and prevent every accident — the 
 Norwich 23eople, or the people of whom Lord and Lady Norwich 
 were types, were startled by coming suddenly across Lady Joan, 
 without her bib-and-tucker, iete-ci-tete with loris at some'marble 
 tal)le in a Paris cafe, or some green bench at an open-air concert 
 at Spa, when business had obliged her to travel, and she had 
 mingled business with pleasure : the real Lady Joan without 
 meeting-house clothes on ; the real Lady Joan who was Cleopatra 
 by moonlight up at Fiordelisa ; the real Lady Joan who came 
 home from masquerades at five in the morning; the real Lady 
 Joan who sang and smoked, with a dozen men about her, half 
 the night ; and this real Lady Joan would startle the Norwiches 
 and other decorous personages a little unpleasantly and give 
 them a sudden sensation as of sea-sickness. But she would 
 whip on her bib-and-tucker very lightly and quickly, and would 
 explain : " I'm on my way to join Mr. Challoner, and he don't 
 like me to travel alone; so he sent loris to meet me. lo only 
 loses my money and gets the wrong labels stuck on my boxes ; 
 and of course I could travel by myself from here to San Fran- 
 cisco, but Mr. Challoner is always so fidgety." 
 
 So she would adjust bib-and-tucker before the cafe mirror ; 
 and the Norwiches, or the type of persons they represented, 
 would be satisfied, and say to each other, " You see her husband 
 knows it ; there can't be anything in it," and so would go and see 
 her in the winter, though they had had that awkwar'd view of 
 her eating her sorhct with the handsome Italian beside her, 
 smoking his cigarette — a situation which would have ruined any 
 woman of less resources and her ready invention. But in truth 
 
FBIENDSniP. 107 
 
 the Lady Joan -«-as Protean, and slipped in and ont of a dozen 
 Tarious skins as easily as a lizard slips ont of its tail. 
 
 " Why do the great ladies go to see our Prince's dama ? " 
 said many a good lloman matron of them all standing at one of 
 tlio fountains in the wall' to gossip with her neighbours as the 
 carriages swept by to the Casa Challoner. 
 
 They did not understand it. 
 
 They were not aware of the golden rules of good society. 
 
 Paolotto, the baker, had a handsome wife, who betrayed him 
 for Franco, the Swiss Guard, with the fair curls, on duty at the 
 Pope's Palace yonder, and Paolotto's wife set out at nightfall 
 once too often ; and Paolotto following, fell upon fair Franco 
 with a knife, and slew the Swiss ere he had time to point his 
 halberd. That they could understand. That was Eoman and 
 righteous^ust as much so as if it had been the other way, and 
 it had been the Swiss who, by God's grace, had killed the 
 baker. Anything, so that it was man to man, and good steel 
 used about it. 
 
 But then they are barbarians still in old Trastevere. 
 
 If Paolotto had been trained in good society he would have 
 only smiled on Franco of the yellow curls, and asked him to 
 speak fair some upper scullion, so as to get the Paolotto loaves 
 ordered and taken for the Vatican kitchen, and so have warmed 
 his oven if his heart were cold, and made his loaves of lighter 
 weight, having the Papal patronage and blessing. Poor Paolotto 
 drew his knife instead; and as he went through the streets 
 between the Guards to pay his penalty. Lady Cardiff, who was 
 passing by, looked at him and asked what 'he had done; and 
 hearing, smiled and said, " Vengeance is out of date, like flour, 
 niy poor fellow. We have ground bones, and Friendship." 
 
108 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTER XTI. 
 
 " It's lasted some years, but I don't think they can be very well 
 suited/' said Lady Cardiff, watching through her eye-glass the 
 forms of loris and* Mr. Challoner's wife pass away down the vista 
 of her own numerous rooms, after a visit of ceremony on her 
 day. " I don't think they can be very well suited ; he looks like 
 Romance, and she like the Money Market. The Eros he would 
 choose would be a soft, tender god of silence and shadow; and 
 hers is a noisy little Advertising Agent, with handbills and a 
 paste -pot. Very bad form, by the way, to afficher publicly like 
 that." 
 
 Etoile, who had become somewhat intimate with this merci- 
 less speaker, and who had just then entered, reddened a little. 
 
 "You dine often with her. Lady Cardiff!" 
 
 " What a tragical tone of reproach ! No, my dear Comtesse, 
 I don't dine there often. Far from it. I find it too expensive to 
 have to buy a pan or a platter, or some ugly mayot or other every 
 time after dinner — it would come cheaper at Spillman's. She 
 amuses me, tliough. Clever woman — knows how to suit herself 
 to her society, and never knows when she has a rebuff. How 
 useful that is ! " 
 
 " Surely she never suffers one ? " said Etoile. " Every one 
 appears to like her." A sentiment of loyalty to her absent old 
 friend, and to the woman whose hand she took in friendship, 
 moved her to a defence with which her convictions did not go. 
 
 Lady Cardiff smiled and dropped her eye-glass. 
 
 " Oh, of course people like her. She'll bore herself to death. 
 There's no more popular quality. Besides, she has such a tower 
 of strength in that excellent husband of hers. Of all lay figures, 
 there is none on earth so useful as a wooden husband. You 
 should get a wooden husband, my dear, if you want to be left in 
 peace. It is like a comfortable slipper or your dressing-gown 
 after a ball. It is like springs to your carriage. It is like a 
 clever maid who never makes mistakes with your notes or comes 
 without coughing discreetly through your dressing-room. It is 
 like tea, cigarettes, postage-stamps, foot-warmers, eiderdown 
 counterpanes— anything that smooths life, in fact. Young 
 women do not think enough of this. An easy-going husband is 
 the one indispensable comfort of life. He is like a set of sables 
 to you. You may never want to put them on ; still, if the north 
 wind do blow — and one can never tell — how handy they are! 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 109 
 
 You pop into them in a second, and no cold wind can find you 
 out, my dear. Couldn't find you out, if your sliift were in rags 
 iindcrueatli ! Without your husband's countenance, you have 
 scenes. With scenes, you have scandal. Witli scandal, you 
 come to a suit. With a suit, you most likely lose your settle- 
 ments. And without your settlements, where are you in society? 
 With a husband like that wooden creature Mr. Clialloner, you 
 are safe. You need never think about him in any way. His 
 mere existence suffices. He will always be at the bottom of your 
 table and the head of your visiting-cards. That is enough. He 
 will represent Respectability for you, without your being at the 
 trouble to represent Eespectability for yourself. Respectability is 
 a thing of which the shadow is more agreeable than the substance. 
 Happily for us, society only requires the shadow." 
 
 With which Lady Cardiff, wittiest of women by heritage, as 
 her grandmother had frightened Fox and almost awed Sydney 
 Smitb, crossed the room and lighted a fresh cigarette. 
 
 " And love," said Etoile, " where does that come in your 
 arrangements ? " 
 
 " Olives and sweetmeats, my love," said Lady Cardiff. " I 
 am talking of soup and fish and the rCti — and of tlie man who 
 pays for tliem. Young women don't think enougli of the roti. 
 They fall in love with some handsome ass who makes court to 
 them after the style of French fviiilletons, and they believe life 
 will be always moonlight and kisses. Once married, he spends 
 all their money, damns them a dozen times a day, and keeps his 
 smile ■ for other houses, while ten to one he is as jealous as a 
 Turk lo boot. Moonlight and kisses are excellent in their way, 
 but they should come afterwards. They are only olives and 
 sweetmeats. You can't dine on them. Those pretty trifles are 
 for Paolo and Francesca, not for Mr. and Mrs. Rimini. I am 
 very immoral? My dear Comtcsse, I am only practical. An 
 easy husband, who never asks questions or cares where your 
 letters go— ah ! you must have been married to a Lord Cardiff, 
 as I have been, to know the blessing of that. With an easy 
 husband you have all the amusement of doing wrong and all the 
 credit of doing right." 
 
 " In this case, indeed," she went on, " it is that poor loris who 
 pays for the rCti as well as the honbons, which is hardly fair. 
 But that does not matter a bit to Society — Society will always go 
 to dinner so long as the husband sits at the end of the table. 
 Disgraceful? Oh, well, perhap,",; but if the husband like it we 
 have no business to say so. Of course Belisarius knew Antonina 
 once danced in nothing but a zone, and had alwciys had a weak- 
 ness for big biceps ; but if Bclisarius liked to make-believe that 
 Antonina was a piece of ice incarnated, Byzantium was bound to 
 make-believe so too, and to know nothing about the zone and 
 
110 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 the biceps. You do not see it ? Of course not, because you are 
 a great artist and do not trouble your head to understand Society. 
 You live on Olympus. We are mere mortals," 
 
 " That is severe, Lady Cardiff." 
 
 " No, my dear. It must be a great thing to have Cloudland to 
 resort to if Society turn one out of doors ; but to poor ordinary 
 humanity, that has no heaven beyond the card-basket. Society 
 has a weight that you people who are poets never can be brought 
 to comprehend. I believe that you really are all happier if your 
 card-basket is quite empty, because nobody ever disturbs your 
 dreams by ringing at your door-bell." 
 
 The Marchioness of Cardiff loved to call herself an old woman. 
 But she had kept three things of youth in ^her — a fair skin, a 
 frank laugh, and a fresh heart. She was a woman of the world 
 to the tips of her fingers; she had had a life of storm and a hfe 
 of pleasure ; she turned night into day ; she thought no romance 
 worth reading save Balzac's and Fielding's ; she did not mind 
 how wicked you were if only you never were dull. She was 
 majestic and still handsome, and looked like an empress when 
 she put on her diamonds and sailed down a silon. On the other 
 hand, she would laugh till she cried ; she would do an enormity 
 of good and always conceal it ; she honoui-ed unworldliness, when 
 she saw it, though she regarded it as a kind of magnificent 
 dementia; and, with all her sharpness of sight, the veriest im- 
 postor that ever whined of his misery could woo tears to her 
 eyes and money from her purse. She always wintered in Eome, 
 and never lived with Lord Cardiff. He and she were both people 
 who were delightful to everybody else, but not to each other. 
 She was a Tory of the old school and a Legitimist of the first 
 water ; she believed in Divine right, and never could see why 
 the Eeform Bill had been necessary. Nevertheless, Voltaire was 
 her prophet, and Rochefoucauld her breviary ; and though she 
 saw no salvation oiitside the Almanack de Gotha, her quick \yit 
 almost drove her at times near the wind of Democracy. Anomalies 
 are always amusing, and Lady Cardiff was one of the most 
 amusing women in Europe. 
 
 " Smoke. Why don't you smoke ? " she said to Etoile. " Yon 
 make me think of Talleyrand and whist. What a miserable old 
 age you prepare for yourself ! You look gi'ave, via chere Comtessc. 
 What are you thinking about ? " 
 
 "Pardon me. I was thinking of my friend Dorotea. She is 
 blameless, and the world is cruel to her. Yet in these women you 
 talk of the same world makes a jest of dishonour. Why ? It is 
 unjust and capricious." 
 
 " When was the world ever anything hut unjust and capri- 
 cious ? " said Lady Cardiff. " Still, do you mean to tell me, really 
 honestly, sans phrases, that the Duchesse Santorin is faithful to 
 that brute and snendthrift ? " 
 
FRIENDSHIP. Ill 
 
 " Entirely faithful ; entirely blameless — yes." 
 
 " Dear mo ! " 
 
 Lady Cardiff was so amazed that she walked the whole length 
 of her room and back o,gaiu. It was late in the day, and her 
 visitors and courtiers had all departed ; she and Etoile were 
 alone. 
 
 " It 15, no use, you know," she said at last ; " nobody'Il ever 
 believe it." 
 
 " Dorotea's actions are not shaped by what people believe." 
 
 " Dear me ! " said Lady Cardiff once more. 
 
 " When one gets amongst these kind of people one is all 
 adrift," she thought to herself. " They have such extraordinary 
 ideas." 
 
 "But there was great scandal about Fedor Souroff. You 
 can't deny that," she said aloud. 
 
 " Count Souroff has a great and loyal love for her — yes. Eat 
 he obeys her. He is in the Caucasus, trying to lose his life, and 
 failing, of course, as all do wlio wish to lose it." 
 
 " How very uncomfortable ! " said Lady Cardiff. " Then every- 
 body was wrong, and she don't care for him ? " 
 
 " That is a question I can have no right to reply to, I think." 
 
 " You mean she doeii ? Then she'll call him back from the 
 Caucasus, my dear ; and goodness knows why she sent him 
 there. You believe her, and I believe you, but nobody else 
 would. Nobody I " 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 " Oh, nobody, nobody ! You know everybody says the worst 
 they can now. They won't let her sing at Court in England this 
 season." 
 
 "And yet " 
 
 " And yet our dear Lady Joan can go to Court. Oh yes ; 
 and Mrs. Henry V. Clams too, and ten hundred others like them. 
 You don't seem to understand. Your friend may have Count 
 Souroff killed and buried in the Caucasus. It won't make any 
 difference. Society has made up its mind." 
 
 " And why ? What has she done, except be innocent ? " 
 
 " f 'h, dear, dear ! what has that to do with it ? " said Lady 
 Cardiff, vexed as by the obtuseness of a little child to understand 
 the alphabet, and thinking to herself, " One can't tell her it's 
 because the woman is an artist — she's an artist herself." 
 
 "It seems to me the main question," said Etoile as she rose 
 and gathered up her furs. 
 
 " That is because you live in Cloudland, as I tell you," said 
 Lady Cardiff. " Who cares what Joan Challoner is or is not ? She 
 has got a well-trained liusband, and we have to receive her, 
 thougli we grin behind her back. Who cares what your beautiful 
 friend is or is not ? She has got a bad name, and she will be hanged 
 
112 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 for it, like the poor proverbial dog that had one. You seem to 
 me, my dear Comtesse Etoile, to take life far too terribly seriously. 
 To your poetic temper it is a vast romance, beautiful and terrible, 
 like a tragedy of ^schylus. You stand amidst it entranced, like 
 a child by the beauty and awe of a tempest. And all the while 
 the worldly-wise, to whom the tempest is only a matter of the 
 machineries of a theatre — of painted clouds, electric lights, and 
 sheets of copper — the worldly-wise govern the storm as they 
 choose and leave you in it defenceless and lonely as old Lear. 
 To put your heart into life is the most fatal of errors ; it is to 
 give a hostage to your enemies whom you can only ransom at 
 the price of your ruin. But what is the use of talking? To 
 you, life will be always Alastor and Epipsychidion, and to us, it 
 will always be a Treatise on Whist. That's all ! " 
 
 " A Treatise on Whist ! No ! It is something much worse. 
 It is a Book of the Bastile, with all entered as criminal in it, who 
 cannot be bought off by bribe or intrigue, by a rogue's stratagem 
 or a courtesan's vice ! " 
 
 Lady Cardiff laughed and wrapped the furs about her guest 
 ■with a kindly touch. 
 
 " The world is only a big Harpagon, and you and siich as you 
 are Maitre Jacques. ' Puisque vous I'avez voula! 'you say, — and 
 call him frankly to his face, ' Avare, lache, vil'dn,fesse-mathieu ! ' 
 and Harpagon answers you with a big stick and cries,' Apprenez 
 a parler ! ' Poor Maitre Jacques ! I never read of him without 
 thinking what a type he is of Genius. No offence to you, my 
 dear. He'd the wit to see he would never be pardoned for telling 
 the truth, and yet he told it ! The perfect type of genius." 
 
 Etoile went home thoughtful, and with a vague sense of 
 trouble upon her. 
 
 She had taken as a residence part of an old palace, entered 
 from the Montecavallo, but with all its great wintlows looking 
 into the Eospigliosi gardens. The rooms were immense, vaulted, 
 noble ia form and proportion, with frescoes that were beautiful 
 with the gorgeous fancies of some nameless artist of the days of 
 the Carracci. Here she installed herself for the winter at her 
 ease, and here she felt as if she had already dwelt for twenty 
 years. Of one great chamber, with deep embrasured casements, 
 she made her favourite apartment, half-studio, half-salon ; and 
 filling the embrasures with palms, and ferns, and flowers, and 
 burning oak logs and dried rosemary on the wide hearth, and 
 trotting about her the picturesque Utter of old bronzes and old 
 brocades, of casts, and sketches, and books, made tranquilly her 
 home in Eome. 
 
 She missed the strong intellectual life that had surrounded 
 her in Paris, the keen and witty discussion, the versatile talents, 
 the brilliant paradoxes, tkc trenchant logic of that section of the 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 113 
 
 world by which she had been surrounded ; but in return she 
 felt a dreamy and cliarming repose, a sense of peace and exhilara- 
 tion both in one; thought was lulled and basked only iu the 
 immemorial treasures of the past ; strife seemed far away, and 
 the mere sense of physical life seemed enough. 
 
 She regretted that she had not come unknown to all the 
 motley winter world that ever and again broke the charm of 
 this spell which falls on every artist and every jjoet entering 
 Eome. She thrust it away as often as she could, but she had 
 celebrity, and it had curiosity, and it buzzed about her and 
 would not be gainsaid. She would fain have shut herself alone 
 in her frescoed rooms when she was not amongst the marbles of 
 Vatican or Capitol, or beneath the ilexes of Borghese and Pamfili. 
 But it is not easy to escape from the world of ordinary men and 
 women, or to escape publicity, when you have a public name ; 
 and people were eager to visit Etoile and say that they had seen 
 her at home, with her olive velvet skirts, and her old Flemish 
 laces, and her background of palms, and her great dog on her 
 hearth, and on her easel some sketch half-covered with some 
 relic of gold brocade. 
 
 " As they must come some time, let them all come together, 
 and not spoil the week," she said, with a shrug of her shoulders, 
 and named Sundays for her martyrdom. 
 
 " I will not come on Sundays," murmured loris as he heard 
 her say it. 
 
 Etoile smiled. " Oh yes, you will — if your sovereign- 
 mistress order you to accompany her." 
 
 " Plait-il ? " said loris, with a look of innocent unconscious- 
 ness; then added, in a low tone, '"'You are pleased to be cruel." 
 
 The Casa Challoner itself received on a Wednesday, making 
 on that day a solemn religious sacrifice to the Bona Dea. It was 
 specially swept and garnished, morally as well as actually ; the 
 pipes and cigars were locked up, the too-suggestive statuettes 
 put out of siglit ; the good-looking slaves all banished; and little 
 Eifie, prettily dressed, was prominently petted by her mother ; 
 Mr. Challoner was as cordial and communicative as nature 
 would permit him to become, and Lady Joan was as full of 
 proper sentiments and domestic interest as if she were a penny 
 paper or a shilling periodical. In her bevy of English dowagers, 
 American damsels, and Scotch cousins, amidst the bankers and 
 consuls' and merchants' wives, the small gentilities and the free- 
 born republicans. Lady Joan was sublime : she would have been 
 worthy the burin of Balzac and the crowquill of Thackeray. 
 
 loris was usually banished from these Wednesdays, but Lady 
 Joan would generally speak of him once in five minutes. " lo's 
 gone to get me some camellias," or " lo's gone to look at some 
 pictures." Or she would turn over the photograph album before 
 
 I 
 
114 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 Mrs. Grundy and say, " Yes, that's lo — you met bim here last 
 week. Handsome? Well, we don't think him quite that, but 
 we're very fond of bim, poor fellow." 
 
 And Mrs. Grundy would go away quite satisfied, and take 
 her daughter on the following Wednesday ; for Mrs. Grundy will 
 suppose anything rather than it were possible for anybody to 
 deceive herself. 
 
 " Showed me the man's likeness openly, her husband standing 
 by and the dear Bishop," Mrs. Grundy would say afterwards, 
 " Of course there's nothing in it — nothing I Do you sujDpose she 
 would show me his photograph if there were ? It is the purest 
 friendship — the most perfect kindness." 
 
 All the bankers', and consuls', and merchants' wives, all the 
 small gentilities, and the free-born republicans, who did not go 
 to the Sundays on Montecavallo, used to compare her admirable 
 Wednesdays, with the teapot and the small talk, to those 
 iniquitous Sabbath-days. 
 
 " They say you can't see across the rooms for the smoke at 
 the Comtesse Etoile's — there are all kinds of liqueurs— anybody 
 plays and sings that likes. The Prince of Scheldt snug heaps of 
 cafe-chantant and guard-room songs last Sunday, and imitated 
 Teresa and then cats on the roofs— oh! scandalous, quite 
 scandalous ! They say " 
 
 And being shut out from the Sundays, they would go and 
 take the tea and muffins on a Wednesday, and feel what a blessing 
 it was to move only in irreproachable society. 
 
 " Yes, I don't go on the Sundays either ; at least, I go very 
 seldom," said Lady Joan, and let a shade of regret on her frank 
 face hint the rest. 
 
 " The Etoile Sundays are delightful," said Lady Cardiff, who 
 did go, and was reassured that she had done quite right in going 
 by meeting Princess Vera in the doorway, and another ambas- 
 sadress a little further on. "I like her very much — I like her 
 immensely ; though she never does seem to see that Somebody is 
 Anybody, and was contemptuous, actually contempiuous, to the 
 Prince of Scheldt ; while she was everything that was amiable 
 to some horrid little snuffy creature, eighty years old, who 
 happened to have all Beethoven and Schumann at his fingers' 
 ends. Yes, I like her. She seems to look over one, through 
 one, past one ; and that isn't comfortable or complimentary ; 
 but she pleases me. She isn't a bit like anybody else. She 
 makes me think of Sappho and St. Dorothea. What are yoii 
 laughing at, pray ? " 
 
 loris, despite his protest, did come now and then on the 
 Sundays, but he came alone and rarely. 
 
 To Etoile he said : " You have said I am a slave ; I will not 
 exliibit myself with my chains on to the merciless raillery of 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 115 
 
 your eyes, and — I do uot care to come when others monopolise 
 you." 
 
 To Lady Joan he said : "Ah, ma cJiere, you Iniow I am afraid 
 of 'celebrities.' Leave me in peace. I see her too often as it is 
 in your house for my tranquillity." 
 
 That was no lie ; but his hearer did not understand it in its 
 true sense, and was pleast d and satisfied. 
 
 " lo won't go near her if you drag him with ropes," she said to 
 her watchdog, Marjory Scrope. 
 
 The watchdog, with a keener and sharper yZazVe, had already 
 smelt danger. 
 
 And once, twice, thrice the watchdog going to copy the 
 Eos)ugliosi Aurora, on an order of Lord Fingal's, saw a tall and 
 slender form that she knew, pass the palace-gate of Etoile in 
 bright mornings at noontide. 
 
 CHAPTEE XIIL 
 
 " EouGHT it for eight hundred francs, and can sell it, my dear 
 madam, for a hundred thousand, honour bright!" the O'Glena- 
 maddy, an Irish member of Parliament, was calling out in highest 
 glee in the Lady Joan's morning-room. " Two men scrubbin' 
 the dirt off all day long, and two dozen sheets of waddin' used 
 already — it's almost clane — and it's a real great picture ! What 
 school, madam ? Oh, it's not a picture of a school at all — it's a 
 " Salutation to the Virgin," madam, twelve feet by twenty. Who 
 by ? Ah, now, that I'm not shure of, but it's a very old master. 
 Cara — Cara — Caradoggia, I'll be thinkin'. Count Burletta says 
 I'd get a hundred thousand to-morrow for it aisy ; but I'll not 
 be selling it. I'll send it home to the ould place. It's a wonder- 
 ful place, madam, is Rome, for pickin' up treasures in the dirt, 
 and I cannot be grateful enough to ye for having put me in the 
 way of doin' it. With a little ready money, and a little know- 
 ledge, it's wonderful what a fortune one may make. Not that 
 I'm wantiu' one ; but when one has chikleru there's never too 
 much broth in the old pot — is there, now ? Only eigh hundred 
 francs my picture! — think o' that! Say, countin' cleanin', and 
 the waddin', a thousand all told. And lyin' without a purchaser 
 ever since the conquest of Italy by Bonaparte ; and such a mass 
 of soot and dust, that if your good husband hadn't pointed out 
 the value of it to me I'd have taken it for a chimney-board and 
 
116 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 nothin' better. Indeed I would. What a thing it is to be clever ! 
 And didn't ye say ye'd take me to a new shop to-morrow mornin' 
 that ye know of? — that is, I mane, an old shop. I love an antique 
 bronze, madam, better than anythin' in the world — mighty old, 
 ye know, madam, and green as grass, with plenty of pattern 
 on it." 
 
 " You mean patina," said the Lady Joan, repressing a smile. 
 " Dear O'Glen, of course I shall be only too delighted to take 
 you anywhere or serve you in any way ; and about the picture 
 I'm enchanted. Such a find as that don't occur once in a dozen 
 years ; and if Mr. Challoner hadn't been so fond of you he would 
 never have let you run off with it. I'll come and see it to-morrow, 
 and bring lo. And now you must stop for luncheon. I've got 
 some real Southdown thyme-fed meat for you ; 1 sent over for 
 the breed myself. They'd such wretched, long-legged, fleshless 
 beasts at Fiord elisa when I went there first! Now our mutton 
 fetches far and away the first price in the market ; indeed, 
 Spillman buys it up always." 
 
 " What a treasure of a woman ye are ! " sighed the O'Glena- 
 maddy. " Ye know everything, from antiquity to mutton ! 
 Quite amazin' ! Ah, sir, ye've drawn a prize indeed in your 
 marryin' ; and few prizes it is that there are ! " 
 
 Mr. Challoner bowed — gratified. 
 
 The O'Glenamaddy could not stop for the mutton, being very 
 busy, and post-haste on his way back for the opening of the 
 Dublin season ; and the Lady Joan was not ill-pleased that he 
 could not. The O'Glenamaddy was a delightful person, of a 
 childlike faith and an elastic purse, but she had had enough of 
 him. Moreover, she expected Etoile to luncheon, having organised 
 a party to the Grotto of Egeria, and she would not have cared 
 for her to hear of the Salutation to the Virgin and the sheets of 
 wadding. 
 
 She herself was in high spirits, having received a rather 
 chillily-worded invitation for herself and husband, and their 
 friend the Prince loris, to go up and breakfast with her mighty 
 cousins the Hebrides, who had just come to their big villa out- 
 side by the Porta Pia. But she did not mind its being chilly ; it 
 would serve her purpose as well as if it were warm. A single 
 invitation to breakfast or dinner at the Countess of Hebrides' 
 always filled Mrs. Grundy's mouth with sweetmeats and silence 
 safely for the season. True, neither the Earl nor the Countess 
 of Hebrides liked her, and asked her as little and as coldly a? 
 possible to their house. But what of that ? 
 
 Lady Joan floated herself by means of her big relations as 
 swimmers in a storm by air-belts. Cousins very near to licr 
 might come to study art in Rome; but if they studied it in 
 humble dwellings, and had no taste or figure for Society, their 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 117 
 
 relationship was sternly rejected at the Casa Clialloner. But 
 when cousins removed twice a hundred times, as Scotch cousins 
 can be, came with pretty handles to their names, and cousins at 
 tlie great hotels, the hospitality of the Casa Challoner was truly 
 Highland in its lavishness, and a series of excellent dinner- 
 )iarties proclaimed the new arrival and the near relationship to 
 the city. 
 
 Nothing could exceed the cordial good understanding of Mr. 
 Challoner and his wife at such times as these. They walked 
 together, drove together, never spoke without a smile, and called 
 each other " my love " and " my dear " with the most excellent 
 reciprocity. 
 
 The Countess of Hebrides, who had always wondered at the 
 odd marriage "Archie's daughter" had made, was obliged to 
 concede that the mesalliance had turned out better than might 
 have been feared, and that the husband seemed a good creature ; 
 and so let the good creature make purchases for her in Etruscan 
 jewellery, and Castellani necklaces, and Koman antiquities, and 
 modern Fortunys and Tito Contis. 
 
 The mighty Hebrides never stayed very long at a time ; but 
 these great people are like the sun, and leave a trail of glory 
 behind them long after they have passed out of sight. 
 
 The afterglow of them rested on the Casa Challoner and gilded 
 it like the Ark of the Covenant in the sight of all the artists and 
 journalists, and hric-a-hrac collectors, and transatlantic wayfarers 
 who made the sum of their daily society, and who drifted per- 
 petually in and out of their hospitable chambers, and who in 
 return defended everywhere the Challoner reputation with as 
 much ardour and perhaps as little discretion as they defended a 
 doubtful Guercino that they wanted to sell, or an antique 
 Pausanias, of which everything was modern except the right ear. 
 The English society of Winter Cities is motley, There are 
 two parts to it : the small fish that always live in the foreign 
 water, and the bigger fish that only float through it. The fish 
 that live in the water, who for the most part have mould on 
 their backs of some " story " or another, and cannot well live in 
 their own native streams, vie with each other for the big fish 
 that only come to tarry for a season, with all the glory of 
 diamond- bright scales upon them, and all their signet-marks as 
 monarchs of the deep, When a big fish arrives, the little fish 
 all rush to catch the shadow of his glory ; and there are no 
 bigger fish anywhere than these salmon from north of Tweed 
 with which the Lady Joan claimed kinship. 
 
 And it was her mighty skill in catching these big fish that 
 kept herself in smooth waters. 
 
 Mrs. Macscrip, the banker's wife, whose father had driven a 
 wheelbarrow and wielded an auctioneer's hammer in New York, 
 
118 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 would not quarrel with a woman wlio could ask her to luncheon 
 with that very great lady the Countess of Hebrides. Mr.-^. 
 Middleway, the evangelical pastor's better half, could only 
 eagerly return calls that brought her into the same chambers 
 with that really noble and Christian gentleman, Lord Fiugal ; 
 and all the rest of the little people who were the mouthpieces of 
 that irresistible potentate Mrs. Grundy would not be either 
 cold or censorious on any one who could call half the Peerage 
 " my cousins." 
 
 Lady Joan pleased Mrs. Grundy, and most other women, for 
 ■many reasons. 
 
 First of all, she was indisputably a lady in her own right and 
 a Perth-Douglas ; and besides, there was that floating impression 
 that she had something to hide, and something to fear, which 
 enabled them to feel above her level. Water may like to find its 
 own level, but women do not. Again, she took extreme trouble 
 to conciliate her own sex. She was morbidly anxious about 
 their estimate of her ; her braggadocio often veiled a quaking 
 pulse. For women she hung her Chistmas-tree with pretty 
 trifles ; for women she bought tickets at charity balls, and gave 
 them lavishly away to large families of marriageable daughters : 
 for women she gave her carefully calculated dinners when a 
 duke's eldest son or a rich unmarried commoner was passing 
 through Eome ; for women, indeed, she would even go so far as 
 to find amongst all her rohi a few lengths of real old Venetian 
 lace, or a genuine rococo locket, and let some happy fair one go 
 off with it really at a bargain. And all this study and self- 
 sacrifice brought her in a rich harvest. 
 
 For any harvest is rich to us that is the one of our desire; and 
 the light of Lady Joan's eyes was her own face refl cted in a 
 Louis Quinze mirror at some great banker's ball, and her own 
 name inscribed on the books of some hotel where some royal 
 princess was staying; her own Delft card-plate filled with 
 polished pasteboard, and her own little drawing-room packed 
 with persons who were Personages. 
 
 Throughout Society there is everywhere to be met with a large 
 class of well-born people who want perpetual amusement and 
 cannot pay for it. They are the offshoots of the nobilities of 
 nations, the flowers that are next the rose; the fringes of the 
 purples; the crumb of the cake. They are nicely mannered, 
 frothily educated, have tastes wider than their purses, arc 
 utterly iiseless, and like to be amused from one year's end to the 
 other without its costing them greatly. They like to use other 
 people's carriages, to have other people's opera-boxes, to dine out 
 constantly, to get innumerable pleasantnesses without having 
 their pride hurt by any approach to patronage; because they are 
 gentlefolks — always gentlefolks— only they like life to be a 
 merry-go-round on other people's horses. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 119 
 
 It is a lar,:^c class, and a gay one, and an amiable one, and a 
 very grateful one— so long as you are able to entertain it. When 
 the day comes that you cannot do so it will forget you — that is 
 all. 
 
 It will not be bitter about you : it has not mind enough for 
 that; it will only forget you. It is always enjoying itself. 
 
 It is a class which abounds in all cities of pleasure ; and its 
 suffrages are to be bought. What pleases it, it will praise; and 
 these praises are like little puffs of south wind : they will send 
 up a monster balloon like a soap-bubble, if only there be but 
 enough of them. 
 
 The Lady Joan, who had been born amongst the purples, but 
 had been forced to live am.ongst its fringes, courted this 
 numerous class, and succeeded with it. 
 
 " I took lo to my dear Hebrides ; they're so fond of him ! " 
 she would be able to say for a twelvemonth ; so she thought to 
 herself now, receiving the Hebrides invitation; and in her 
 mind's eye she could see all the bankers', and consuls', and 
 merchants' wives, all the little gentilities, and all the freeborn 
 Americans, running about, and saying with unctuous lips, "Slie 
 took him to the ^lebrides' ! How can there be anything in it ? " 
 
 And if ever Lady Joan blessed Providence she blessed it for 
 Scotch cousiuship. 
 
 At this moment, however, she put aside both the great 
 Hebrides, and the Salutation to the Virgin, and arrayed herself 
 in the character she always wore for Voightel's friend. 
 
 She wore many characters, according to her spectators. For 
 the great Scotch cousins she was a very happy and virtuous 
 wife; ill-placed, indeed, iu a social position unworthy of her, but 
 with qualities tliat would have graced a duchess's coronet. To 
 the world in general she was a much- enduring and much- 
 forgiving martyr ; a sacrifice made by her family to the goldt n 
 calf, and heroically pressing the knife of sacrifice meekly to her 
 bosom. To a chosen few she was an adventurous, devil-may- 
 care, high-spirited creature, who threw her cap over the mill aii I 
 didn't care who saw it in the air. To herself she was a combina- 
 tion of fine mind and fearless nature, a sort of Madame Tallieu 
 dashed with the virile vigour of a Lady of Lathom. 
 
 But even the chosen few never saw her as she actually was, 
 and it may certainly be averred that she herself never did. She 
 thought she had a will of iron, a brain of steel, a dauntless 
 courage, and a matchless wit. She never dreamed that she was 
 after all only a terrible coward at heart, disguised in a fine 
 swagger like Tistols, having neither the force in her to defy 
 society nor the force in her to deny her passions. 
 
 At this moment she arrayed herself in the part that she 
 always thought most appropriate for receiving a person who 
 
120 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 kuew Voiglitel and lived in Paris, and did her best to seem to 
 Etoile a clever, brilliant woman of the world, with honest out- 
 spokenness of tongue and fearless utterances of advanced 
 thought, yet one that never affected to be altogether above the 
 mundane amusements of a pleasant society that adored her as 
 one of its leaders. 
 
 "So delighted to see you; so kind of you to come!" she cried, 
 with that cordiality of welcome which looked so real when she 
 did not upset it with a bit of rudeness or bad temper. " You 
 are always with Princess Vera, aren't you? How can you 
 condescend to such small folks as we are? But I'm charmed 
 that you do. Will a feminine Velasquez like yourself deign to 
 help me in a most important question ? Look here at all these old 
 plates. lo's brought them for me to pick out a costume for the 
 Clams' fancy ball. What do you say to this — or this ? They're 
 all very stiff, but that style rather suits me, I think, and I've 
 lots of brocade doing nothing. Don't you think this one, if it 
 were made of ruby velvet, and the stomacher sewn with seed- 
 pearls? I bought a lot the other day. And the ruff will be 
 becoming. And I've heaps of old Venetian prints. lo says these 
 plates aren't correct. He's some old family portrait he wants 
 me to dress like. You know he's such a fidget about historical 
 accuracy. He made himself wretched the other night because 
 my Louis Treize costume had eighteenth century buttons on it 
 and lace only fifty years old. He said I was a dancing ana- 
 chronism. Good gracious ! here he is — come to luncheon, 
 actually — a thing he never does. That's because you're here ! 
 My dear lo, can't you throw your coat down without breaking 
 those tulips all to pieces ? " 
 
 The fallen petals of the tulips made her eyes darken angrily. 
 Why did he come to luncheon when he was not ordered ? Of 
 course when ordered he had to come, no matter how incon- 
 venient to himself; but any sign of an independent will in him 
 was a glimpse of that cloven hoof of rebellion which she had 
 believed that she had crushed under for ever. 
 
 When he rebelled she always made him ridiculous. Before 
 he could speak she tossed him the costume drawings. 
 
 " Here, Comtesse Etoile has chosen this dress for me," she 
 called to him. " Take a pencil and write out what the stuff and 
 all ought to be on the margin, and then Mariannina can follow 
 your notes. Have you been to the Palmiro sale ? I hope to 
 goodness you didn't let that Capo di Monte slip through your 
 fingers. Has Davis's agent got it? Oh, good heavens, lo, wluxt 
 a fool you are! I knew how it would be if I didn't go myself! 
 Mr. Challoner '11 be furious. There'll be no peace for a week. 
 It's always so when you do anything alone." 
 
 " Ma chere, the person from London " began loris. But 
 
 she never indulged him by hearing his explanations. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 121 
 
 " Nonsense. Of course Davis's agent got it if you weren't 
 quick enough. Don't talk rubbish. You know well enough I'd 
 told you to get it at any price — any price. It will fetch 
 hundreds in Pall Mall. All the rest of the Palmiro things were 
 trash, but that was worth any money. But it's always so when 
 you go alone. Have you had those grapes and woodcocks sent 
 up to the Hebrides? Did you send to Fiordelisa for the 
 caraeUias for to-night? And have you told 'em to blister 
 Pippo? Oh, you'll be going to the stable to sit with him. 
 What do you think he did do? " she pursued, turning to Etoile. 
 " When his old mare was blistered last summer he stayed with 
 her all day long, because he thought she felt the pain less if he 
 stroked her ! I believe he'll want to give the hares and foxes 
 anajsthetics before we shoot 'em next ! There he was all day long 
 in the marc's stall, reading Giusti and stroking her neck. He 
 wore mourning when the old beast died." 
 
 ** Oil I — carissima mia ! " 
 
 "Oh, you know you did, or you wanted to, if I hadn't 
 laughed at you. Now, write those notes clear, so that Marian- 
 nina can read 'em. Euby velvet, and just a touch here and there 
 of gold. I wan-L to use up that lame d'oro we got in the Ghetto. 
 The stomacher isn't cut right? Well, draw it the shape it 
 should be. Shall it be sewn with seed-pearls or Turkish sequins ? 
 Oh, pearls, I think. We bought all those ropes of 'em the other 
 day, and I may as well wear 'em before " 
 
 "Before we sell them again," she was going to say; but 
 instead, as Etoile was there, substituted a less tell-tale phrase. 
 
 "Before I get sick of the sight of them, lying about in that 
 dish. One does get sick of pearls so soon. Now, diamonds 
 never pall on you. They seem always changing. When a 
 fairy sends me anything for my birthday, I wish she'd always 
 send me diamonds." 
 
 loris sighed. He knew what that meant. And diamonds 
 cost money, and he was not rich. He sketched the Venetian 
 costume obediently in silence. Lady Joan walked over to him 
 and rested one hand on his shoulder, and with the other 
 stroked back the dark hair of his head as it was bent over the 
 drawing. 
 
 All the while she looked at Etoile furtively, as though 
 by the action she would say, " Take care what you do. This 
 is mine." 
 
 loris moved under her touch a little petulantly. He went on 
 drawing without response. 
 
 Etoile looked at him through dreaming eyes ; that delicate 
 aquiline profile against the high crimson lights of the wall- 
 hangings had a fascination for her as for all artists. For the 
 moment she felt a sense of disgust to see those strong, firm. 
 
122 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 sinewy hands clasped on his shoulder like a hand that holds, 
 and holds, for ever. She rose and turned from the sight, and 
 went to a little Albano hanging near. 
 
 loris threw his pencil away broken. 
 
 "It is of no use drawing on that wi-etched paper," he said, 
 displacing the hand that was on his shoulder by a quick and, 
 as it seemed, accidental manoeuvre. " I will send you the 
 costume later. It will be much easier to copy at once that 
 Venetian portrait I told you of; you shall have it by to-morrow 
 morning." 
 
 " Luncheon is ready," said the -Lady Joan curtly, and she 
 went in without ceremony to her dining-room, where she 
 scolded her iittle girl for having put on silk when she ought to 
 have put on merino, and did a battle-royal with her husband 
 about the disputed frock. Of course she did not care a rush 
 about the frock, but the fierce disputation did her good. The 
 child was brought up on very simple principles. What her 
 father ordered her mother forbade, and what her mother com- 
 manded her father refused. The child had quickly learned how 
 to get all she wanted by the mere process of pitting them one 
 against each other. 
 
 " Mamma will let me have it, because papa can't bear me 
 to," she would say to her little companions, with questionable 
 grammar but the unquestionable princii^les proj^er to a young 
 daughter of a house whose foundation-stone was the Triangle of 
 Dumas. 
 
 All through luncheon Lady Joan descanted on the extrava- 
 gance of the offending frock and the injury done to her by the 
 loss of the Capo di Monte to Davis. 
 
 She was a woman whose passions, like the fires in Vesuvius, 
 threw up much smoke and many stones. 
 
 loris talked of literature and art, ate only a few of his own 
 grapes, and for once disregarded his hostess. 
 
 Mr. Challoner, who always listened and watched impassive 
 as Fate and as immutable, commenting on all things, and 
 interfering in none, like the Chorus to a Greek play — Mr. 
 Challoner thought to himself that his own vengeance was 
 dawning. 
 
 But after all Mr. Challoner was a man of the world. Things 
 were better for him as they were. Peace is a calmer thing than 
 revenge — especially when peace means that some one else is 
 worried instead of yourself, and revenge means that you will 
 be left all alone to bear the heating of the storm. 
 
 Mr. Challoner, as a student of human nature and a mere 
 mortal man, could not but enjoy the prevision that loris was 
 drifting unconsciously away into love elsewhere. But Mr. 
 Challoner, as a mari complaisant and a philosopher, knew that 
 
FBIENDSniP. 123 
 
 this drifting away ■would be a fatal blow to bis own rest and 
 tranquillity. 
 
 Solomon thought a dinner of herbs with quietness better thin 
 a stalled ox and contention ; but modern men and women, who 
 have no fancy for herbs in these days, unless mixed with shctrry 
 and soles by an excellent cook, contrive by these tacit and 
 amicable arrangements to obtain both the ox and the quiet- 
 ness. 
 
 Compromise is the note of the present century and the choice 
 of all wise men. Arbitration instead of arms ; damages instead 
 of vengeance ; give-and-take- instead of cut-and-thrust ; universal 
 doubt and polite suspicion instead of frank faith or stout denial. 
 Compromise everywhere, caretakiug, timorous, shrewd, dubious, 
 apprehensive, wise : compromise is the supreme art of the nine- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Mr. Challoner and his wife studied this great theory to 
 perfection ; and it was only because they, like the greatest of 
 mortals, were human that they sometimes forgot its rule so far 
 as to quarrel about their shares of a picture's profits or fling 
 their resiDcctive secrets at each other's head. This was very 
 seldom ; and besides, what did it matter ? It was only when 
 nobody else was there. 
 
 " You think me very insincere ? " murmured loris to Etoile, 
 a quarter of an hour later. 
 
 " Insincere ? What have I said ? " 
 
 " In words nothing. Your eyes say it." 
 
 " My eyes are very ill-bred, then." 
 
 " Nay, tell me the truth." 
 
 " Well, I should think you were very frank by nature, but 
 tXQ somewhat false from habit." 
 
 " And what makes you suppose that ? " 
 
 " How can I tell ? Artists, yoit see, are like dogs : they go 
 by instinct, and draw deductions without being aware of it. 
 We are unreasonable animals, not fit for drawing-rooms." 
 
 " But what should make you imagine me insincere ? " 
 
 She laughed at his persistency. 
 
 " Well, do you not always call your friend ' ma chere ' when 
 I only am with you both, and most ceremoniously ' Madame ' 
 when other people are by ? " 
 
 " Oh, that is only friendship. You must not infer more than 
 they mean from such little slips of the tongue." 
 
 " I infer just what they do mean — no more." 
 
 loris smiled. A man cannot help smiling when one woman 
 talks to him of his position with another. It is not vanity ; it is 
 recollection and anticipation combined. 
 
 "You are very mischievous, madame," he answered airily. 
 "Perhaps one does learn to lie in the world. Society has made 
 
124 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 falsehood its axletree, and cannot well turn round without it. 
 But I do not think I ever should lie to you." 
 
 " Why ? "What is there about me ? I am not like your old 
 stone Bocca della Verita, to bite the hand off all false speakers." 
 
 " No, you are something much better," he said abruptly. 
 " You are one of those women who shame men into truth." 
 
 His eyes dwelt on her with earnestness, with warmth, with 
 a passing sadness. He touched her hand with that hesitating 
 timidity, which in him was as successful with women as audacity. 
 His fingers closed on hers one moment with a sort of supplication 
 in the gentleness of the action. 
 
 They were standing in the anteroom of the Casa Challoner. 
 Lady Joan came through the oriental curtain dividing the rooms ; 
 and saw. 
 
 Her brows contracted, but she gave no other sign of anger. 
 
 " Are you people ready ? " she cried, in her cordial and 
 ringing voice ; she had planned a drive to show her guest the 
 Caffarella. " My dear Comtesse, have you got enough on ? You 
 know it gi'ows av.-fully cold at twilight. I was afraid Mr. Chal- 
 loner would insist on our having his company ; but the dear 
 Dean has carried him off to the English schools. Heaven be 
 praised for all its small mercies. You'd never forget it if you 
 heard him prose about Numa. 'Nunia never existed at all.' 
 Well, settle it so and have done with it, I say. But not a bit of 
 it; he'll preach on for three hours and a half to prove that 
 Numa was moonshine. As if anybody could prove a negation ! 
 Call for Eccelino. We'll take him up at the Circle, I promised 
 him ; and the other men rode on before. Take heaps of cigars, 
 lo. How could you lose that Capo di Monte to-day ? It makes 
 me so savage. You are like a baby in some things. I do believe 
 if it wasn't for me you'd be ruined to-morrow, and have to sit on 
 the Spanish Steps to get halfpence. Let's be off, or we shall have 
 all the daylight gone." 
 
 And Lady Joan showed herself solicitous as she got into the 
 carriage that her guest should be protected by scarfs and furs 
 against the hard wind blowing from the Appenines, with all the 
 frank and pleasant cordiality that a wise woman displays when 
 she has a grudge to pay off^by-and-by. 
 
 Lady Joan laughed and talked her brightest as they rolled 
 along; and when she chose she could be very agreeable in a 
 cheerful and offhand fashion, which won her much admiration 
 amongst that large proportion of society which thinks good 
 si^irits a pretty comiDliment to itself She had seen a great deal 
 of men and manners; she had seen most cities and some few 
 courts ; she read human nature well, though narrowly ; she 
 could tell a tale with point and humour, especially when it had 
 in it a flavour of broad mirth. Within herself she was deeply 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 125 
 
 incensed at what she had seen and heard. But then she reasoned, 
 lo could only have been making game of tliat stuck-up adven- 
 turess : he disliked Etoile; he had always said so. So slic was 
 very amiable to Etoile as they drove to the Grotto of Egeria, and 
 did not chastise her lover more severely than by bestowing all 
 her smiles on Eccclino di Sestri, a good-looking courtier, wlio 
 had adored herself dans le temps. 
 
 " lo's my friend, of course, just as Eccelino is," she would say 
 in her most candid manner. It was a distinguishing feature of 
 Lady Joan's administrative capabilities that she could keep men 
 together without their quarrelling about her. Perhaps the reason 
 was that she let each of them think that she cheated for him all 
 the others ; or perhaps the reason was that the love she inspired 
 was not of the strongest kind. 
 
 The carriage went out by the Albano road, under the leafless 
 elm trees, to the silent places where Egeria's altar lies fallen 
 under the green pall of the ivy and the wild waterfed moss. 
 
 The sun was still high, the sky cloudless, and the north wind 
 dropped as they entered the valley of the Almo. 
 
 " No doubt that unhappy Numa, if he ever did exist, must 
 have been awfully bullied by his wife ; I should think she was a 
 scold; and the length of her tongue made him adore the Muse of 
 Silence as much as I do when Mr. Chal loner vouchsafes one of 
 his historical orations," said Lady Joan, with her bright laugh, 
 as she got out of her carriage, sauntered down into the dell, 
 lighted her cigar, and pitched stones at the fallen statue that 
 lies like a dead thing beneath the arching rock. 
 
 " All lovers adore that Muse. Numa was only like all of us 
 there," said the Count di Sestri. 
 
 " Do they ? I don't know anything about lovers ; I only care 
 for friends," laughed the Lady Joan, with her cigarette in her 
 white teeth. She, for her own part, did not adore Silence at any 
 time, and in her own heart considered that it was of no use being 
 made love to at all unless you could publish the triumph of it 
 right and left to your society. She liked to fasten her lover to 
 her skirts as she pinned a signal-ribbon to her domino at the 
 Veglione. She was not a woman to let her Eomeo go from her 
 when the lark sang ; on the conti-ary, she liked all the cocks in 
 the neiglibourhood to crow their shrillest and call attention to 
 him on her balcony ; though, of course, she would say to the 
 cocks, like the cat in the Animuux ParlanU, " Je suis une chatto 
 anglaise et je n'ai point d'amauts ! " None of the animals believed 
 the cat, certainly. Still in its way the cry was useful. 
 
 loris went forward and gathered a sprig of broom and a few 
 sprays of maidenhair fern, and gave them to Etoile. 
 
 " Juvenal would be satisfied, I suppose. He hated the costly 
 marbles and the artificial ornamentation ; there is little enough 
 left of them now, I am sure you, too, like it best as it is ? " 
 
126 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Yes, the bubbliDg brook siugs the fittest song for Egeria ; 
 and poor Tatia, too, whose shade must have been so jealous of 
 her. I am sure she never cared for all her mortal rivals in the 
 new city on the hills there, but Egeria must have made her heart 
 ache ; Egeria, who came on the wings of the wind as she did 
 herself, and came into her own temple to take his very soul 
 aAvay " 
 
 " Have you ever loved any one, I wonder ? " thought the Lady 
 Joan, turning and looking at her with a sudden thought. 
 
 " Egeria also forgave even disloyalty," said loris aloud. " No 
 infidelity changed her. She was faithful to him through death 
 and after it." 
 
 Etoile smiled. 
 
 " Which is only to say I should think that the nymph was a 
 woman after all." 
 
 " How little you know of women ! " 
 
 " Don't turn cynic, lo," cried Lady Joan, flinging her cigar 
 end at the mutilated statue. " It won't suit you at all. You 
 are naturally a cross between Faust and the young man in the 
 Peau de Chagrin ; between Eomeo and Eeubeu, unstable as water, 
 etc. — you know what I mean. You are as credulous as a seal and 
 as soft-hearted as a dog : cynicism is for men who drink brandy, 
 beat their wives, wear long beards, and never wash their hands. 
 Nature made you " 
 
 But he lost this definition of his character, as he had wandered 
 away after Etoile, who had gone further down to where the little 
 stream bubbled up amongst the mosses that had once been 
 Numa's bed. 
 
 Lady Joan glanced after them, and lit a new cigarette. She 
 knew passion and all its ways too well not to know the meaning 
 of that silent unconscious irresistible magnetism which draws 
 two unfamiliar lives one to another in the indefinable physical 
 attraction which is the birth of love. But her natural quickness 
 of intelligence was obscured by her overweening vanity. 
 
 " He is only fooling her," she thought with indifference and 
 amusement. " After all, if he like to do that, let him." 
 
 If another woman were made to love her lover hopelessly, 
 that would be only so much additional entertainment for herself. 
 She was so sure of him — as sure as she was of the ring on her hand, 
 that would stay there for ever unless she threw it aside. 
 
 "loris seems to admire that new comer," said the Count 
 Eccelino. 
 
 " Oh dear, no, he doesn't," said Lady Joan coolly. " He 
 rather dislikes her ; thinks her insolent and tete montee. But 
 I've told him to be agreeable to her. She is a great favourite of 
 Voightel's. You know dear old Voightel, the cleverest man in 
 all Europe. We were so fond of him long ago at Damascus." 
 
FBIENDSniP. 127 
 
 Of course lie was only fooling Etoile, she Faid to herself, 
 glancing, as she lauglied witli the other men al'out her, at the 
 two iigures that had strayed away side by side under the sliadows 
 of the trees along the stream towards the ruins that tradition 
 allies with the memory of Yolumnia and Virgilia, and with the 
 great cry from the breaking heart of the hero ; 
 
 " I melt, and am not 
 Of stronger earth than others." 
 
 Of course he was only fooling Etoile ; he disliked her, so he 
 had said a score of times ; nevertheless that sohtary walk dis- 
 pleased her. 
 
 " Who is she ? I haven't an idea," she said roughly to another 
 question of Eccelino di Sestri's. " Of course she's known all the 
 world over for that matter, by name ; but as to where she came 
 from, I should be very sorry to have to answer for that. These 
 kind of people always drop down from the moon, or say they do, 
 to demonstrate that they didn't jump up from the otter." 
 
 " But she is a Countess d'Avesnes." 
 
 "Yes. That's her name, or she says it is. It sounds very 
 aristocratic ; but I don't much believe myself in aristocracy that 
 has no relations, and travels about with a big dog, and has the 
 knowledge of Manon Lescaut, with the innocent airs of Una. 
 Men like that sort of thing ; they believe in naked feet walking 
 over hot ploughshares without a burn. "We don't. We're more 
 consistent. We don't look for daisies on dung-heaps. It's 
 rubbish, you know. After all, think what that woman has 
 seen ! I don't say there's any real harm in her ; Voightel would 
 not have sent her to me if there had been, of course ; but it's 
 perfectly ridiculous to suppose that she has the white-paper-past 
 that she pretends to have. She's very clever, that everybody 
 knows ; and a very clever woman can't be a very innocent one — 
 when she's an artist, I mean." 
 
 The Lady Joan concluded with a puff of smoke up into the 
 traceries of the ash-boughs overhead, for she remembered that 
 she always pictured herself to her world as combining in her 
 own person the two excellences which she had just declared to 
 be incapable of co-existence. 
 
 " Calomniez, calomniez ! " said Voltaire ; " culomniez toujours : 
 quelque chose resfera." 
 
 So the Lady Joan was of opinion that if you only lie ever- 
 lastingly, something of it all will always be believed somewhere. 
 
 If you are only well beforehand with your falsehood all will 
 go upon velvet; nobody ever listens to a rectification. "Is it 
 possible ? " everybody cries with eager zest ; but when they 
 have only to say " Oh, wasn't it so? " nobody feels any particular 
 interest. It is the first statement that has the swing and the 
 
128 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 success; as for explanation or retraction — pooli! — who cares to 
 be bored ? 
 
 She knew very well tliat what she said was not true. But 
 Lady Joan knew also that a little fiction always came in 
 handy. 
 
 Besides, when loris had wandered away without permission 
 along tne bend of the water, it was only human nature to fling 
 a stone after his companion. 
 
 Moreover, she was really incredulous that any one with such 
 opportunities for amusement as Etoile had possessed, could have 
 been idiot enough to have led as quiet a life -as a rosebush in a 
 nun's lattice window. 
 
 Men might believe it. But she was not to be taken in by any 
 such nonsense. 
 
 Fame to a woman is like the tunica incendialis of the Latin 
 martyrs, and it is never the fault of other women like the Lady 
 Joan, if the torches of slander do not set it ablaze till the sulphur 
 flames burn up the life within. 
 
 She smiled her sunniest and kindliest, however, when the 
 truants returned from the temple of Fortuna Mutabilis, as the 
 first shadow of sunset fell over the grass. 
 
 " My dear ! are you not afraid of the cold ? " she said affec- 
 tionately to Etoile. " We must be moving, I fear, and leave the 
 ghost of Egeria to salute the moon all alone. You must come 
 back to dinner with us. Oh yes, you must ! I wish you would 
 go to the masquerade with me ; but you care so little for those 
 things. You don't get half out of life tliat you might, believe 
 me. However, I suppose, in return for all you lose, primroses 
 talk to you, and stones have voices, and all that kind of thing. 
 I've more of the Peter Bell in me. Give me my furs, lo; and 
 call up the carriage. Oh, of course she'll come to dinner — I 
 won't take any refusal. Mr. Challoner will discourse of nothing 
 but Numa, unless we're strong enough in number to talk him 
 down. Of all the cants, I do think that new cant of proving that 
 nothing ever was, and that nobody ever lived, is the very worst 
 bore that sceptical education has developed. Five o'clock ! Tell 
 them to drive fast. I shall take you home to dinner too, Ecceliuo ; 
 and I'll give you the cotillon to-morrow night if you're good at 
 the Macscrips." 
 
 Count Eccelino bowed his ceremonious thanks with an air of 
 ardent gratitude. But he was too used to receive favours of this 
 sort whenever his friend was out of favour to be mucli flattered 
 by them actually. As a punishment they were also lost upon 
 loris, who, as they drove homeward, was silent, letting his dark 
 eyes brood softly upon the face of Etoile, so that whenever she 
 looked up she met their gaze in the pensive Roman twilight. 
 
 She persisted in not dining with them that night, and went 
 
FBJENDSIIIP. 129 
 
 to her own room and sat and dreamed, with her head on her 
 hands, over a fire of oak and pine. 
 
 " That man is not happy," she thought again and again ; and 
 she seemed always to feel that tender hesitating touch of his 
 fingers, always to see those eloquent and wistful eyes in the 
 evening shadows. 
 
 Meanwhile Lady Joan went home and dined, and then 
 " mystified " herself in loup and domino for that first Yeglioue 
 of the year. 
 
 She had a passion for masquerades. No scrutiny of marital 
 wrath drew her to heed the secresy of that most dingy and prosaic 
 of all Venusbergs — a baiynoir au troisicine. No weak objections 
 on the part of her lord to any pastimes of friendship drove her, 
 as they drive some ill-used wives, to require the shelter of one 
 of those little close-curtained cloth-hung closets, where the poor 
 god of love is huddled up in a black sacque, and his rosy mouth 
 soiled with champagne-cup. She could go home with her escort 
 at four or five in the morning, and use her latch-key, and Mr. 
 Challoner, like a sensible sleeper, only turned cosily in his bed 
 at the back of the house, and, if he woke at all at the sound of 
 his hall-door's unclosing, only thought what a fool the other 
 man was to have danced attendance through all those hours in 
 the noise and the heat of that dingy festival. 
 
 Lady Joan had no need of masquerades. With her latch-key 
 in her pocket, and her friend's cab at her command, she could 
 come and go, alone or accompanied, in that happy freedom which 
 is the privilege of a perfect conjugal comprehension. The cabman 
 knew much more about her than Mr. Challoner. 
 
 But though she had no need of them, her soul adored the 
 Veglione. That dance Macabre was the delight of her heart, as 
 the Brumalia of the Roman matron's. 
 
 To mystify herself, or think she did so ; to laugh louder than 
 with due regard to society she ever could elseM'here ; to throw a 
 stone and grin undiscovered and pass on; to fasten strangers 
 with her shining eyes, and jeer at them and leave them ; to 
 torment her friends and torture her foes, and sup and smoke 
 and go home in the daybreak, when the masks were all reeling 
 up the streets and the carnival songs were greeting the sunrise 
 — that was pleasure to the Lady Joan. 
 
 It requited her for a hundred dismal clerical luncheons off 
 cold lamb and lettuce, with chaplains and consuls ; it fortified 
 her against a thousand big dinners with her tongue tied, and 
 her " dear Eobert " at the bottom of the table. 
 
 loris sighed this evening as he fastened her mask behind her 
 ears and went down with her into the dingy whirlpool. He was 
 so tired of it all. 
 
 The thin disguises, the stupid jokes, the commonplace 
 
 K 
 
130 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 intrigues, tlie coarse i^retence of deceiving and of being deceived, 
 the noise, the uproar, the shrill cries, the headlong dances — they 
 had grown so tiresome. He had laughed his lightest and waltzed 
 his wildest in other years ; but he was tired of it all — very tired 
 — now as he walked about amongst the screaming crowd, and 
 exchanged the vapid phrases of custom, with dominoes that were 
 as well known to him as though he had met them in broad day ; 
 and heard the resonant voice of his empress ring loud above the 
 music in merciless speech and worn-out jibes ; and lighted her 
 cigarettes, and carried her fan, and got her her claret-cup, and 
 thought how long the night was — the boisterous, empty, joyless, 
 senseless night, through which, all the while, he had to laugh and 
 be ready with answer, and look amused, and turn an airy compli- 
 ment, and join in all the mirth, and never show a yawn, but wait 
 on duty till the kindly sun should rise, and so release him. 
 
 What weariness will men endure if only it be not in the name 
 of virtue ! 
 
 " A fine long night. Excellence ! " said the cabman, with a 
 radiant smile, as loris paid him while the bells of the first mass 
 rung in the dawn. 
 
 " A terrible long night," thought his employer, looking up at 
 the blue morning skies. 
 
 The cabman, who, had he ever been cross-questioned by 
 Society, could have rendered the clerical cold lamb for ever a 
 Passover of the past to the Casa Challoner, drove away joyous 
 to get his breakfast and gamble in the sun. loris went upstairs 
 and shut the sun out, and threw himself on his bed. 
 
 " Good God ! once I thought this, pleasure ! " he murmured 
 as his heavy eyelids fell. 
 
 So he had thought this — love. 
 
FBIENDSIIIP. 131 
 
 CHAPTEE XIV. 
 
 " CHi;iiE CoMTESSE Etoile^ parcloii me, but you sow tlie earth 
 with dragon's teeth ! " said Lady Cardiff one morning, about four 
 o'clock, on the Pincio. " You cannot want enemies ; you really 
 cannot xvant them — you must have so many. I don't wish to be 
 rude, you know, but you must. Whoever shines, etc. AVhy will 
 you make so many iinnecossary ones ? Do tell me." 
 
 "What have I done?" said Etoile with amazement and a 
 little absently. She was thinking of things that loris had said 
 the night before in the Palazzo Farnese, where there had been 
 an early reception. 
 
 " Done ? " echoed Lady Cardiff. " Why, you have cut our 
 beloved Mrs. Hem-y V. Clams dead ! Unconsciously, I dare say, 
 but stiU dead. You looked at her as you did it ; you did really. 
 I must say so if they ask me." 
 
 " I did not see her," said Etoile. " Not that I should be un- 
 willing to commit the crime consciously, if you mean that." 
 
 " Good gracious ! Has she offended you ? " 
 
 " Not in the least ; but why should I know her ? She is far 
 less educated than my maid, and very many times more 
 vulgar." 
 
 " Of course ; but still why ? " 
 
 "With a vulgarity more blatant for the fine clothes it is 
 dressed in ; a vulgarity that is not even redeemed by mere 
 decency." 
 
 Lady Cardiff shifted her sunshade. 
 
 " Terribly strongly you put things ; of [course they sound 
 horrible when you put them like that. But everybody knows 
 her. It's a way we've got into nowadays. Why don't you write 
 a comedy hke VEtranyere or the Famille Benoiton, and put all 
 that into it? We should applaud it on the stage; but it only 
 sounds uncomfortable off; — you don't mind my saying what I 
 think?" 
 
 " Pray always say what you think. Would you continue te 
 know Mrs. Henry V. Clams if her husband were ruined to- 
 morrow ? " 
 
 "Goodness me! of course not; and she would never expect 
 it — never. She does know her place. There is nothing like a 
 free and independent citizen for taking slights good-temperedly. 
 I never knew how much kicking a human being would stand 
 until I knew these born-democrats. One didn't know them 
 
132 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 twenty years ago. I don't know why we didn't. They hadn't 
 struck oil, I suppose, and made it worth our while ; or "Worth 
 hadn't dressed them, and they were still mere natural tar and 
 feathers. Somehow we didn't know them. Perhaj^s they hadn't 
 come over to ' Europe.' Know her if she were ruined ? The 
 idea! You might as well ask would Fontebranda continue to 
 filer le parfait amour." 
 
 " Poor woman ! " said Etoile. 
 
 " You needn't pity her, my dear. You may be quite sure she 
 knows quite well the terms on which she has my visits and his 
 devotion. If all the ' red cents ' went to-morrow I dare say she'd 
 go back across the water and ' keep a bar ' very hai^pily. The 
 days of strong objections and strong emotions are alike over, 
 believe me. As for you, you are exactly like Moliere's Mis- 
 anthrope ; I shall call you Alceste — 
 
 ' Eire franc et sincere est mon jjlus grand talent, 
 Je ne sals point jouer les hommes en parlant, 
 Et qui n'a pas le don de cacher ce qu'il pense, 
 Doit fau-e en ce pays fort pen de re'sidence.' 
 
 Dear me ! why will people go on writing ? As if Moliere and 
 Fielding between them hadn't said all that there is to be said 
 better than any one else ever can say it! By-the-by, why 
 wouldn't you go to the Echeance ball ? " 
 
 " I dishke balls." 
 
 " Very well ; if you dislike dancing, don't dance ; though if 
 a woman don't, you know, they always think she has got a short 
 leg, or a cork leg, or something or other that's dreadful. But 
 why not show yourself at them ? At least show yourself. One 
 goes to balls as one goes to church. It's a social muster, and 
 not to be there looks odd. I wish yoix had gone. Our dear 
 Joan was in great force there ; her lo behind her chair at 
 supper, and she sending him about here, there, and everywhere 
 to do this, that, and the other. * lo, hand that mayonnaise.' 
 'lo, take Lady Cardiff that chicken.' ' lo, reach me those straw- 
 berries.' You should have heard her! I grinned and everybody 
 grinned; — except that admirable wooden husband. She'd got a 
 fine set of sapphires on, and told five different histories in my 
 hearing of how she did get 'em. Do you happen to know where 
 she did? 'lo' does, I suppose. She wanted us all to take 
 shares in some Society for the Diffusion of liabbits over the 
 Camj^agna. It seems there are no rabbits in Italy. I never 
 noticed it, did you ? And we're all to repair this omission of 
 Nature and make a fortune out of their tails (I think it's their 
 tails) ; and there is no risk whatever, she says ; it's to be all pure 
 profit. Clever creature ! She really is great fun. Half her life 
 is spent in being so dreadfully afraid people should think she 
 
FBIENDSniP. 133 
 
 has a lover, and the other half is spent in being so dreadfully 
 afraid people should think she hasn't I I left her at the ball, 
 and I didn't come away till five. Poor ' lo ' looked very much 
 bored, I thought. What a very queer thing love is ! " 
 
 Etoile was silent. She was thinking of him, as he had been 
 at tlie Palazzo Farnese earlier in the same evening. She felt 
 angered — unreasonably angered that he had gone later to this 
 ball. 
 
 " Not that it's hardly ever more than tlie mere question of a 
 qicid 2V0 quo," continued Lady Cardiff, looking up into the pink 
 dome of her point-lace parasol ; " a give-and-take partnership of 
 vanity and convenience. Throw in with the selfishness of this 
 vanity, the mere animal selfishness of the senses, and weld them 
 with the adhering force of halnt, and you have the only form of 
 love that is known to nine-tentlis of our men and women. 
 Passion is a dead letter to them. It would scare them out of 
 their lives. They know no more of it than they do of God, and 
 think no more of it than they do of their graves. Modern love 
 is like modern furniture, very showy and sold at a long price, 
 but all veneer. Pray, how is your friend with the gro.nde passion 
 that sends its object to the frosty Caucasus ? I saw in yester- 
 day's Oalignani that Fedor Souroff had been badly wounded in 
 some mountain skirmish. Is that true ? Yes ? Dear me ! 
 Now, if he had only taken a fancy to Mrs. Henry V. Clams or our 
 dear Joan, nothing of that would have happened to him. It's a 
 caution, as Mrs. Henry would say. Ah, there's General Desart 
 and Mrs. Desart, and Buonretiro. Pretty woman still, ain't 
 she ■? Been flirting fifteen years straight through, and as ' fit ' 
 now as ever she was. They are two of the pillars of the Casa 
 Challoner. General Desart believes in Mr. Challoner as one man 
 of honour believes in another. There's nothing so charming as 
 the amiability of any unamiable peojDle when they occupy the 
 same position, and that a ticklish one. ' Ca' me and I'll ca' 
 thee,' is ever present in their minds. General Desart declares he 
 is ready to put his hand in the fire if loris is anything he 
 oughtn't to be, etc., etc.; and Mr. Challoner is ready to put 
 his hand in the fire if Buonretiro is anything he oughtn't to be, 
 etc., etc. Beautiful reciprocity of faith ! Ah, my dear General, 
 how do? Lovely weather, isn't it ? Charlie gone back to Eton? 
 Handsome boy. How do, dear ? How well you look ! You 
 miss Charlie? To be sure, to be sure. One always misses 
 schoolboys, if only by the preternatural stillness of the house 
 when they're gone. iShall I see you at the Japanese Embassy 
 to-night ? " 
 
 With a few pleasant words Lady Cardiff bade the Desarts 
 adieu, and sailed on under the palm that once saw Augustan 
 Home. 
 
134 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 By the toy-kiosque, they met again Mrs. Henry V. Clams and 
 the Marquis Fontebranda; reaching the summer-house, they 
 encountered the great Duchess of Bridgewater, with her shadow. 
 Lord Dauntless, who were on the eve of hastening home, one to 
 the Court, and the other to the Commons ; by the water-clock 
 they saw that leader of fashion the Baroness de Bruges, with 
 young Ferrara,' who had a face like the Dolce Christ, and was 
 twenty years her junior ; feeding the swans was lively Lady 
 Eyebright, who cheated at cards and had her ears boxed, but 
 was highly esteemed nevertheless, because she was believed to 
 have compromised herself with a very high personage, and to 
 have heaps of his letters, very ill spelt. Nearer the wall, looking 
 at the sunset and her neighbours' gowns alternately, was 
 Princess Gregarine, whom men called " Les vices sympathiques ; " 
 ugly as a KaiSr, charming as a syren, who called herself the best 
 dressed gorilla in Europe, and whose caprices ranged from 
 Grand Dukes to Corporals of the Guard, and, except for superi- 
 ority of plunder, preferred the latter. 
 
 " Delightful age we live in," said Lady Cardiff, when she had 
 nodded to them all, and stopped for her last chat, and was going 
 towards her carriage. " Such dear, virtuous women all these 
 are, and so funny it is to see them where Messalina used to 
 make an idiot of herself with Silius ! Poor Messalina ! She was 
 but a primitive creature, and knew no better than to exhibit 
 herself in the streets ; and Claudius was an easy husband, and 
 uxorious. Yet he did cut up rough at last ; Mr. Challoner and 
 General Desart, Bridgewater and Gregarine, never will. It has 
 been reserved for the Christian world, which boasts of its one 
 wife to one man, to produce a polygamy and polyandry side by 
 side in its midst like the lion and the lamb in Revelation. 
 We've drawing-room editions of everything — we should have 
 had one of the Bible and Shakesi^eare, only that nobody ever 
 reads them, — and so we have drawing-room editions of illicit 
 love, a pretty thing that we can ask to dinner, nod to in church, 
 and meet at court balls. Dear me ! poor Messalina was a very 
 primitive creature, and must have had a sort of conscience in 
 her after all. We've none." 
 
 As the carriage passed oiitward, and went under the clipped 
 ilex trees of the Villa Medici in the rosy light of the passing 
 day, under the trees they saw the Lady Joan and loris. 
 
 Lady Joan kissed her hand with a bright and cordial smile. 
 
 loris, as he bowed, coloured and then grew very pale. 
 
 Lady Cardiff smiled as she said : " Are they going up '? 
 They'll join the Desarts, I dare say; quite seasonable. The 
 Duchess and the Gregarine are a flight above her ; even little 
 Eyebright, I think, don't favour her much. Little Eyebright's 
 no fool, though she does lose her pin-money for a year in five 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 135 
 
 seconds at Draw-Poker. What a charming game, and what a 
 charming name — Draw-Poker ! It is such au epitome of our 
 times, isn't it? All the cards 'chucked,' and the game to the 
 one that ' grabs ' quickest. When the world had good manners 
 it played Ecarte and Piquet ; now it has no manners at all, it 
 plays Poker. It's curious that we should have no manners, but 
 it is true. Heavens! to think of the old grandes dames I 
 remember in my babyhood — friends of the Lamballe and the 
 Polignac, sitters to Lawrence and poems for Praed ! Where has 
 it all gone — the serene grace, the grand courtesy, the perfect 
 delicacy of sentiment and of phrase, the true consciousness of 
 nohhsse oblige f It has gone like the old sweet fragrant scent of 
 the dried rose-leaves in the rooms. Nobody has dried rose- 
 leaves now. They have hrule-parfums instead, and the perfumes 
 are as loud as their dress and their speech." 
 
 Lady Cardiff sighed as she drew up the carriage-skin 
 closer. 
 
 " I took a pretty woman yesterday (a great lady, too, as place 
 goes) to see Vassiltchikoff's new house. The house is lovely, and 
 has worlds of pretty things ; he's a great collector. ' Gomme 
 vous etes bie/i installe iciy she said to him. ' II faut que j'y pince 
 quelque chose,' and she carried off one of his best bits of Saxe, 
 and an enamelled sweetmeat box of Petitot's. And she'd only 
 seen him twice before. 
 
 "Fined" The language of the gutter, and with the 
 language the manners, and with the manners the morals:' of 
 course ! — inevitable and perpetual conjunction. 
 
 " But, my dear, the supreme feminine passion of the day is 
 the bourgeois passion of thrift ! lu face of all our lawless ex- 
 penditure and idiotic profusion ! Yes. In face of all that. 
 Perhaps because of all that. Women seldom spend their own 
 money. Ask Dauntless, loris, Buonretiro, or Heltne Gregarine's 
 Grand Dukes. It is expensive work to be Madame's 'friend' 
 nowadays. Thrift is the fashionable woman's master-motive — 
 it's only a means to an end ; she gets that she may squander. 
 She is the miser and the heir in one person. She seldom wears 
 a dress three times, it's true, and never heeds the loss of one ; 
 but that is a matter of vanity and rivalry. To make up for it, 
 she insures her chemises, underpays her governesses, sells her 
 wardrobe when she has to go into mourning, borrows from her 
 friends, and plunders from her lovers. In all her romances she 
 keeps a weather eye ojDen^to what will pay ; and when she is 
 insisting on a separation, never adores Don Juan so much but 
 what she keejDS hold of her money if she can. That most poetic 
 and transiparent soul. Princess Milianoff, wore mourning here 
 all carnival, because her lover was sent out of the country ; 
 ruined her family by her headstrong passion ; told Milianoff flat 
 
136 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 to his face that she loathed him and everything belonging to him^ 
 and adored Stornellino, and meant to live with him at all costs ; 
 but all the same she stipulated that she should have all the 
 Milianoff's jewels, and even asked for the twelve footmen's 
 liveries, and all their silk stockings. Impossible, you say ? No ; 
 a fact, my dear. A plain, hard, absolute fact. The lawyers 
 heard her. People who say ' Impossible ' don't know our world ; 
 that's all. She was mad about Stornellino, but all the same she 
 thought she might as well i^lunder while she could from her 
 husband. The women of our day don't perceive when they drop 
 to bathos. They make absurd anti-climaxes, and never see the 
 ridicule of them. Madame Milianoff was superb in her wrath 
 and her beaiity, deaf to her sister's prayers, bland to her father's 
 tears, adamant to her husband's upbraiding, declaring by all the 
 powers that were that she loathed even her child because her 
 child was also his. It was a scene of Medea, of Phedre, of 
 Lucrezia — but all the same she fought for every one of her 
 diamonds, and remembered the footmen's silk stockings. Now, 
 if there were a living Beaumarchais to put that on the stage, 
 who'd believe it ? And yet it is a fact, I tell you. A fact as 
 hard as a pebble. All thrift, my dear ; all thrift. That is why 
 there is no passion in our day. They have sensual fancies like 
 rockets, that make a great rush and blaze for a second, but they 
 are always fastened to a gold stick of solid bullion, and when 
 the rocket evaporates in the air, the stick comes down to the 
 ground, — and they keep it. When the woman of our day 
 publishes her ' Souvenirs de mes Tendresses,' she need only edit 
 her banker's book — with a key and an explanatory note or two. 
 * A la place du coeur elle n'a qu'une lettre de change.' If the 
 quotation is not textually correct, it ought to be ; it would have 
 been if Hugo had known as much of our world as he does of 
 little Jeanne. By the way, Joan Challouer will get that royal 
 subsidy, they say, out of the ministers for her Messina Bridge, 
 to prop it up a little while. I dare say that's why she looks so 
 smiling to-day. 
 
 " Ah ! all her efforts seem very puny and petty to you, no 
 doubt; but, in point of fact, those efforts mean very much. 
 They mean perpetual humiliation, constant self-restraint, con- 
 tinual strain, incessant vigilance. Only fancy what it must be to 
 that fiery-hearted violent creature to choke down her temper, to 
 control her scorn, to hide her passion, to veil her disdain ; per- 
 petually to stoop and eat dust in the sight of everybody, and 
 bring her tameless tongue to utter all the humble pie of 
 commonplace and compliment ! What a pui-gatory it must be, 
 you say ? N — no ; hardly that. A continual effort certainly, 
 but she is sustained in it by her anxiety to succeed ; and, after 
 all, very likely she feels the fun of the whole thing, and grins all 
 day behind her mask. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 1.37 
 
 " It is nothing new, all this ; though you fume about it now, 
 as Alcestc fumed and fretted in his time. Society always had 
 its fixed demands. It used to exact birth. It used to exact 
 manners. In a remote and golden age there is a tradition that 
 it was once contented with mind. Nowadays it exacts money, 
 or rather amusement, because if you don't let other folks have 
 the benefit of your money. Society will take no account of it. 
 But have money and spend it well (that is, let Society live on it, 
 gorge with it, walk ankle deep in it), and you may be anything 
 and do anything ; you may have been an omnibus conductor in 
 the Strand, and you may marry a duke's daughter. You may 
 have been an oyster girl in New York, and you may entertain 
 royalties. It is impossible to exaggerate an age of anomaly and 
 hyperbole. There never was an age when people were so 
 voracious of amusement, and so tired of it, both in one. It is a 
 perpetual carnival and a permanent yawn. If you can do 
 anything to amuse us you are safe — till we get used to you — 
 and then you amuse us no longer, and must go to the wall. 
 Every age has its price : what Walpole said of men must be 
 true of mankind. Anybody can buy the present age that will 
 bid very high and pay with tact as well as bullion. There is 
 nothing it will not pardon if it see its way to getting a new 
 sensation out of its leniency. Perhaps no one ought to complain. 
 A society with an india-rubber conscience, no memory, and an 
 absolute indifterence to eating its own words and making itself 
 ridiculous, is, after all, a- convenient one to live in — if you can 
 pay for its suffrages. Panshanger Pomfret married out of his 
 own rank the other day. We were horrified. We were out- 
 raged. We had no words to express our sense of the infamy 
 that gave a great man and seventy-five thousand a year to a 
 woman whom nobody knew. We found oiit all about her in a 
 month, that she had been on the boards of fifth-rate theatres, 
 that she had sung in music halls and danced in tights, that she 
 had been to chimney-sweeps' balls, that she had cooked sausages 
 and sold gin-sling ; that she had hired a fictitious mother out 
 from an unmentionable jjlace in New York ; in short, that there 
 was nothing that she hadn't done, and we ran a neck-and-neck 
 race as to who should know the last newest and "o'ilest story 
 about her. Well, Pan Pomfret took the bull by the horns, and 
 gilded the horns. (They seldom prick then, my dear.) London, 
 and Paris, and Italy were dazzled by his wealth and summoned 
 to his entertainments. He got his cousin to present her at 
 Court, and his sister to receive her ; and down the throat of the 
 rest of the world forced her hke a very big golden pill. II con- 
 nait son monde, my dear. Ltixe in London, luxe in Paris ; luxe 
 in Rome ; and iSociety bidden to enjoy it ; and above all, luxe 
 with tact like minever on white satin. Nothing resists the two — 
 
138 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 nothing. They make a sovereign's robes, in which a beggar will 
 look regal. It is only a year since he married her, but there is 
 nothing on earth more successful than Panshanger Pomfret's 
 wife. Sung in music halls ! Danced in tights ! Heavens ! my 
 dear, we would all swear till we were black in the face that the 
 public never saw so much even as the very tip of her nose. She 
 did sing in private concerts, in Park Lane and Portman Square, 
 and, we think, once at Buckingham Palace. But anything else, 
 my dear ! anything else ! why, we never heard of such slander — 
 never! We see, hear, and feel her only through a golden 
 shower, as Danae saw, heard, and felt Jupiter; and what a 
 difference it makes in our sentiments! Mr. Challoner's wife 
 can't be Panshanger Pomfret's, but in her little way she goes on 
 the same principle. The Pomfrets go in for treble events at 
 four figures, and the Challouers for selling-races and shilling 
 sweepstakes, but the principle is the same ; the only principle, 
 indeed, that will ever succeed nowadays." 
 
 " Believe me. Society is a plant that must be fed and watered, 
 and dug and matted scriipulously," continued Lady Cardiff 
 gravely, as they rolled homeward through the sunset lightened 
 streets. " If you do not take endless trouble with it, it will never 
 blossom for you. Are there not dukes and duchesses nearly as 
 obscure as Jones and Brown ? Are there not millionaires, ay 
 billionaires for that matter, who live hidden imder their gold as 
 utterly as if it were a dust heap ? Why do you see a marchioness 
 a nonentity whose name is barely known off her estates, and a 
 new comer, who has nothing but her shrewd sense and her 
 pleasant manner, pushed up into a leader of fashion ? It's all 
 a matter of trouble and tact, my dear ; nothing more. It isn't 
 what you have, but how you spend it. It isn't what you are, 
 but what you appear to be. It isn't rank, or brains, or riches, 
 or conduct ; you have any one of them, or you may have them 
 all, and yet may avail you nothing. You may remain obscure. 
 Look at Lady Kencarrow in London now — not pretty, not clever, 
 not witty, a third-rate actress in the country, as anybody knows, 
 and yet what a success ! Princes of the blood go to dine with 
 her, her house is the very temple of distinction. All a matter of 
 tact, my dear, and of attention. She has devoted her life to 
 getting a Position. She has succeeded. Nothing succeeds like 
 success. You people who are very clever, or very proud, or very 
 careless never — pardon me — succeed with Society. You make a 
 stir in it, perhaps, but that never lasts long : you won't take the 
 pains to please it; and it soon leaves you for people who do. A 
 witty thing comes into your head, and you say it, careless whom 
 it may hit. You are bored by the vanity of other folks, and yoxi 
 show it, indifferent where you may offend. You won't con- 
 ciliate big little people, and they in their spite set the big big 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 139 
 
 people agaicst you. So the snowball grows, and one day 
 it gets large euougli and hard enough to knock you out of 
 Society altogether. People must make themselves agreeable to be 
 agreeable to the world ; yes, and eat a good deal of dust, too ; 
 that I concede. If they are very high and mighty by birth and 
 all the rest of it, of course they can bo as disagreeable as they 
 choose, and make others eat the dust always. But if not, there 
 is nothing for it but to toady. Believe me, nothing but to toady. 
 Dear Lady Joan knows it. In her little way she succeeds 
 thoroughly. It's a very little way, I grant : to be visited like 
 other people, and go to bankers' balls and clergymen's tea-fights, 
 flnd stand well in ordinary society generally. That's her ambi- 
 tion! But see how she attains to what she wants— just by 
 smiling on women she hates, and making believe that a two- 
 penny-halfpenny chaplain can send her to heaven on earth I 
 Oh, it all seems unutterably small to you. I know that," she 
 said, with some impatience, as Etoile irreverently laughed. " You 
 clever poetic people have a sort of world of your own, a rock 
 amongst the waves, like Chateaubriand's Tomb. But, after all, 
 my dear creature. Society is not to be despised. It is pleasant. 
 Pleasantness is the soft note of this generation, just as scientific 
 assassination is the harsh note of it. The age is compounded of 
 the two. Half of it is chloroform ; the other half is dynamite. 
 We are not brilliant, nor powerful, nor original ; we shall never 
 sparkle like the hcau siecle, nor leave heirs to immortality like the 
 Cinque Cento, nor shape the world anew like the early Ciiristians, 
 nor radiate with crystal clearness like the days of Pericles. But 
 when we are not murderous, we are pleasant, pre-eminently plea- 
 sant ; we know how to gild things, we know how to gloss them, we 
 know how to set chairs on -jvheels, and put spring cushions in 
 them : we are the Age of Anresthetics. We have invented pain- 
 less dentistry and patent bedsteads, we have discovered chloral and 
 condonation, and though we have, to be sure, to bear uncomfort- 
 able things like the telephone, the Commune, and Wagner, still 
 we snooze ourselves asleep, and decide that since we must all 
 die so soon we will be as comfortable as we can whilst we are 
 living. It is the doctrine of Horace, with the poetry left out. 
 We are like Tennyson's 'Lotus-eaters: ' — 'Let us alone, what is 
 there worth a row? ' (Isn't that the line?) Now, you see, you 
 people who will live on that rock in the midst of the sea, and fly 
 across to us like eagles, only disturb us. That is the truth. 
 You make us think, and Society dislikes thinking. You call 
 things by their right names, and Society hates that, though 
 Queen Bess didn't mind it. You trumpet our own Littleness in 
 our ear, and we know it so well that we do not care to hear 
 much about it. You shudder at sin, and we have all agreed 
 that there is no such thing as sin, only mere differences of opinion, 
 
140 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 which, provided they don't offend us, we have no business with t 
 adultery is a haison, lying is gossip, debt is a momentary embar- 
 rassment, immorality is a little slip, and so forth ; and when we 
 have arranged this pretty little dictionary of convenient pseu- 
 donyms, it is not agreeable to have it sent flying by fierce, 
 dreadful old words, that are only fit for some book that nobody 
 ever reads, like Milton or the Family Bible. We do not want to 
 think. We do not want to hear. We do not care about any- 
 thing. Only give us a good dinner and plenty of money, and 
 let us outshine our neighbours. There is the Nineteenth Century 
 Gospel. My dear, if Ecclesiasticus himself came over from that 
 rock of yours, he would preach in vain. You cannot convince 
 people that don't want to be convinced. We call ourselves 
 Chi'istians — Heaven save the mark ! — but we are only the very 
 lowest kind of jjagans. We do not believe in anything — except 
 that nothing matters. Well, perhaps nothing does matter. Only 
 one wonders why ever so many of us were all created, only just 
 to find that out." 
 
 And Lady Cardiff, who sat and watched the world and her 
 generation with the same contemptuous yet good-humoured 
 amusement that she watched children plunder a Christmas tree, 
 or maidens romp in a cotillon, drew a long breath as she ended 
 her harangue, lighted a fresh cigarette as she rolled home in the 
 dusk, and sighed for the days of Louis Quatorze. 
 
 " Why don't you talk, lo ? " the Lady Joan was saying mean- 
 while, walking on under the trees past the kiosque. 
 
 " Mais, ma chere I — there is such a noise from all those 
 carriages." 
 
 "Stuff! There's no more noise than any other day. Did 
 you see Etoile ? " 
 
 " I saw her." 
 
 " With Lady Cardiff. Horrid woman. Lady Cardiff. I can't 
 think what you like in her, she is as insolent as ever she can be. 
 I quite believe that story that Lord Cardiff left her because 
 she horsewhijDped him for driving another woman down to 
 Eichmond " 
 
 " Ca ce peut," said loris with a little shrug of his shoulders. 
 
 " Unless it were worse" said Lady Joan. " Many peo]Dle say 
 it was worse. I do believe she's said something to the Mon- 
 mouthshires, for they have refused my dinner. After my giving 
 'em all those things too ; and I wanted 'em to meet the Norwiches 
 and the Fingals, because Ficgal's out of temper about that 
 Tabernacle of Mimo's. Somebody's been nasty and told him it 
 is all modern bits glued together." 
 
 "But of course!" said loris with a certain contempt, as of 
 one whose advice had been disregarded and was now proved 
 right. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 141 
 
 "Oh, of course! yon're always so wise!" said his friend with 
 much irritatioD. " Of course, when he'd had the money in 
 advance and there wasn't a tabernacle to be found, nobody could 
 do otherwise, and Fingal was delighted with the thing, delighted, 
 until some busybody went and put him out of conceit of it; 
 Mimo has most excellent taste, nobody better." 
 
 " Lord Fingal has better," said loris coldly ; " the Tabernacle 
 will blemish his chapel." 
 
 " You've never seen his chapel, and never will, unless I take 
 you to have your soul converted to the true faith, as the Moira 
 old fudges wanted me to do — do you remember ? If you didn't 
 like Mimo's tabernacle, why didn't you let us sell the one out 
 of Fiordelisa ? That's genuine ! " 
 
 " Ma chere," said loris blandly. " You know well that there 
 is nothing I ever refuse you. All I reserve to myself is the altar 
 my fathers knelt at. It is foolish, no doubt, but is a foolishness 
 I cannot give up " 
 
 " Oh no, you can be a mule when you like," muttered Lady 
 Joan, who had found him on matters that touched his ancestral 
 creed immovable even under her menaces. loris was a man 
 who clung to ancient faiths and ancient ways ; he did not believe 
 in them very devoutly indeed, because he was a man of the world 
 and of his time ; but he would not have them disturbed. Spoil 
 or embellish, ruin or restore, the rest of Fiordelisa as she might, 
 he had will enough of his own to bar her progress at the chapel 
 door. The Lady Joan, who looked longingly at its Delia Kobbias, 
 its Cellini candlesticks, its old oak screen, its old marble altar, 
 and its chased silver chalices, felt herself defrauded of her rights. 
 " All these things growing mouldy for a set of peasants 1 " she 
 woi;ld mutter, and in her mind's eye see them fittingly moved 
 away to South Kensington, and did not despair even yet of one 
 day so moving them. 
 
 At that moment Mr. Silverly Bell joined them in their walk. 
 " My dear St. Paul ! " cried Lady Joan, enchanted : his baptismal 
 name was Paul. 
 
 Mr. Silverly Bell was flattered and smiled. He had a soft 
 sweet smile — never softer, never sweeter, than when he was 
 carrying little drops of poison about in little sweetmeats of 
 pretty phrases : that was his occupation. No one could say 
 Mr. Silverly Bell was otherwise than good-natured ; he never said 
 an ill-natured thing ; he only " regretted," only " wished," only 
 "feared." When a person's character was so bad that as a 
 saviour of society he was obliged to drown it in the tea-pot, ho 
 always sighed as he did so, tenderly, and wore a quite crushed 
 air, as of extreme pain. 
 
 Lady Joan was very fond of him ; she had not known him 
 very long, indeed, but at a glance she had discovered the extreme 
 
142 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 ■usefulness of him — smile, sigL, and all. He had started with a 
 prejudice against her, but he had been vanquished ; she welcomed 
 him so delightedly, invited him so persistently, praised him so 
 ardently, that he could not but yield ; and with this handsome 
 woman on his arm at the spinsters' teas and the clergymen's 
 gatherings, could not but feel meekly iiattered. In return, he 
 placed himself — smile, sigh, and all — at her disposal, and was of 
 gxeat value. 
 
 " Silverly Bell assures me there's nothing in it — nothing in it. 
 He must know; he's always in her house," said ]\Irs. Grundy 
 time and again, when having received a momentary scare from 
 the sight of Lady Joan rattliug out at the gates with a gun 
 between her knees, and the handsome profile of loris dark 
 against the sun beside her, Mr. Silverly Bell reassured her 
 seriously, and smoothed down her ruffled scruples with a few 
 judicious words. 
 
 " What do I care for the old cats ? " she would say with a 
 grin, twitching Pippo's reins, and flecking her whip over her 
 tossing mane. But she did care, care endlessly, care with all 
 her heart and soul. People who do not care do not say so. The 
 soldier who is not afraid never boasts that he fears no ball. 
 
 The lawless gipsy half of her sent her across country with her 
 whip and her cigar, her gun and her lover, rattling through the 
 dust at full gallop, and showing her white teeth at broad jests 
 that she shouted above the din of the wheels. But the coward 
 in her was none the less powerful ; and when the ponies were 
 back in the stable, she would shake off the dust and don a full 
 siiit of decorum, and bear herself with cheerful countenance, and 
 go through all the million and one ceremonials of commonplace 
 existence with a zeal and a patience that demanded their reward 
 and got it. 
 
 A woman who ought to be out of society, but, nevertheless, 
 is always in it, commands the genuine respect of both sexes. 
 She pleases them too ; for she neither offends the stronger sex 
 by too much virtue, nor offends the weaker sex by too much 
 effrontery. Lady Joan lunching meekly off cold lamb and lettuco 
 with a clergyman's wife on a Sunday morning, and Lady Joan 
 going joyously to champagne and caviare at the masquerade on 
 a Sunday night, was an instance of that adaptability to circum- 
 stances which is the most popular of all qualities. 
 
 Mr. Silverly Bell, and such as he, enabled her to go at once to 
 the lamb and lettuce, and to the champagne and caviare. She 
 knew this, and petted Mr. Silverly Bell and his typo ac- 
 cordingly. 
 
 It may be opposed to all the graceful theories on the relations 
 of the sexes, but it is true that the woman who seeks the admira- 
 tion of the majority, and shows that it is agreeable to her, will 
 
FEIENDSHiP. 143 
 
 almost always secure it. She will turn against lier the highest 
 order of men indeed, but as this is a very small minorily the 
 loss will not be felt. In society, as in politics, the majority is 
 the least intelligent but the most imposing section. 
 
 Happily for herself, she was so constituted that she could 
 enjoy netting a minnow as much as landing a sturgeon, and 
 brought to her efforts at capture an infinite zest that was of 
 itself assurance of success. She took so much trouble, she was 
 so charmed with commonplaces, her smile beamed so radiantly, 
 her hand pressed theirs so cordially, her manner was so 
 accentuated with the strongest welcome and the most eager 
 enjoyment of their companionship, that a man could hardly be 
 otherwise than gratified with his own effect on her ; and when 
 he left her i^resence, could not do less than defend the good 
 manners and good taste of a lady so favourable to himself. 
 
 The art of pleasing is more based on the art of seeming 
 pleased than people think of, and she disarmed the prejudices 
 of her enemies by the unaffected delight she appeared to take in 
 themselves. You may think very ill of a woman, but after all 
 you cannot speak very ill of her if she has assured you a huudi-ed 
 times that you are amongst her dearest friends. 
 
 And if a very fastidious mind is displeased with flattery, 
 very fastidious minds are not general, and a taste for flattery is. 
 " Be honey, and the flies will eat you," says the old saw ; but, 
 like most other proverbs, it will not admit of universal appli- 
 cation. There is a way of being honey that is thoroughly 
 successful and extremely popular, and constitutes a kind of 
 armour that is bomb-proof. 
 
 "Michael Angelo was a fool," said Mr. Pratt, an English 
 sculptor, who lived with Eoman princes, and was called Pheidias 
 Pratt by artists in general, and took the derision seriously as a 
 compliment — to Pheidias — and would demonstrate to you that 
 the Apollo of the Belvedere was nothing so very extraordinary 
 after all. 
 
 " A sublime fool, but a fool ! " said Pheidias Pratt, shifting 
 his scarlet fez on one side. "Did all his work himself; only 
 think of the waste of power ! Half his years spent in chipping ; 
 lost in mere stonemason's labour. Now, I keep sixty workmen ; 
 I never touch the marble — never touch it ! — and look what 
 numbers of statues I can turn out in the year." 
 
 " And the ideas, Mr. Pratt ? " said Etoile. " Do you hire them 
 also, or do you do without them ? " 
 
 " The ideas ! the ideas ! " echoed Pheidias with a stare ; and 
 the good fellow walked oft" hufled in his velvet gown, amongst 
 his marble children, who all gazed vacuously into space with 
 scarcely more soul in any one of them than in the carven doll of 
 a Swabian toy-maker. 
 
144 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 He had married, twenty years before, twenty thousand a 
 year, in the person of an alderman's heiress, and his works were 
 to be seen in law courts and public halls, gentlemen's mansions 
 and people's parks. What did he want with ideas? Neverthe- 
 less, he felt the allusion to such a thing was in very bad taste. 
 
 The Lady Joan, who had brought Etoile to the studio, 
 grinned as she herself fell into ecstasies over a Desolation, the 
 embroideries of whose tunic she declared she felt she must pick 
 off with a pair of scissors : the marble was so exactly like 
 thi'ead. 
 
 " How could you inquire for such ' outsiders ' as ideas ? " she 
 murmured to Etoile. " Of course he hires his ideas ; clever 
 young Italians sell heaps of ideas for a hundred francs. All 
 that's dear old Phid's own in his sculptures is his name on the 
 pedestals." 
 
 " Poor Michael Angelo! " 
 
 The Lady Joan laughed. 
 
 " Well, I don't think you need put yoiirself out for him ; he's 
 pretty safe, and I don't think Phid here will go down to 
 posterity with him. But Phid will hate you, you know, for 
 ever. Why don't you tell him that Venus at the Bath is 
 beautiful ? " 
 
 " A bathing woman, that must have been modelled at Trou- 
 vUle? With a hip out of joint, too, look ! " 
 
 " Phid gives capital parties, and he's ' coining ' every day," 
 said Lady Joan, dryly. " And his wife has the longest and the 
 nastiest tongue in Europe." 
 
 And she swam after the sulking Phidias and told him that 
 his Sabrina was the noblest work of the century ; Sabrina was 
 robed from head to foot ; Mr. Pheidias Pratt thought the nude 
 barbarous; he held, too, that it was very easy — only study 
 anatomy, and there you were. 
 
 " A very intelligent woman, that wife of Challoner's," said 
 the good Pheidias to his own wife, a few hours later. " If I 
 were you I'd call on her ; it isn't worth while to be too starchy : 
 of course she larks about with loris, and all that kind of thing ; 
 but it's no business of ours if the husband like it; and she tells 
 me Lord Hebrides is her cousin. The Hebrides are here this 
 winter. I'd leave a bit of pasteboard if I were you." 
 
 His wife, who hitherto had always insisted that the Casa 
 Challoner was too flagrant to be entered, because she herself 
 came from Clapham, and had severe notions, allowed herself to 
 be persuaded against her conscience, and left the bit of paste- 
 board, and a few days later a larger piece inscribed, " Mrs. Pratt. 
 At Home. Tuesdays" — with a very small "music" hiding 
 itself in the corner. 
 
 Lady Joan gave a grimace of triumph before the big card. 
 
FRIENDSniP. 145 
 
 Mi's. Pratt's musical Tuesdays were amongst the choicest 
 gatherings of the season ; all the embassies went there, and 
 hitherto Lady Joan had languished in vain for an entrance. 
 
 Of course a similar big card was delivered at the house of 
 loris. Society, provided only you will wash your cup and 
 platter, will always oblige you in these little things. 
 
 Mrs. Pratt had been six years bringing her Clapliam con- 
 science into recognition of the Casa Challoner ; but having 
 brought her conscience round, she at last brought it round with 
 a handsome sweep, and knew the polite ways of society too 
 much not to follow them, and sent the big card to loris, so that 
 he might enter her presence with the Lady Joan, and be at hand 
 for the Lady Joan's fan on the Lady Joan's wish to walk about 
 the rooms, or the Lady Joan's carriage when the party was over. 
 Mrs. Pheidias Pratt knew that as a leader of society she must be 
 amiable in such matters. 
 
 So did Lady Joan gain her point, by merely pretending to 
 want her scissors to pick off the embroideries of a marble 
 Desolation, and by saying a Sabrina surpassed Praxiteles and 
 Donatello. 
 
 Who should .3ay she was not a cleverer woman than Etoile ? 
 
 Certainly Mrs. Pratt left cards little and big on Etoile, as she 
 would have done on Phryne or Mephistopheles, had she met 
 either of them at Princess Vera's ; but Mr. Pratt said to his wife 
 that he was sure there would be something queer about her 
 somewhere which would come out some day, and Mrs. Pratt 
 pursed her mouth to her friend : " Y — e — es. We do receive 
 her. We met her at Princess Vera's. But, tulio was she ? That 
 is what I never can learn." 
 
 " ]Vho tvas she i " said Mrs. Pratt with sepulchral whisper 
 and solemn stare, and had a way of saying it, and of vaguely 
 implying a great deal by the way she said it, for which Lady 
 Joan could have kissed her, " detestable old woman," with her 
 dukes and duchesses, and rubbish, though the Lady Joan had 
 always considered her to be. For the Lady Joan did not permit 
 other people to air dukes and duchesses; as for herself, dukes 
 and duchesses were all her cousins, and came in handy when 
 she wanted to impress the small fry of society; that was 
 different : when you are born a Perth-Douglas, and want to sell 
 a teacup or a triptych, you must employ the advantages that 
 Nature has given you. 
 
 But she was very often so out of temper with herself that 
 neither dukes nor duchesses, teacups or triptychs could reconcile 
 her to life. She knew very well that when she had been pre- 
 reuted at seventeen, handsome, black-browed, and Spanish look- 
 ing, there had been no reason in life why she should not have 
 become an English duchess in her own person. By temper she 
 
 L 
 
l^G FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 was ambitions, by nature she louged for place aucl power ; she 
 kuew very well that ber life was a coup manque ; aud now and 
 then some irritated pride at the smallness of ber aims, and the 
 pigmy proportions of ber results, would wake in ber, and make 
 her acrid and disappointed and enraged with ber past and her 
 present. There were times when she realised that her life was, 
 after all, obscure and little and ignoble. 
 
 Sometimes it made ber in such a rage with herself that she 
 shook her fist at the image of ber black brows in ber mirror. 
 For she was shrewd enough, and — in ber own odd way — proud 
 enough, to hate herself heartily at times for ail the dust she ate, 
 and all the honey she prepared for the eating of Society. And 
 still more she bated those who bad sight enough to see the dust 
 on ber mouth, and the honey in ber bands, and amongst them 
 .she instinctively numbered Etoile. 
 
 She began to detest Etoile with that vehement and concen- 
 trated dislike which is only the stronger because it cannot ex- 
 plain itself, or put any clear name toits origin. 
 
 Something in the glance of Etoile stung ber conscience ; 
 something in ber smile made ber pride wince ; she was always 
 fancying that Etoile was thinking of all Voightel bad told ber of 
 those days when the champagne bad been in the ice-pails on the 
 housetops in Damascus : "N'oightel bad told ber nothing, but the 
 Lady Joan would never have credited that. Somehow, too, 
 before Etoile's Ufe — meditative, poetic, studious, always aloof 
 from the world even when in the world — ber own life seemed 
 common and' bustling, and base and ridiculous. At the bottom 
 of her soul lay a contempt for herself, a bitter and restless 
 contempt: it stirred in ber, and stung her in this stranger's 
 presence — and she hated h§j. 
 
FEIENDSIIIP. 147 
 
 CHAPTEri XV. 
 
 " Why don't people like Etoile? " said Lady Cardiff. 
 
 " Don't they like her ? " said a Eussiau Baroness. " I do." 
 
 " You do, my dear, I do, a hundred cleyer people do, but not 
 the majority ! " 
 
 " I will tell you why," said Princess Yera, who was in her own 
 house, and to whom these ladies had come as an amateur-deputa- 
 tion about a great charity ball at the Capitol. 
 
 "Yes, well?" said Lady Cardiff, in expectation of a titbit of 
 news. 
 
 " She likes to see the sun rise," said Princess Vera. 
 
 " What ? The sun rise in winter ! " 
 
 " In winter and summer. Unnatural, isn't it ? " said Princess 
 Vera, lifting her lovely head from an old miniature she was copy- 
 ing. _ " It is those imnatural tastes that we find unpleasant. The 
 traditional lady who answered naively that she did not care for 
 innocent pleasures was the one candid person of all womanhood, 
 depend on it, and represented a sentiment more general than we 
 like to acknowledge. A woman who does Like innocent pleasures 
 is to us just what a writer who won't take money for his books, 
 or a painter who won't sell his pictures, is to all other writers 
 and all other painters. Nothing is so objectionable in anybody 
 as to be above everybody else's tastes and necessities. When we 
 come from our balls feeling ugly and untidy, and ennmjees, and 
 see her just coming out of the door beginning the day, we feel to 
 dislike laer. It is all tlie sunrise. Nothing else." 
 
 People laughed. Princess Vera, who was always lovely, and 
 never ennuyee, and cared for sunrises herself, could afford to say 
 such things. 
 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams, who was present, felt angi-y, though 
 she never dared to open her lips before Princess Vera. 
 
 " Of course one aren't as neat and spry comin' out as goin' in, 
 and after the cotillon how should we be ? but there's no call for 
 her to say so," she thought, feeling personally aggrieved and 
 wondering if Princess Vera had seen her curl drop off into the 
 soup, as it had done at the Japanese Embassy supper on the 
 previous night. 
 
 Princess Vera was quite right: Society was naturally sus- 
 picious of such a queer taste for sunrises. 
 
 Society could never understand it. Why should anybody who 
 wasn't obliged, go out early ? All the pretty fashionable women 
 who waltzed themselves half out of their sleeveless boddices till 
 
148 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 sunrise dawned on them drinking hot soup and champagne, and 
 then slept serenely with chloral's benign aid till it was time to 
 have their complexions " done np," never could understand or 
 forgive a woman who walked, drove, or rode in soUtude while 
 the dew was still fresh. 
 
 For some years the world that talked about her had thought 
 Etoile went out for mysterious intrigues, which intention would 
 have redeemed the unnatural action and made it more natural ; 
 but being at length after several seasons compelled to conclude 
 that this explanation was impossible, the eccentricity of the habit 
 could be only annoying. 
 
 That she went for mere air, mere exercise, and the charm that 
 lies in the fi-eshness and silence of the early day, was a thing far 
 too simple to be grasped by the astute intelligence of an experi- 
 enced Society. 
 
 The simplicity of the artist is always the stumbling-block of 
 the artist with the world. 
 
 One early morning, following this habit, she was wandering 
 alone with her dog under the woods of the Pamphili Doria, where 
 she had especial permission to drive at her jDleasure. In the 
 breezy uplands of that lovely place she rambled ankle-deep in 
 violets, lost in thought, the dreamy scholarly fanciful thought 
 which Eome begets in any contemplative mind ; suddenly her 
 thoughts were scattered by the excitement and apparent sorrow 
 of Tsar, who ran to and fro, whining and pawing at some object 
 on the grass under the oak trees. On going nearer to the dog, 
 she found outstretched there a woman who had fainted, and was 
 lying insensible. 
 
 She was young and handsome, though her face had the gaunt 
 grey leanness of long hunger, and her bones seemed almost 
 starting through the skin. When the woman came to herself, 
 she moaned for her child, refusing to be comforted, and begging 
 to be taken home. " Home " was a miserable garret, in a dark 
 and loathsome lane of crowded hovels, 
 
 Etoile had her taken there, and followed her. 
 
 In the garret was a baby of two years old ; he was rosy and 
 well ; the mother had starved herself to give him the little food 
 she could get. By little and little she told her story, a very 
 trite one : she was an Hungarian, a ballet dancer, engaged at 
 fifteen years old to follow a wandering Viennese troop, and, fall- 
 ing ill, left behind them unpaid ; for the enterprise had not 
 succeeded. In her poverty and beauty a young French painter 
 had found her and loved her : she had been happy for six months. 
 Then her lover had deserted her, gone to his own country, promis- 
 ing to return ; he had written once or twice, but never now for 
 two years. She had no relatives and no friends. Dance any 
 more she could not, for her ankle had been broken in a stage 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 149 
 
 trap, and though well ag.ain, had been ill set and was stiff. Friend- 
 less, sick, and wretched, she had dropped from one depth to 
 another depth, lower and lower, but keeping herself honest that 
 the boy might not blush for her in liis manliood. 
 
 She had gone into the Pamphili woods to gather violets to 
 sell, and had fainted as she had stooped to the first flower. It 
 was one of those short sad stories which lie thick and common 
 as dust under the roofs of great cities. Death comes and brushes 
 such dust away ; and it gathers again by the morrow. 
 
 Etoile, returning to see her later in the day, and welcomed in 
 the wretched attic with touching gratitude, found that the poor 
 creature's one desire was to get some means of maintenance for 
 herself and the child in Eome. She could not bear to leave the 
 place where her love's short joys had been known, and where her 
 lover, she always hoped, might one day or other return. 
 
 She did not know what to do, but was willing to do anything 
 " that would not make the child ashamed." The sculptors would 
 have paid her to let them model her form, which was symmetri- 
 cally beautiful ; biit better death, even for the boy, than that, 
 she thought. She clung with absolute fidelity to her lover's 
 memory. 
 
 The hive of wretched bouses in which she dwelt was in the 
 heart of Eome, and almost touched the back of the Casa 
 Challoner. When with an aching heart she left the garret, the 
 little child stretching his arms out after her, and the mother 
 blessing her and her dog too for rescue from the grave, it was 
 twilight in the short wintry day, and the lamp, lighted before 
 the doorway of the Temple of all the Virtues, caught her sight 
 as it glanced throitgh the gloom. 
 
 "Perhaps she could help me to help her," thought Etoile. 
 She vaguely doubted in all things the woman who Voightel had 
 said would be to her the Prose of Eome, yet the energy and 
 promptitude of a character utterly opposite to her own as 
 vaguely impressed her by its very unlikeness to herself. The 
 Hungarian girl, in her wretchedness, was only divided by a few 
 yards from the cosy mirthful chambers of the Casa Challoner. 
 To speak of her might perhaps secure her a friend there. 
 
 It was a Wednesday, and several of the heavy landaus that 
 yearly bear to and fro their freight of rich foreign visitors about 
 the streets of Eome were standing before the house. Etoile 
 descended from her own carriage, and remembered that she 
 ought weeks before to have attended one of these solemn rites. 
 
 The house looked ciiriously changed. It made her think of 
 Sganarelle drawing a long face to feel the patient's pulse. 
 
 There was no scent in the Turkish room save from a fountain 
 of eau de Cologne; there was a tea-urn in the Turldsh room 
 solemn as a high altar ; there were crowds entirely composed of 
 
150 FRIENDSniP. 
 
 ladies, and serried ranks of dowagers and spinsters bolt upright 
 on the Turkish divans. There was a murmur of small talk like 
 the unending murmur of the sea ; the Bishop of Melita and a 
 Dean of St. Edmund's conversed together in the centre of the 
 chamber; Mr. Challoner had become "dear Eobert," and was 
 handing bread and butter ; and amidst it all stood the Lady- 
 Joan with a little ruff round her throat, and a grey gown, who 
 was asking after a baby's health with eager solicitude, and stand- 
 ing with her little girl's curls pressed tenderly to her side, herself 
 smiling sweetly in the face of Mrs. Grundy, as typified at that 
 moment by Lady George Scrope-Stair and that very proper little 
 person, Mrs. Macscrip. 
 
 Mrs. Grundy was in great force, indeed, in all her types there, 
 and the Lady Joan, with her hand on her child's neck, was say- 
 ing apologetically — 
 
 " Well, you know, I don't like it, and that's the truth. Of 
 course there are unpleasant sort of stories, and Mr. Challoner 
 doesn't approve my being much with her. But, you know, 
 I'm always good-natured, and my father is such a dear blind 
 goose " 
 
 " The Comtesse d'Avesnes! " shouted her servant between the 
 silk curtains of her drawing-room doorway. 
 
 The serried battalions of Mrs. Grundy's forces fell asunder 
 with a shock, and some dropped their biscuits, and one even 
 dropped her cup. The Lady Joan, however, who never dropped 
 anything except an inconvenient memory or an unremunerative 
 acquaintance, rushed forward with cordial smile and outstretched 
 hands. 
 
 " Too good of you. "What a pleasure ! You, who despise tea- 
 fights, too ! Do come to the fire. Effie, go and fetch the cream 1" 
 
 Little EflBe, bringing the cream, looked softly at Etoile, who 
 had been kind to her, and timidly stroked the silver fox furs of 
 her dress. 
 
 " I like you," said the child in a nervous little voice. " Why 
 did mamma say ? " 
 
 " EflQe, hand the cake to Lady George," said Mr. Challoner, 
 who was standing on guard by the hearthrug, having just safely 
 left the Bishop and the Dean cordially discussing the state of the 
 Colonial Church, The child, frightened, slid timidly away, and 
 it never occurred to Etoile that the words which she had partially 
 overheard on her entrance could by any chance whatever have 
 referred to herself. 
 
 The serried ranks of Mrs. Grundy drew away from the fire, 
 and, as around a safe and holy sanctuary, closed round the tea- 
 table where the Scrope-Stair sisters, in bounetless intimacy, were 
 presiding over the urn. 
 
 " Dear Lady Joan is too good-natured," sighed Mrs. Grundy,. 
 sotto voce, and the Scrope-Stair sisters murmured back — 
 
FRIENDSIIir. 151 
 
 "Oh yes, you InDw; it is her independence and nobleness. 
 She never tvill believe in the possibility of evil." 
 
 Mrs. Grnndy shook her head, and glancing towards the fire 
 wondered what the cost of the silver fox furs had been. Why 
 could questionable characters always dress so well ? Mrs. Grundy 
 does not always dress well. 
 
 Lady Cardiff nodded from her corner by the hearth, where 
 she had ensconced herself with her eye-glass, and naotioned 
 Etoile to a seat beside her. 
 
 " How do, my dear Comtesse ? Cold day, isn't it ? "What a 
 charming gown. And those niello buttons too — delicious ! It's 
 quite amusing here ; only one's always afraid she'll come out 
 with something for one to buy. If it wasn't for that apprehen- 
 sion it would really be delicious to sec her butter all those bores 
 and do the proper for Mrs. Grundy. I've said I'd the toothache, 
 and kept quiet just to watch her. It's great fun. How does sho 
 square it with all her little games ! But the little games are only 
 the boldness of innocence. So Mimo says. He must know." 
 
 Lady Cardiff put up her eye-glass to look at Mrs. Henry V. 
 Clams' Eretonne toilette (the entire costume of a fisher girl, 
 correctly copied; in feuiUe-morfe velvet, and navy blue satin, with 
 a merveilleuse bonnet to crown it appropriately), and Lady 
 Cardiff said aloud for the benefit of neighbours that His Holiness 
 was very ill, the old trouble in the legs, and then, sinking her 
 voice, continued : — 
 
 " In Spain, you know, my dear, when a lovely woman has had 
 an adventure, her friends say slie has eaten a lily. That's just 
 what her friends say. She munches her leeks, and they swear 
 they're lilies. Happy creature ! All comes of a wooden husband, 
 as I told you the other day, and her admirable faculty of boring 
 herself to death. She will hear me ? Nonsense ; she is screaming 
 into Lady George Scrope's ear-trumpet. If she did hear, she'd 
 only ask me to dinner and sell me a marjot. That's her way of 
 revenging herself. She's been dying to be acquainted with the 
 Monmouthshires for four winters, but they never would let her 
 be introduced to them. (You know wliom I mean — the Mon- 
 mouthshires— she's the Duke of Brecon's sister). "Well, when I 
 'was with them one day last week, in comes my Lady Joan, bold 
 as brass, and with her pockets full of all the sweepings of her 
 hric-a-hrac shops, and rosaries of olives that she gathered herself 
 Tipon Olivet — all these as offerings to Anne Monmoutiishire, 
 who is perfectly mad on the subject of a lottery for the blind 
 English in Eome. (I believe there are six of them blind, or 
 some such number.) And all these sweepings and olives were 
 for that lottery. The bait took — yes, the bait took. Anne 
 Monmouthshire, who always loathed her, has returned her card, 
 and has certainly invited her to a musical party next week. 
 
152 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Now you, instead of doing a thing like that, only find out sick 
 old folks and do good to them, and let nobody be the wiser ! " 
 
 " There ! there ! " said Lady Cardiff, vivaciously, interrupting 
 herself as a haughty-looking dowager, with a very aquiline nose, 
 and very fine sables, sailed into the room. " Didn't I tell you 
 so ? Just look at her. There's Anne Monmouthshire actually 
 come on her day I Watch her now. Watch her ! What eager- 
 ness, what cordiality, what ecstasy ! Dear me, how very funny it 
 is that anybody born a Perth-Douglas should be such a snob. 
 She pined four whole winters to get the Monmouthsliires here, 
 and now she's done it, just by those shop-sweepings and olives. 
 Eeally she ought to have been a greater creature than she is ! 
 Oh, I see you despise all these things. You are leagues above 
 such considerations. You are governed by your sympathies and 
 your antipathies. You seek or shun other folks by no better rule 
 than their merit or demerit. What can be more indiscreet ? You 
 like people who can be of no manner of service to you, and dislike 
 all sorts of great personages. Pardon me, but that is not how 
 Society is carried on. Society is an aggregate of personal enemies 
 — all women are all women's enemies, and most women are most 
 men's enemies, too, if men did but know it, which they don't ; 
 but hostility should never interfere with prudence. A grain of 
 sand may blind a Samson, or a Sappho : that is the figure that 
 should always loom large before any of us. Don't provoke the 
 sand with a whirlwind : take a watering-pot. That is where our 
 admirable Lady Joan is pre-eminent. To look at her she should 
 raise the whirlwind ; with an oriental profile and a mastiff's jaw, 
 one woiild expect a whirlwind from her. Not a bit of it ; she 
 has a nice green watering-pot, like a true British horticulturist, 
 and she smooths her sand diligently with a silver shower from 
 the parish pump. The whirlwind does the world good ; it clears 
 the mist, it sweeps away the pestilence, it bears the eagles as the 
 sea her ships, and drives the clouds before it. Oh yes, and it's 
 very nice in epic poetry. But the watering-pot is a much meeker 
 domestic servant, and a much more popular instrument. If you 
 would use the watering-pot, my dear, you would never get the 
 dust in your eyes. " 
 
 Wherewith Lady Cardiff rose and swam away majestically 
 to her friend Anne Monmouthshire, and said very cruelly — 
 
 " Didn't know you knew Lady Joan, my love ! Delighted to 
 meet you so unexpectedly. Have you come to get any more 
 rosaries ? Gathered the olives yourself, dear Lady Joan, didn't 
 you, and on Olivet ? Dear me, how charming ; just like Noah's 
 dove. Wasn't it Noah's dove ? " 
 
 Meanwhile Mrs. Henry V. Clams approached Etoile, who 
 always filled her with that uncomfortable sensation which Burns 
 embodies as the idea that " a chiefs amang us takiu' notes," and 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 153 
 
 ongaging her timidly in conversation, invited her to dinner — a 
 very great dinner to be given in twelve days from that time. 
 
 Etoile declined on the plea that she had come for health, and 
 went out very little. Mrs. Henry V. Clams suddenly felt that 
 the Bretonne costume was loud, and the merveilleuse bonnet 
 incongruous. " She's real nasty," thought that good-natured 
 lady. 
 
 iVt that moment there entered a person very unlike the Bishop 
 of Melita and the Dean of St. Edmund's — a graceful and dis- 
 tinguished-looking person, with a charming smile and a perfect 
 bow. 
 
 Lady Cardiff put up her eyeglass. 
 
 " Dear me ! There's loris ! " she said to her friend, Anne 
 Monmouthshire, whom she had cruelly possessed herself of, and 
 drawn away near the door. " Dear me ! Husbands usually shirk 
 these 'days,' but he and Mr. Challoner are really most exem- 
 plary. "What do I mean ? Oh, I don't mean anything, of course, 
 my dear. Nice-looking man, isn't he? Such race about him. 
 Somehow he doesn't go well with the tea-urn, do you think? and 
 the Bishop? You are quite deh'ghted with her? To be sure, 
 why shouldn't you be ? I'm sure she tries hard to please you, 
 and she never did anything in the East, you know, but gather 
 those olives ; never anything ! Such a pretty idea, too, Olives 
 from Olivet ! " 
 
 Meanwhile, as loris entered, the brow of his hostess grew 
 black as night. " You're an hour too early ; how could you be 
 such a fool ? " she muttered roughly. " You ought always to let 
 'em all be gone ; I've told you so fifty hundred times." 
 
 He murmured penitent apologies, greeted the saints around 
 the tea-urn gaily and gracefully, and crossed to the sinner in the 
 silver furs. "I saw your liveries at the door, so I ventured to 
 enter," he murmured to Etoile ; Mr. Challoner shifted his eye- 
 glass with a grim smile, and, vacating his post by the fire, asked 
 Mrs. Grundy if the Chemnitz scandal ^Yere not a terrible blow 
 to Society. Mr. Challoner always spoke of Society with peculiar 
 tenderness and respect, as if it were his elder brother. 
 
 The Baroness Chemnitz, who had dealt this blow, was a 
 beautiful young Eoman, with a head as perfect as a narcissus, 
 and a body as graceful as its stem. She had been wedded by a 
 ruined family to a great German capitalist at eighteen. She 
 had decorated his wonderful Louis Quinze houses and Renais- 
 sance hotels for some five or six seasons. She had seen all the 
 world dance in her gorgeous rooms until ten in the morning in 
 Paris, Berlin, and Rome. Then a great love had entered into 
 her ; a whirlwind of passion that transformed the pale, pensive 
 narcissus into a purple passiflora with a heart of fire. She fell, 
 but she fell grandly. She erred, but she never swerved from 
 
154 FBIENDSUIP. 
 
 lier punishment. She faced tho wrath of her husband, the fury 
 of her family, the rage of the world. She confessed herself guilty, 
 and claimed her separation, and left all the gold and the glories 
 of her place, and went out to face solitude— for her lover even 
 turned against her ; lovers like Society dishke a storm, and blame 
 a hesitation to deceive. The husband had to be held back by 
 main force from her destruction ; she hurled her hatred of hiui 
 in his teeth, and shook herself free from the trammels of his 
 riches, and went down into the dust of obscurity. What could 
 an outraged Society do?— such a woman as this was unnatural. 
 To old Greek times perhaps she might belong, but born under 
 the Second Empire of France, surely she should have known 
 some better way than this. 
 
 Shewas in love, of course— women always were— but then to 
 leave such luxury for love ! 
 
 What depravity ! sighed Society. Such a ball as her last was 
 —diamond rmgs and sapphire lockets given away like pebbles 
 in the cotillon, and twenty thousand francs spent in forced straw- 
 berries alone!— how stupid, when, with a little management, 
 nothing need have been known, you know !— her bedroom hung 
 with white satin, embroidered with wreaths of roses ; her footmen 
 to be counted by the score ; her lovers like the dreams of Aladdin ; 
 
 and, to leave all that, when with a little tact ! was there ever 
 
 such unheard-of madness?— to make an abominable edat, when 
 with only a grain of sense no one need have suspected anything ! 
 —to lose a fortune counted by trillions, because she could not 
 smile m her lord's eyes, and lie a little gracefully, and manage 
 things quite quietly, as good-breeding teaches every one ! What 
 insuperable idiotcy !— what inconceivable baseness ! Did she not 
 know better her mere duty to Society ? 
 
 What did Society care for the woman's agony, for her long 
 temptation, for her piteous feebleness, for the mute misery with 
 which she had played her part in the gorgeous pageant of her 
 life ; for the passionate sickness for one voice, one glance, one 
 touch, which had made her cast away all the pomp and powers 
 of her place, and fling herself into the dust for love alone ? 
 
 What did they know or care ? They only saw a fool who 
 forfeited pride and pleasure and possession ; who left wealth 
 and ease and the delights of boundless extravagance behind her 
 as so much dross ; who could not lie, who would not be bribed, 
 who would not be content with treachery and vice, but craved 
 for liberty, and stooped to truth ! Society was outraged. 
 
 If her precedent were followed— what balls would there be 
 to go to ? A husband who leapt like a lion to avenge his own 
 dishonour, and a wife who shook off millions like dust from her 
 unfaltering feet ! Society was aghast— nothing frightens it like 
 passion. For what does Passion care to amuse Society ? 
 
FRIENDSUir. 155 
 
 Society with one voice proclaimed Geltrudc Chemnitz tbc 
 vilest of her sex ; and, now around the Lady Joan's tea-table, 
 agreed witli Mr. Challoncr that in these flagrant cases Society 
 could not be too severe. Society, which invited Lady Joan and 
 loris to the same entertainments; Society, which smiled and 
 sniggered with vile beneficence on a million illicit i;nions ; Society, 
 ■which had invented and patronised those blasphemies of " friend- 
 ship" and fervent parodies of "purity ;" Society, which pressed 
 the wife's wedded hand warm from her lover's lips, so long as 
 the husband presided blandly at the desecration of his hearth ; 
 Society, which smiled good-humouredly on the " little weak- 
 nesses " of post-nuptial loves so long as the supplanted lord had 
 neither modesty enough to feel his shame, nor virility enough to 
 take his vengeance ; Society, which crowned the adulteress, and 
 welcomed her, so long as she kept a lie upon her mouth, and 
 had a bold front lifted to the gaze of men ; Society, which only 
 when the man was roused as man, and the woman could blush 
 as woman, saw " any harm whatever," and only when the doors 
 were shut, the tables feastless, and the world forgot in woo, 
 found out that sin was after all an ugly thing, and faithless 
 wives were wantons. 
 
 " It is such a grievous thing when a woman forgets herself! " 
 said the Lady Joan who had danced at the last monster ball in 
 the Louis Quinze rooms, and ordered lo to bring her her chicken 
 and champagne in tones that a kindly duchess would barely use 
 to a steward's-room boy. 
 
 She herself never forgot herself ; she only forgot other people 
 — when they were of no use to her — which does not matter 
 at all. 
 
 What a fool the beautiful wife of Baron Chemnitz looked to 
 her ! — to have only one lover in all your life, and let everybody 
 know it, and leave whits satin bedrooms and Louis Quinze 
 dining-rooms, diamonds as big as marbles, and horses from the 
 imperial haras, and all the rest of it, with a horrible rupture and 
 uproar, so that all Europe heard of the crime ! 
 
 It made Lady Joan quite ferocious to think what chances 
 other women had and what dire mess and misuse they made of 
 them. Only see what she did — with little rooms like bandboxes, 
 and no money to speak of, and never a Louis Quinze mirror in 
 the house at all, unless it were bought to be sold on the 
 morrow. 
 
 She felt more respect than ever for herself; and felt that 
 there was some use after all events in a Mr. Challoner, just as 
 there is no doubt in sea-anemones and houseflies, and other 
 inferior creations, whose existence a superior humanity is apt 
 thoughtlessly to resent as uselessly and insignificantly super- 
 fluous, and occasionally prominently disagreeable. 
 
156 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " My! It's a caution, aren't it?" said Mrs. Henry V. Clams 
 thouglitlessly, biting a piece out of a bit of Madeira cake. 
 
 Lady Joan looked severe as Diana Nemorensis. A caution ! 
 Who wanted " a caution " in good society ? Did not Mrs. Henry 
 V. Clams know that she was eating cake in the Temple of All 
 the Virtues? 
 
 "It is disgusting; perfectly disgusting," she said, with 
 severity. And to think we all went to her only last week! 
 Eeally, it is quite horrible, isn't it ? It makes one almost feel 
 ashamed one's self." 
 
 " I don't see no call to do that," said Mrs. Henry V. Clams, 
 reddening a little, for she had brought a sort of conscience out 
 of the laud of wooden nutmegs, and never could attain the 
 sublime audacity of the Lady Joan's panoply of perfection. " I 
 don't see no call to do that. We aren't no kith or kin to her, 
 poor soul. Oh, my ! she'll miss it fine, I reckon — do you mind 
 that riviere Chemnitz gave her New Year's Day ? Pearls as big 
 as plover's eggs, weren't they now ? She must be downright 
 vicious." 
 
 " Innate depravity ! " said the Lady Joan. " W^ell, she'll 
 starve now, thank goodness. She hasn't a penny of her own, 
 you know." 
 
 And the ladies present, who had all danced and drunk, and 
 borne off the costly cotillon toys from the Chemnitz balls 
 throughout four carnivals, agreed that she ought to starve ; all 
 except Mrs. Henry V. Clams, who was too good-natiu'ed, and 
 whose conscience was pricking her. 
 
 The Prince loris turned round in the low chair where he sat 
 by the hearth beside Etoile, and murmured a word in favour of 
 his lovely countrywoman. 
 
 " The blame is hardly Geltrude's," he said, gently ; " I knew 
 her from her infancy ; she was of the sweetest nature ; but her 
 people forced her into a marriage that she loathed ; she was frank 
 and fearless, and our women are not cold, mesdames ; love to 
 them " 
 
 " Hold your tongue, lo ! This is not the place to talk in such 
 a way," said Lady Joan sharply, with a heavy frown. " There is 
 no excuse for Madame Chemnitz ; not the slightest. She should 
 have done her duty. It was certainly gilded enough to make it 
 easy ! " 
 
 loris was silent, and tui-niug back again to the fire, resumed 
 his conversation with Etoile. When your lady-love arrays her- 
 self in ruffs and farthingale of social virtue, there is obviously 
 nothing to do but to be silent. You cannot quarrel with her 
 for having managed so well that, whilst she smiles upon you she 
 yet makes the world smile on her : it would be both impolite 
 and ungrateful. 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 157 
 
 " I am pained for Chemnitz ; very pained ; what can richef=; 
 compensate to a man for dishonour ? " said Mr. Challoner, 
 sternly gazing at the teapot. The assembled ladies murmured 
 applause to so beautiful if hackneyed a sentiment. 
 
 " Lord ! what a liar that man is ! " thought Mrs. Henry \. 
 Clams, and went to her carriage to take up Fontebranda at the 
 club. 
 
 Fontebranda never asked her to make Mr. Henry V. Clams 
 lie in that manner : Fontebranda only said to her, " Get a great 
 cook ; give three big balls a winter, and drive English horses : 
 you need never consider Society then, it will never find fault 
 with you, ma tres-chere." 
 
 She did not quite understand, but she obeyed ; and Society 
 never did. Society says to the members of it as the Spanish 
 monk to the tree that he pruned, and that cried out under his 
 hook : — 
 
 " It is not beauty that is wanted of you, nor shade, but olives." 
 
 Moral loveliness or mental depth, charm of feeling or noble- 
 ness of instinct, beauty, or shade, it does not ask for, but it does 
 ask for olives— olives that shall round off its dessert, and flavour 
 its dishes, and tickle its sated palate : olives that it shall pick 
 up without trouble, and never be asked to pay for : these are 
 what it likes. 
 
 Now, it is precisely in olives that the woman who has one 
 foot in Society and one foot out of it will be profuse. 
 
 She must please, or perish. 
 
 She must content, or how will she be countenanced ? 
 
 The very pcrilousness of her position renders her solicitous 
 to attract and to appease. 
 
 Society follows a natural selfishness in its condonation of 
 her ; she is afraid of it, therefore she must bend all her efforts to 
 be agreeable to it ; it can reject her at any given moment, so 
 that her court of it must be continual and expansive. No 
 woman will take so much pains, give so much entertainment, be 
 so willing to conciliate, be so lavish in hospitality, be so elastic 
 in willingness, as the woman who adores Society, and knows 
 that any Black Saturday it may turn on her with a bundle of 
 rods, and a peremptory dismissal. 
 
 Between her and Society there is a tacit bond. 
 
 "Amuse me, and I will receive you." 
 
 " Eeceive me, and I will amuse you." 
 
 Meanwhile Lady Joan dismissed, one by one, the whole 
 battalion of Mrs. Grundy's forces, and the lighter squadrons of 
 airy ladies who had carried off the gold toys from the Chemnitz 
 cotillons, and heard the carriages of the deans and the dowagers, 
 and the bankers' wives, and the more modest cabs of the minor 
 acquaintances, roll away towards the Corso in the dusk. The 
 
158 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Scrope-Stairs bonnctccl aud cloaked themselves, and also pre- 
 pared to depart. 
 
 " They are excellent persons/' loris had said confidentially of 
 them to Etoile, that day in the corner by the fire: — "Mai mi 
 seccano ! They are the sort of women we put in convents in our 
 country. It is terrible that the English have nowhere to put 
 their unmarriageable women, but can only let them overrun 
 other lands, like flocks of goats, stray and unhappy." 
 
 " You are very ungrateful ; they adore you, all these sisters." 
 
 " Oh ! C'cst h pire defaut ! " had rejoined loris, with his light 
 laugh. 
 
 But the Scrope-Stairs sisters, assisting at the tea-table, had 
 heard nothing of this, and little divined what he had been saying 
 as he had sat in the corner by the fire, in the low chair that 
 Lady Cardiff had vacated. 
 
 " lo," said Lady Joan, as the sisters embraced her in adieu, 
 and with that glitter of wrath in her eyes which loris knew but 
 too well ; " the girls can't go by themselves, and I can't spare 
 anybody. See them home, will you ? Get back by seven ; Eon- 
 toulet will be here, you know, and Victor." 
 
 loris glanced at Etoile, hesitated, sighed, and offered his 
 escort to the sisters. 
 
 " They might go from the Campidoglio to Soracte, no one 
 would stop them," he thought to himself, but courtesy was his 
 nature, and obedience to his tyrant was second nature. 
 
 " He'd have gone home with her if I hadn't sent him off," 
 thought the Lady Joan, wondering why Etoile still remained in 
 the low chair by the fire. 
 
 " I lingered behind your other visitors because I want your 
 advice if you will give it me," said Etoile, as though answering 
 her thoughts, as the door closed upon loris, and Mr. Challoner 
 vanished into his own den. 
 
 She responded eagerly, all attention in an instant, remem- 
 bering that Etoile had bought a good deal of brocade. 
 
 "Delighted! Anything I can do — only tell me. What 
 is it?" 
 
 To her view " helping people " always meant advising them 
 to buy hric-a-hrac, and who heartily resolved that if it meant 
 furniture, china, or stuffs, she must send Mimo a hint to get out 
 all the best things he had, and to mind all the marks and the 
 millesimes were correct. 
 
 Etoile sat down beside her, and told her the story of the 
 dancing-girl who was starving behind the wall of her house. 
 
 " The little boy is lovely," she said, when she had ended the 
 bad little history, '•' and the woman, I am sure, would interest 
 you if you saw her. She would die, and even let the child die, 
 sooner than be faithless to her faithless lover." 
 
FRIENDSIIIF. 159 
 
 Lad}' Joan listened with cooled interest. Since it was not 
 teacups and triptychs, wliy was slie bored about it ? 
 
 " Very interesting, no doubt," she said drily. "But rather 
 immoral, don't you think ? " 
 
 " Immoral ? No ; there are many things more immoral — Mrs. 
 Henry V. Clams, for instance." 
 
 The Lady Joan winced. She hesitated a moment whether 
 she would seem very virtuous or seem very charitable and 
 beyond all prejudices. 
 
 " It is too kind of you to be so interested," she said at length. 
 " You must tell it all to lo ; he'll be rushing off directly, with soup 
 in one hand and bank-notes in the other. Certainly, the girl's case 
 is very sad : but then, you see, she brought it on herself. "Why 
 did she listen to her painter before she saw the marriage-lines ? 
 I should think your best way would be to speak to the Austrian 
 Consul, or perhaps your Princess Vera would condescend. I 
 think they'd send her back for nothing, and I suppose she has 
 some friends ? " 
 
 " None, I believe," said Etoile. " But do not trouble your- 
 self ; it will not cost much to set her up in some little trade 
 that will enable her to keep herself and the boy. That is all I 
 meant to ask your advice about." 
 
 " Of course I would do anything in charity that I could," 
 said Lady Joan, vaguely feeling that she had made a wrong move. 
 " But a ballet girl and an illegitimate child and all that— one 
 hardly knows what to do. I've just sent a housemaid away for 
 light conduct. One must be just — one must not put a premium 
 on immorality." 
 
 " It is a pity Society often allows so high a one ! " answered 
 Etoile with that flash of contempt which the Casa Challouer was 
 learning to fear. Lady Joan, however, was always ready for any 
 thrust. 
 
 " I don't think Society does," she answered ; she always 
 defended Society since Society accepted her. " It gives certain 
 rules, and if you keep to them it has no business to attack you, 
 and never does in point of fact. Women are rash themselves 
 and headstrong, and do foolish things, and then they complain 
 of Society. I've no prejudices — not one— I would just as soon 
 shake hands with your ballet-girl as with a duchess. But, yoxi 
 see, as long as one lives in the world one can't follow every 
 impulse of one's heart, and tlicso poor girls just throw them- 
 selves away on some headlong passion, and then think it very 
 cruel of humanity not to be ready with gold christening cups 
 and rose silk cradles for their babies. Their fate's very dreadful 
 and very hard, no doubt, but they make it themselves, you see." 
 
 " By forgetting themselves, which women in Society never 
 do, no doubt." 
 
160 FlilENDSHIP. 
 
 "Of course they never do, except that ass of a Geltrude 
 Chemnitz ! If you don't remember yourself, who will ? " said 
 the Lady Joan with a pleasant laugh, ignoring the equivoque. 
 " As for the world well lost for love, and all that, it's rubbish, 
 you know. The world is too strong for anybody that sets up 
 against it. And when you've lost the world, i.e., your bread 
 and cheese in it, loves flies out of the window. That's common 
 sense," 
 
 " It would be common sense then if this poor Hungarian 
 descended to infamy to feed herself." 
 
 " Just so. Having once slipt into the pit to gather a flower, 
 she ought to go down to the bottom to pick up a bit of silver. 
 But that's the sort of consistency you jDoetical creatures never 
 possess. You will fling yourselves to perdition in afuriu of self- 
 sacrifice, and then j^ou are supremely astonished that the world 
 only thinks you a donkey, whose legs are broken. Society can't 
 classify. It only lays down a few broad lines, and packs into 
 two sets the people who keep in 'em, and the people who jump 
 over 'em. Unjust ? Oh, I dare say. But the thing is so. It's 
 no good kicking against the pricks. No doubt Magdalen is a 
 charming person, utterly underrated, and very much misjudged, 
 and all the rest of it ; but all that common folk can judge by is 
 that she has dragged her hair in the dust, and has made a beast 
 of herself " 
 
 " Without corresponding advantages ! " 
 
 Lady Joan laughed, but when she was on her high horse of 
 morality, she rode it with cynicism indeed, but with consum- 
 mate coolness, and woiild now and then enumerate opinions 
 with which Hannah More herself could have found no fault. 
 Indeed, to do her justice, women who sacrificed themselves — at 
 a loss — did seem to her " too poor for heaven, and too pale for 
 hell." 
 
 " I am shocked at you," she said, with her frankest smile. 
 " What is the use of railing against Society ? Society, after all, 
 is only Humanity en masse, and the opinion of it must be the 
 opinion of the bulk of human minds. Complaints against Society 
 are like the lions' against the man's picture. No doubt the lions 
 would have painted the combat as going just the other way, but 
 then, so long as it is the man who has the knife or the gun, and 
 the palette and the pencil, where is the use of the lions howling 
 about injustice? Society has the knife and the pencil; that's 
 the long and the short of it ; and if people don't behave them- 
 selves they feel 'em both, and have to knock under. They're 
 knifed first, and then caricatured — as the lions were. I can't 
 see so much injustice myself. The world's a very pleasant 
 place, if you'll only keep straight in it." 
 
 And the Lady Joan pulled up tlic ruffles of old lace about 
 
FFdENDSIIir. IGl 
 
 her shapely throat, aud glanced with a littlo griu at two big 
 envelopes just come in : invitations to a ball at the Macscrips, 
 and a dramatic representation at one of the minor Legations. 
 
 Etoilc bade her good evening, and went away ; left alone, she 
 snapped her fingers at the deserted tea-table, jumped a step or 
 two of a bolero, lit a cigar, and going to her chamber, got into a 
 gown of loose eastern brocade with gold threads shining in it, 
 twisted a string of amber beads round her head, and felt dressed 
 appropriately for the guests she expected: Victor Louche, a 
 second-class French dramatist, aud M. Eonsoulet, a very great 
 sculptor, with Madame Patauge, who was Madame Eonsoulet de 
 facto, but not de jure. They were tonic that she required after a 
 Wednesday afternoon. 
 
 Society is like the porter of your Paris house.^ It frowns and 
 bars the door, or rushes to bring all the keys to you, according 
 as you have filled its pockets, or have left them empty. Lady 
 Joan know her porter. 
 
 She was not rich, indeed, not even with all the teacups and 
 triptychs in the world ; but then she knew how to be obliging ; 
 she would run up the back stairs to spare the porter any trouble 
 about the front, and when the porter was grumpiest and 
 sulkiest, would look up in his face and smile. No porter could 
 long resist such conduct : not even the grim porteress that is 
 called Mrs. Grundy. 
 
 But there is an amount of fatigue in being so very con- 
 siderate to your porter, and Lady Joan always recompensed 
 herself for her consideration with some littlo pleasant indulg- 
 ence or other, when the porter could not see through her 
 keyhole. 
 
 In a sense, too, she liked the sharp and strong contrasts of 
 her life. She loved the bisque soup after the barley broth ; the 
 caviare toast after the boiled sole with herbs. She liked keep- 
 ing the goats and the sheep apart, and frisking up the wild 
 glens with the one, and' feeding in the fat pastures with the 
 other. She liked lunching decorously off cold lamb with a 
 clergyman's family, and talking of her dear friends the deans 
 and the bishops, and she liked going to an artists' ball afterwards, 
 and dancing and screaming till the daylight shone in at the 
 windows. She liked driving staidly about with her great cousin 
 of Hebrides with the white-wauded footmen of Hebrides behind, 
 and she liked rattling the same nights about the streets, in the 
 white Eoman moonlight, in a hired cab, with her friends, 
 singing choruses. She liked having a bevy of married and 
 maiden dames to tea on a Tuesday afternoon, and enchanting 
 them with old laces miraculously iDurchascd, and pattern 
 opinions miraculously fabricated; aud she liked dining at homo 
 that evening with a few choice spirits who quoted Baudelaire in 
 
 M 
 
162 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 a haze of smoke, and brought out the suggestive little statuettes, 
 and held that none but fools could believe in any deity under 
 any name, and quoted as the amatory gospel, " I'amour, c'est la 
 ftmme d'un autre." 
 
 On the whole, there was much wisdom in these ways of life. 
 She saw life in all its aspects, and got credit from all its actors. 
 And she seldom made mistakes in either the dull comedy or the 
 gay one — except, indeed, when sometimes she talked too long 
 to a cynic or met the eyes of a guileless woman. 
 
 At such times she would quail a little, and feel as though, 
 despite all her cashmeres of conventionality and sables of con- 
 tent, some one had stript her naked in the full blaze of a noon- 
 day sun. 
 
 Her guests came in all together, laughing, happy, and good- 
 humoured, bringing with them much sparkle of fi'esh wit, and 
 much smell of stale smoke, into the chambers where Mrs. 
 Grundy had sat in august majesty but an hour before. 
 
 Victor Louche was a thin, sallow man, with a pungent 
 tongue and a salacious humour, who lived amongst actors and 
 actresses, and was the life and soul of winter nights at Bignon's, 
 and summer days at Etretat; Madame Patauge was a cheery 
 soul, with much mirth, many anecdotes, and a repertory of all 
 the liveliest songs of the last half-century, which she could still 
 sing with power and zest, like the female Lablache that she was. 
 Madame Patauge, originally the daughter of a house-porter in 
 Paris, in days when Louis Philippe was king, knew her Paris as 
 a child its nurse ; she had gone on the stage of the Opera 
 Comique and been successful ; she had married a journalist, 
 who had beaten her and spent her money ; she had consoled 
 herself in the atelier of M. Eonsoulet, when he was unknown to 
 fame, and had finally settled down permanently side by side 
 with him when he became famous. She was a very big woman, 
 with a very big voice, and M. Eonsoulet, who was a very Little 
 man, spent life much as a pigmy might do chained between the 
 four paws of an elephant. But it was a good-natured elephant, 
 and was totally unconscious that it crushed him; it thought, 
 indeed, that carrying him about by its trunk was a benefit; 
 female elephants have these delusions. 
 
 She was an honest soul ; she never sought to conceal what 
 she had been, or what she was ; when she had quarrelled with 
 her husband she had abused him soundly, packed up her trunks, 
 and departed from under his roof, with the frankest avowal of 
 her intentions ; she never concealed either the storms or the 
 sunshine of her adventurous years ; and she adored Eonsoulet 
 with an adoration as big as her person. Nevertheless, a world 
 which accepted the Lady Joan rejected this poor Madame, who 
 was only Eonsoulet by coiirtesy. She was 7rial vue by Society, 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 163 
 
 though sho was a huudred times the bettor, truer, tenderer, and 
 worthier woman. In fact. Society would have blushed to have 
 been supposed to have even known tho mere fact of her 
 existence. 
 
 Lady Joan invited this trio of sorry sinners to dinner 
 because the songs and anecdotes tickled her palate ; because 
 after Mrs. Grundy at tea she required mental tonic and refresh- 
 ment ; because Eonsoulet would make her own bust for nothing ; 
 because Victor Louche had always known a good deal about 
 her ; because — there were fifty becauses. Besides, nobody knew 
 of these bohemian banquets ; her servants never talked ; and if 
 she were seen driving up to the little villa outside Porta Pia, 
 where MM. Eonsoulet and Louche were living together, she only 
 went to have her bust modelled — that was all. 
 
 " Do you speak to that creature ? " said Society to her once, 
 when the good-tempered fat woman smiled, and nodded, and 
 waved hands to her in delighted recognition across the crowd 
 on the Pincio. Such contretemiDS will now and then occur to 
 the most perfect diplomatists. And the Lady Joan replied with 
 that frank regard which always told her intimate friends when 
 she was lying with the most hardihood : — 
 
 " Well, you know, Mr. Challoner's always telling me I'm too 
 good-natured to i^cople. But I see her at Eonsoulet's studio. 
 What can I do ? One must just bow. I haven't the heart to 
 cut people ; I'm so weak about all that. Besides, you know, I 
 have not the stiff ideas of other women ; my poor mother was 
 always so over-kind to all artists. You see ive are so well known. 
 We can do things other folks can't. Nobody ever can say a 
 word against us." 
 
 So Society gave her much credit, alike for frankness, spirit, 
 and propriety, a triad seldom allowed to exist in unison ; and it 
 was the general feeling in society that she was a very excellent 
 young woman, and that it was high treason against her to 
 suppose for a moment that she had any other attractions up 
 at Fiordelisa than her bees and her beasts, her pigs, and her 
 poultry. 
 
 On the whole Lady Joan was as successful as that ingenious 
 smuggler who traded in sheep, to run brandy ashore, and whose 
 upper deck was crowded with innocent lambs, while the alcohol 
 that cheated the revenues reposed cask against cask, all snug 
 and unseen, underneath in the hold. 
 
 "Is it worth the trouble?" landsmen wonder, seeing the 
 contraband sloops hover off the Spanish shores ; " is it worth 
 so much calculation, so many risks, such constant oscillation 
 between safety and ruin?" The contrabandist will tell you 
 that it is — that no money rings so cheerily as his, and no wine 
 tastes so well. 
 
161 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Lady Joan had the same opinion. 
 
 Hers were only small gains 'like the smuggler's — a duchess's 
 bow, an ambassadress's nod, cards to half a hundred houses, 
 bankers' balls, clergymen's praises, American dinners — no more 
 than the smuggler's dollars and tobacco. But then these were 
 everything to her. Some desire the Apple of Hesperides, others 
 only hunger for a sweet potato. Lady Joan was of this wise 
 other section. And she bought her sweet potato in the right 
 market, and ate it, and was happy. 
 
 CHAPTEE XVI. 
 
 The Scrope-Stair sisters made a Cerberus quite invaluable 
 stationed for ever at the hall door of the Casa Challouer. 
 
 Cerberus of Hades was but a primitive and one-ideaed beast, 
 whose sole office was to prevent miserable sinners from escaping 
 their punishment. This Cerberus of society was a much more 
 civilised being, and had the advanced views proper to its epoch 
 — the epoch that has the Triangle instead of Troy. Cerberus, 
 by alternately fawning and growling, induced Society to swallow 
 the discrepancies of the Casa Challoner, as Cerberus itself had 
 swallowed them. And it is only this first swallowing that is 
 any trouble. An impropriety to Society is like a fishbone in the 
 human throat; fifty to one it will not slip down, but if once it 
 pass all faces are calm; the fishbone is accepted in safety, and 
 will be heard of no more. A little butter will be taken after it — 
 nothing else. 
 
 Old Lord George had not utterly forgotten that he had onco 
 been a man of the world, though he had adopted an air of sleepy 
 senility, which kept him out of rows and served him well ; and 
 old Sir George would watch the Lady Joan with a twinkle in 
 his eye, and take her measure very correctly. He kejDt his lids 
 half shut, and was very hard of hearing for the majority of the 
 world, and could act a cross between King Lear and Poor Tom 
 with an admirable skill when any quari'el was going on around 
 him. But he had not forgotten that he had once been " hand- 
 some Scrope " in the guard-room of St. James's, and he appraised 
 his daughter's friend very neatly, and did not like his daughter's 
 friendship. But what could he do all alone ? 
 
 Middleway stayed up there ; the pious Middlcway, who talked 
 of Providence as his own Senior Partner, and of Paradise as a 
 
 I 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 165 
 
 sort of bonui? aTvarclcd for thrifty and timely insurance ; Middle' 
 way dined at the Casa Challoner, and took his beloved girls to 
 Fiordelisa, strong in their maiden innocence and their blond 
 chignons. To be sure there was the Seventh Commandment 
 printed amongst its brethren in any church where Middleway 
 officiated; the Seventh Commandment in all the glaring out- 
 spokenness and culpable heedlessness of the feelings of Society, 
 of which Moses, like too many other great writers, was guilty, 
 and there were times when the excellent Middleway felt that 
 the Decalogue ought, like the Decameron, to be edited in more 
 polite language. But still, qualms or no qualms, Middleway 
 lunched with Mrs. Henry V. Clams, and visited at Fiordelisa, 
 and where Sliddleway, austere though charitable, boldly trod, 
 how should poor old trembling Lord George dare to refuse to 
 enter ? 
 
 Besides, there was Marjory ! 
 
 At the thought of Marjory all rebellion would die out of him ; 
 Marjory, with her pinched lips, her sharp voice, and her resolute 
 will, who, if he ventured to cross her wishes, would never let 
 him have a brazier of charcoal, or a glass of whisky, or a bank- 
 note in his pocket ever again throughout his dreary days, but 
 would remind him fifty times oftener tlian she did already, that 
 if he had not been a spendthrift his daughters would not now 
 have to trudge through mud and dust to copy gallery canvases 
 and chapel frescoes. There was Middleway and there was Mar- 
 jory—so old Lord George stifled his conscience, and let the 
 mutton from Fiordelisa be set upon his table, and the eggs from 
 Fiordelisa be broken into his sherry, and pretended to be dozing 
 in the sun when the Lady Joan on the terrace of Fiordelisa called 
 loris to her feet. He was a gentleman at heart, this poor worn- 
 out, weary octogenarian ; he had been an English soldier, and 
 was still an English gentleman, and sometimes he felt ashamed. 
 But he had grown timid with age, and his home was chill and 
 dreary, and his daughers bade him obey, and he did obey, and 
 Lady Joan sent him new eggs and fresh vegetables with the 
 most grateful regularity. She had grown rather bored with 
 Cerberus, but Cerberus was still very useful to her, and she 
 tlu-ew the admirable watch-dog the tit-bits she knew it desired. 
 
 She called them darling girls, though they were older than 
 herself, had them always to her second-rate dinners, gave them 
 patterns for gowns, took them to the theatres, sent them game 
 and honey and wine, had them to stay at Fiordelisa, and above 
 all, let Marjory feast her eyes on loris. 
 
 Poor Marjory, in the beginning of time when Lady Joan had 
 first arrived from Abana and Pharphar, Orontes and Euphrates, 
 with her huntress's blood all on tire for want of something to 
 kill, had not been a watch-dog, she had been a catspaw. 
 
1G6 FRIENDSEIP. 
 
 Before Lady Joan had reached the sublime heights of 
 intrepidity from which she now invited the Church to lunch 
 up at Fiordelisa, whilst she was still under that certain chill 
 and awe of that vision of the British Bona Dea which had 
 loomed before her on her landing at Brindisi, she had deemed it 
 worth while to be prudent. 
 
 In pursuit of prudence she had bade loris pay a semblance of 
 court to her dear friend Marjory, and took Marjory about with 
 her conspicuously. loris laughed, pitied himself, and obeyed. 
 He played his part gracefully in the meaningless comedy, and 
 its victim based upon it her wildest hopes, as baseless as they 
 were wild. When she perceived that she had been but fooled — 
 used as the mere screen of another's convenience — the passion 
 of that fading hope survived the death of hope. She consumed 
 her heart in rage and misery, but consumed it in silence. To 
 break with the Casa Challoner would have been to lose all sight 
 of loris ; she continued to kiss her friend in public and private, 
 and nurtured her unspoken passion in her breast, feeding it 
 hungrily on every look and tone and gesture of her friend's lover. 
 She saw what her friend did not see ; she foresaw the time when 
 the proverb would hold good that too much tying loosens. She 
 marked her friend's mistakes, and gauged the power of her 
 friend's tyranny, she saw when the chain was strained, and laid 
 in wait for some dim future, as the grey adder hides under the 
 stone. 
 
 She loved him with the terrible love of the woman who 
 hungers for a life that will no more come to her than the silver 
 moon in summer will come to a child's cries ; who knows that 
 his hours, his thoughts, his senses, are all another's and will 
 never be hers, yet dreams of some day when disaster or disap- 
 pointment may drag him down within her grasp, and whispers 
 in the hush of the night to her own sick soul — " Who knows, 
 who knows ? " 
 
 The comedy had long ceased to be played and the years had 
 gone by since then, but the desire of the moth for tlie star still 
 burnt on, and the gentle grace, the tender familiarity, the kindly 
 courtesy of his ways with women, fed the smouldering fire with 
 every unthinking action ; she knew that it was useless, hopeless, 
 rootless, but still, in the dreary routine and repression of her 
 days, she hugged closer this one sweetness : only to see him, hear 
 him, bo where he was, this she deemed better than nought; she 
 fought so firmly for the Temple of All the Virtues because on its 
 altars her own hopes smouldered, and when she defended the 
 innocence of its rites there was so robust a ring of sincerity in 
 her voice because it hurt her so fiercely to think of those long 
 amorous summers, which the nightingales of Fiordelisa hymned. 
 
 Lady Joan knew her folly well enough, and gleefully grinned 
 
PitiENDsnip. let 
 
 over it in secret, and even approved of it. It was nseful to her, 
 the one siTpreme test-weight by which the Lady Joan balanced 
 all things. 
 
 " If the poor ass like to fret herself to fiddle-strings after lo— 
 let her," said the Lady Joan in her thoughts ; and Lady Joan in 
 public kissed her with effusion, before a dozen spinsters, and 
 took her often to the theatres, and said to everybody, " If lo 
 would only be persuaded to marry that dear darling good girl ! 
 — but he won't hear of it, you know — such a pity — such friends 
 as we all are, it would be delightful ! " 
 
 Meantime, Marjory Scrope grew passive, if not resigned, as 
 the seasons swept on, and accepted the reign of the Lady Joan 
 as inevitable, and would have been even willing to make common 
 cause with her against any invader of her sovereignty ; and, sharp 
 of eye and ear, saw many a sign that escaped the happy and 
 blind vanity of her friend : heard many a yawn, detected many 
 a gesture of weariness and impatience, and had almost ceased 
 to be jealous of what she saw had to him become but a habit. 
 But at any gleam of a fresh interest, any glance of a new thought 
 for him, she sprang up as a snake springs — not the Lady Joan 
 herself could ever have been as swift to see it, as ferocious to 
 resent it, as she was. 
 
 And, with tlie prescience of an unerring way, the hatred of 
 Marjory Scrope-Stairs had darted down and fastened on Etoile. 
 
 Marjory, indeed, was hardly used. Jacob for Rachel had not 
 served more devotedly than she for six years had served the 
 Lady Joan for the wage of proximity to loris. She had toiled 
 early and late ; she had copied old frescoes and let the Lady Joan 
 sell them ; she had worked chairs and cushions, and finished lace 
 that her friend had begun and got tired of; she had never minded 
 being asked at the eleventh hour to fill up a place at a dinner, 
 unexpectedly left vacant ; she had trudged through sludge and 
 sleet on bitter winter days, to ransack curiosity barrows for the 
 Casa Challoner ; and, finally, she had gone about in society armed 
 cap-a-pie in defence of that Temple of all the Virtues, and made 
 herself generally ridiculous with a stubbornness and a heroism 
 worthy of a far better cause. She had led a hard, dull, joyless 
 life. She had been a watch-dog, and been bound to take blows 
 and be out in all weathers ; she had been a screen and had borne 
 all the brunt of the fire, and been pushed aside when not wanted; 
 she had been a catspaw, and was left with burnt fingers and sore 
 heart out in the cold whilst her clever friend gleefully munched 
 the fruit. She had been hardly dealt with for six mortal years ; 
 but she had been able to bear it all for sake of that baseless, 
 shapeless, yet inextinguishable hope which had sustained her. 
 She had grown used, with the diTll pain of an old half-healed 
 wound, to seeing the supremacy of the Lady Joan. 
 
108 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 But uow! — She hated the newcomer with that deadly hatred 
 which has no pity as it has no parallel ; the hatred of an obscure 
 and discontented woman for the woman who is eminent and 
 adored. 
 
 Etoile herself never thought about her at all, save to feel 
 compassion for her vaguely as the slavey of Society, and the 
 shadow of the Lady Joan. But Marjory Scrope thought of her 
 from morn till night, watched her gestures, studied her every 
 word, hated her for the ye^-^ frou-frou of her skirts, the mere 
 silent softness of her sweeping velvets ; hated her beyond all for 
 the look that the eyes of loris gained whenever they gazed on 
 her; and in the stillness of the nights dreamed of her, and 
 waking, muttered, "I have borne enough — never will I bear 
 ihat ! — never, never, never ! " 
 
 " Take the watering-pot," had said that wise woman of the 
 world. Lady Cardiff. 
 
 Perhaps, if Etoile had taken the watering-pot — if she had 
 drunk tea at the Scrope-Stairs, given the Scrope-Stairs a few 
 pretty things, praised the Scrope-Stair drawings, and bought a 
 water-colour of the School of Athens — even this sandstorm of 
 envy and hatred might have been allayed. But that was not 
 her way. 
 
 "My dear, you never seem to fear the mob," said Lady 
 Cardiff. " It is just the mob that builds up guillotines ; and 
 the woman who has genius is just Marie Antoinette to it, ' the 
 accursed proud Austrian' — and the mob howls till the axo 
 lalls." 
 
 No doubt it was a true exordium : but Etoile feared the mob 
 no more than did the daughter of Maria Theresa. 
 
 This night, when the Lady Joan sternly bade her knight 
 attend the knightless damsels to their home, loris obeyed. Ho 
 was aware of the hopeless passion he had long before inspired, 
 and pitied the woman who felt it, and was friends with her in 
 the same kindly, courtly, gentle spirit with which he took off 
 his hat to the old orange woman at the corner, and asked the 
 cobbler's wife in the cellar how her rheumatism fared. It was 
 tiresome to him to go out of his way in the damp chilly night, 
 v^-ith the snow beginning to fall, to escort Cerberus whom his 
 mistress had chosen for the nonce to dress up as a Una, without 
 a lion. But he did the behest chivalrously, and went with the 
 sisters gaily and courteously to their dull, old, dark, long palace 
 down by the Forum Trajano, and having discharged his duty, 
 tliought that he had justly earned a little recreation. 
 
 loris, Avith people he disliked, was apt to pour out on them 
 a graceful effusion which they took for cordiality and regard. 
 They were never more mistaken in their lives. To women wlio 
 wearied him, to men ho mistrusted, to enemies always, and to 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 169 
 
 strangers generally, Ion's was courtier enough by habit, and 
 meridional enough in nature, to bo unrelaxing in courtesy, and 
 ardent in protestation ; amiability is the armour of tho South, 
 as much as rudeness is of the North. 
 
 In tho dusk on the staircase that night, loris as he had escorted 
 Cerberus had seen a jewel shining on the stone, had stooped for 
 it, and recognised a black onyx medallion, with a monogram in 
 pearls, which ho remembered seeing ouce about tho throat of 
 Etoile. He did not send it upstairs to her by the servant, as ho 
 might have done, since he had left her sitting by the fire, but 
 said nothing of it to his companions, and slipped it into his 
 pocket. His escort ended, and tbe sisters safe at home, he went 
 to his own home, dined hastily, and calling about eight o'clock 
 at the house on the Monte Cavallo, sent to know if the Comtesse 
 d'Avesnes would receive him. 
 
 Etoile, her own brief dinner ended, was sitting in a low 
 chair by the hearth, with great Tsar at her feet, looking over 
 some old prints, Marcantonios amidst them, which she had 
 bought that morning. 
 
 The room was large, but warm ; big bowls of flowers stood on 
 the marble tables ; old tapestries and embroideries were scattered 
 about, there were sketches here and there ; the hearth was wide 
 and open ; oak logs were burning on it, and their flame shone 
 red on the giallo aniico of its hi;ge carved chimneypiece ; a marble 
 copy of the Belvedere Mercury which she had bought stood near, 
 witia a cluster of rose-red azaleas in vases around it; and a 
 bronze of the Vatican Jove was half-hidden in white camellias. 
 A certain sense of home fell on Ions as he entered — a sense that 
 never touched him in his own lonely house or within the chambers 
 of the Casa Challoner. 
 
 Etoile, who was dressed in white stuffs, that fell softly about 
 her, and had a knot of geranium at her throat, turned, with a 
 smile, as she saw him. 
 
 " Is it anything very urgent ? Has Lady Joan found a fault 
 in the Venetian costume ? " 
 
 A shadow passed over his mobile face at the name ; he camo 
 forward and dropped on one knee by the hearth. 
 
 " Nothing urgent ; and perhaps you will rebuke me for an 
 intrusive impertinence. I had the fortune to find this to-night, 
 and I could not resist restoring it into your own hands." 
 
 She gave a cry of pleasure. 
 
 " Oh, that is very good of you. My dear locket ! I had just 
 sent to advertise for it. You shall look in it for your reward." 
 
 "May I indeed?" 
 
 She pressed the secret spring for him, and he saw the portrait 
 of Dorotea Coronis. 
 
 His heart beat with a quick relief. He had expected to sec 
 some face of his own sex. 
 
170 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " The Ducliesse Santorin is very happy to have snch a friend," 
 he said gravely. 
 
 " But you barely look at it ; there is no more beautiful face 
 in Europe." 
 
 "I do not care to look at it," said loris, and his soft eyes 
 gazed at her own face. 
 
 Etoile felt her cheek grow warm — she could not tell why — 
 and she drew a little away. 
 
 " Make Tsar move farther — he has very bad manners — and 
 rise up, Prince loris. There is a pleasant chair there." 
 
 " Will you not call me lo ? Every one does." 
 
 " I do not care to do what every one does," she answered him, 
 a little impatiently. She seemed to hear the " lo ! lo ! " of Lady 
 Joan's imperious demands ringing loudly over hill and vale by 
 the banks of the Almo. 
 
 He caressed Tsar, and sank into the chair near her, within 
 the warmth of the hearth. 
 
 " You are all alone ? You are going to spend your evening 
 alone?" 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 " ' Never less alone than when alone.' It is fortiinate for 
 me that I feel so, for I have always been left very much to 
 myself." 
 
 "But surely " 
 
 " You mean I might be out somewhere to-night ? Oh yes : 
 and any other nights. But I do not care very much for society 
 — not even for that of Paris. In my own house there I receive 
 a good deal : that I like ; but society is monotonous : it has no 
 infinite variety, as study has and art. Besides, I think the artist, 
 lilfe the saint, should keep himself ' unspotted from the world ' 
 as far as possible. It only dims our sight and dwarfs our aims." 
 
 " And you are not very strong in health, I fear." 
 
 "They say so. Perhaps I have tried to do too much too 
 early." 
 
 " The perfect fruit and flower have been too much for the 
 young tree that bore them." 
 
 " Perfect ! Ah, if you could only know how ill-content I am 
 with all that men call great in what I do ; how poor and pale the 
 best is beside the visions that I see ! " 
 
 " That of course. What Baffaelle has left us must be to the 
 glories he imagined as the weaver's dye to the sunset's fires. Tell 
 me — you have been in Borne before ? " 
 
 " isiever. I studied in Belgium and in Paris— nowhere else ; 
 but to be taught by Istrion was almost an atonement for the loss 
 of Eome. But it is because I lost Eome in my student days that 
 I cannot endure to waste any hours here in the mere distractions 
 of Society which I can have anywhere else. In your city it is 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 171 
 
 so easy to ' be with the immortals.' I wander in your wonderful 
 haunted ]:)laccs as long as it is light, and then when evening 
 comes ou I am tired." 
 
 " You do wisely for yourself — though cruelly to others." 
 
 "Ah, pray do not make mo compliments: I dislike them. 
 We are not in Society now ; we can be natural." 
 
 " You always doubt my sincerity." 
 
 " No, not always. Tsar would not like you so well if you 
 could not be true sometimes." 
 
 loris lifted up the noble head of the dog and kissed him. 
 
 " I think I am always true — except when she makes me false," 
 he murmured as he stooped to the hound. " Madame, tell mc 
 more of yourself. You cannot think what interest it has for me. 
 Nay, I am saying no flattery now, but the simplest fact. When 
 the world says ' Etoile ' every one wonders ; I have wondered 
 with the rest. Do not be angered." 
 
 " "Why should I be ? I will tell you anything you like. Not 
 that there is much to tell. My years are written on my panels 
 and canvases. I have lived between the studio and the open 
 air." 
 
 There was something dreamy and familiar in the warm, 
 wood-scented air, the mellow light, the bright hearth, the 
 shadowy, fragrant chamber. It seemed to loris that he had been 
 there all his life watching the glow from the fire fall on the 
 white folds of her dress and finding out the red geraniums at 
 her throat ; whilst little by little, in the easy communicativeness 
 of fireside talk, the various changes of her life, with its ambitions 
 and its fruitions, passed ,before him, and her words built up to 
 his fancy the little village on the green Meuse waters and the 
 old house by the gardens of the Luxembourg. 
 
 Etoile very seldom spoke of herself. 
 
 She had grown to see that no one ever believed a word she 
 said ; so silence had become a habit with her. 
 
 What they expected she did not know ; nor, perhaps, did they 
 any better. But the mere truth never had a chance of being 
 credited. It never has. 
 
 " Truth is a gem that loves the deep " applies to truth meta- 
 physical, historical, philosophical. Biit truth personal is rather 
 a flower like the briar rose, too homely, too sim])le, and too 
 thorny for men to care to gather it. They like a lie, which, like 
 the barometrical flower, will change its colour half a dozen 
 times a flay. 
 
 With loris she had a different feeling. She was willing to 
 talk to him, glad to fake him back with her in fancy to her 
 childish days. He listened with that soft, mute attention, that 
 homage of scarce-broken silence, which his gaze made more 
 eloquent than the most eager words of other men. The firelight 
 
172 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 shone on his delicate dark head ; his eyes were dreamy, musing, 
 tender. The moments sped swiftly away and became hours. At 
 last he drew a deep breath, as of a man who casts off a burden 
 of dread. 
 
 " And amidst it all — you have never loved ! " 
 
 " Loved ! " echoed Etoile, in a vague, startled sort of surprise. 
 Her face grew warm ; she felt troubled, she could not have told 
 why. 
 
 " Is it true ? " he persisted. " It is true, is it not, you have 
 never loved any one ? " 
 
 Etoile bent forward and put back a burning piece of wood 
 that had fallen too far. As she did so one of the geranium 
 flowers fell out from amongst the blossoms at her throat. He 
 caught it from the fire. 
 
 " Answer me," he said eagerly. " Is it true ? " 
 
 " Certainly true — yes. But I do not know why——" 
 
 He put the scarlet flower in his breast. 
 
 " Why I have the daring to ask you so personal a question ? 
 Only to ask it seems a profanation, and I need not have asked 
 it — for I knew " 
 
 " AVhat can you mean ? What can you know ? " 
 
 " I kuew that it was so before you spoke a word. The first 
 night I saw you I said in my thoughts, ' That woman has no 
 ])ast ; ' for a woman who has had no passion has no past, no 
 more than those flowers, born to-day, that are at your breast. 
 Then I studied those scattered poems that are signed ' Etoile,' 
 and I was yet more sure. You write of love from without, not 
 from within. It is a thing you have read of, dreamed of, built 
 up to yourself in fancy, but have not felt. You theorise on it 
 externally, as you might of life in some far planet more beautiful 
 than earth. But love, you know — no, you do not know — is a 
 fiercer, fonder, ay, and perhaps a grosser and viler thing than 
 you have ever been touched by. You have said to yourself, ' I 
 shall love like that some day.' You have not said to yourself, 
 ' I loved like that in a day that is dead.' Now, between those 
 two there is such a gulf — such an abyss — such a sea of flame ! 
 And when you have crossed that gulf you will not look at us all 
 any longer with those clear, candid, wondering eyes, as if you 
 had strayed down out of a better world than ours. No; then 
 you will only look back, and you will be no longer pure of heart, 
 as you are now. Tell me : am I not right ? " 
 
 A flush wont over her face. He was half-leaning, half-kneeling 
 by her ; his eyes watched her with a dreamy pleasure in them, 
 half-sensual, half-sijiritual. 
 
 He was utterly in earnest as he spoke ; he meant truly what 
 he uttered ; but he was a master in the power of casting sweet 
 trouble into a woman's soul, and there was an added pleasure to 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 173 
 
 him when the soul was deep and calm like a lake and his was the 
 fii'st hand to drop either a pearl or a stone into its depths, 
 
 " Am I not right ? " he murmured softly. 
 
 She pushed her hair hack from her forehead a little wearily 
 and with a sense of confusion. 
 
 "Yes — oh yes," she answered him, "I suppose a woman's 
 life without love is incomplete. I suppose I only sleep ; but I 
 can care for no one — in that way. Art alone moves me." 
 
 He had risen as he had spoken last ; and now, bending down- 
 ward with exquisite grace, he touched her hand with his hps as 
 softly as a bird's wing might brush a rose in passing. 
 
 " Happy he for whom you shall awake," he murmured as he 
 stooped. 
 
 Then he glanced at the clock, bowed low, caressed the dog, 
 and went. 
 
 The clock-hands stood at eleven. 
 
 Etoile sat without moving as he had left her gazing into the 
 fire. A nameless emotion stirred within her and made her pulse 
 thrill. A troubled pain, that yet was not pain at all, was on her. 
 " What have I missed ? " she wondered ; and then her face grew 
 warm again, and she rose with a restless impatience of herself, 
 not understanding what ailed her. 
 
 Meanwhile loris passed out into the moonlit night, which was 
 cold and wet, flinging his furs about him in the teeth of the north 
 wind, and, with the geranium flower hidden in his breast, 
 mounted tlie staircase of the Casa Challoner, 
 
 At the Casa Challoner the dinner had been gay, but Lady 
 Joan had been gloomy. 
 
 In vain did Victor Louche tell his best stories, and Madame 
 Paturge cap them with still better ; in vain did both of them 
 sing the funniest and naughtiest songs that theatres and cafes- 
 chantants had ever rung with ; in vain did they disport themselves 
 and earn their truffles and their wine and their entrance into the 
 Temple of All the Virtues — in vain : the brow of the Lady Joan 
 was dark, her high spirits had departed, and her eyes were as 
 two scimetars flashing ominously in moonlight. 
 
 Victor Louche, innocent or malicious, called out from the 
 piano at eleven o'clock, " A.h.,p(irdieu\ where is Prince lo? I 
 thought I missed something familiar from the menu." 
 
 The cheery Paturge from a capacious chair sent out a cone 
 of tobacco-smoke. 
 
 "Ah, yes, where is Prince Charming? It seemed to me 
 there was something wanting. You have never quarrelled witli 
 him, ma mie f He is too delightful. Such manners ! Ah ! " 
 
 " Quarrel ! " said the Lady scornfully. " Who coiihl quarrel 
 with lo? Quarrel with a bean-stalk! That's more character 
 than he has." 
 
174: FBIENDSHIF. 
 
 " Jealous : who of, I wonder ? " thouglit the astute Victor, 
 with a crash of the chords. 
 
 ]Mr. Challoner was, as usual, in his own sanctum, with the 
 Times and the Share-list. 
 
 Madame Paturge looked across at Monsieur Eonsoulet and 
 winked; but the wink was lost on him: he was thinking of his 
 statue of Palestrina for the new Opera-house, and a little of the 
 chdteauhriavd at dinner. He roused himself slowly to what they 
 were talking about. -,. j 
 
 " To be sure, where is loris ? " he muttered. " I never dined 
 here without him before. And there is no one in Europe with a 
 truer or more delicate instinct for the arts. Where is he ? " 
 
 " I expected him to dinner," said Lady Joan sulkily. When 
 she was out of temper she sometimes told the truth. 
 
 The Turkish curtains were at that moment put aside, and 
 through the doorway loris entered, kissed Madame Paturge's 
 hands with gay gallantry, saluted Eonsoulet with reverential 
 friendship, and accosted Victor Louche with a graceful com- 
 pliment on his last comedy. 
 
 " Such perfect manners, ma mie. You will never change for 
 the better," said Madame Paturge in a low tone to her hostess, 
 who, however, did not even hear, but said roughly and curtly to 
 the offender : 
 
 " Where have you been ? " n „ 
 
 " I have dined at home. I found a mass of correspondence. 
 
 " I told you to go with the Stairs." 
 
 " I accompanied those amiable sisters." 
 
 "Well, why didn't you come straight back here?" 
 
 " I remembered orders I had to give Giannino at home. ^^ I 
 knew you could not miss me— you would be too well amused." 
 
 " You've been writing all the evening? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 The eyes of loris began to grow a little angry under their 
 long lashes. Victor Louche, who feared a scene, began to sing 
 " C(i me chatouiUe dans le nez." 
 
 ' Madame Paturge nudged her hostess. 
 
 "Perhaps he has been playing at the club, and lost money? " 
 
 " lo never plays," said the Lady Joan savagely. 
 
 There was an awkward silence. 
 
 Victor Louche sang very loud and made a great noise with 
 the pedals. loris crossed over to M. Eonsoulet. 
 
 " Caro maestro, how goes the Palestrina? " 
 
 "The bean-stalk won't bend for ever," thought Madame 
 Paturge in her capacious chair. 
 
 Portunatcly for the preservation of peace there then entered 
 Mimo and Trillo and a youth of three and twenty, Guido Serra- 
 valle, who sang a fine second to her favourite ritornello. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 175 
 
 Trillo brought her word of an Inspectcnr dos Beaux-Arts who 
 was coming from Petersburg and would buy a great deal ; Mimo 
 of an order that Lord Norwich had given him to find an altar- 
 screen, trecento, if possible ; and Guido Serravallc brought her 
 a new song and an old lute, inlaid with ivory and silver, as a 
 present. They sufficed to avert the thunders of her wrath ; but, 
 even as she hastily reckoned that the lute was certainly worth 
 three or four hundred francs and smiled on the donor, her brow 
 was still dark and her face was still sullen. 
 
 The sagacious Madame Paturge, from her chair blowing clouds 
 of cigarette smoke about her head, watched and winked once 
 more to the slumbering Eonsoulet. 
 
 " She is jealous, and he is not. No, he does not even resent 
 that lute ; he is only glad that the lute spares him a scene. Ah ! 
 there is a storm in the air. I should like to see it break." 
 
 But the sagacious Paturge had not that pleasure — loris did 
 not wait for it. 
 
 He left the house with Victor Louche, and left the old ivory 
 lute on his mistress's knee, and Guido Serravalle kneeling before 
 her to tune it, with Mimo and Trillo on either side of her, like 
 her tutelary twin deities as they were. 
 
 " Eonsoulet," said Madame Paturge as they went home, " that 
 will not last very long." 
 
 " Will it not, my dear ? " said Eonsoulet ; and he sighed, for 
 experience had taught him that liberty was hard to obtain. 
 
 The next morning, while the day was still young, loris, in 
 his own little room, taking his coffee, v.'as confronted by an 
 imperious and furious woman. A scene was his fate. 
 
 What did he mean ? How dared he ? Where had he been ? 
 What could he say ? 
 
 The whirlwind broke over his head. The iierce grey eyes 
 flashed like steel. The storm had lost nothing of its violence by 
 having been pent up till noon. 
 
 Irritated, annoyed, deafened, surprised, exasperated, he 
 sought refuge in an untruth : he affected jealousy of the old 
 ivory lute. 
 
 It was a lie, but it imposed on her. It calmed the troubled 
 waters of her soul. She believed ; and believing, consented to 
 be pacified. 
 
 So blinded by her credulous vanity was she, that she omitted 
 to notice that all the while he never told her wliere his evening 
 had been spent. 
 
17G FBIENDSEIP, 
 
 CHAPTEE XYII. 
 
 " He was jealous of poor little Guido ! " thought Lady Joan, with 
 a flash of delight and amusement, an hour after the temiDest, as 
 she glanced in the mirror to see if her brow were smooth again 
 and her dress uncrumpled, and hastened from the house of 
 loris. 
 
 On the threshold, with whom should an unkind fate bring 
 her sharply in contact but Lord and Lady Norwich, ponderous 
 and solemn, their footman behind them, walking feebly down 
 the street to their carriage ! They had been to see a neighbouring 
 church which boasted a famous fresco. 
 
 Lord and Lady Norwich looked a little stiif ; Lady Joan for 
 the moment a little blank. But it was just one of those moments 
 which, like the meetings at the Paris cafes when without her 
 bib-and-tucker, tested her savoir-faire, and never found her 
 wanting. 
 
 " Oh, dear Lady Norwich," she cried with rapture, "what a 
 fortunate moment to meet you ! This is lo's house. You know 
 lo's house ? Mr. Challoner brought you the other day to see his 
 tapestries, didn't he?" (Lord and Lady Norwich, still stiffly, 
 assented.) " How I do wish you would come in again now ! 
 Will you come in again now? I've just been to see such a 
 lovely old Francia he has found out right away in the moun- 
 tains. It belongs to a poor old priest, a vicar of a miserable 
 village, who is really almost starving, and never knew the worth 
 of it till lo told him. Mr. Challoner and I have been enchanted 
 with the picture. I'm afraid Eobert's just gone, and lo was 
 already out, but I could show you this Francia if you would 
 not mind coming upstairs. You know I do as I like here. Poor 
 dear lo ! he's just like my brother. Could you spare me five 
 minutes ? " 
 
 Lord and Lady Norwich were thawing : they hesitated, 
 miimbled that it was cold, but finally yielded ; she was so 
 solicitous and so deferential that they consented to enter the 
 house and to carry their venerable persons and their imim- 
 peachable respectability and dignity up the staircase to see the 
 Francia, which was placed alone in its glory on an old oak easel 
 in one of the entrance chambers. 
 
 " Very fine ; really very fine," said Lord Norwich, and sat 
 down before it. 
 
 The Francia was a real Francia ; it had been in the family 
 
PBIENDSHiP. 177 
 
 of loris for as many centuries as have gone by since the tender 
 old painter looked with wet eyes on Eaffaelle's panel that made 
 him ashamed of tlie labours of his own long lifetime. There 
 was no doubt about the Francia, which was a treasure and 
 favourite with loris ; and the slow, torpid heart of Lord Norwich 
 began to quicken with longing for it. 
 
 "Wasted in a village jiresbytery — dear me! dear me!" he 
 said, and shook his head. He was an honourable man ; he said 
 straight out that he would give the needy priest the just price 
 for it, and named a large sum. 
 
 "I'm sure lo can get it for you for that," said the Lady Joan. 
 " I'm so sorry lo's not home now. He was already gone out when 
 I came in first. But I'll tell him, and let you know this evening 
 for certain." 
 
 " Perhaps he may wish to buy it himself? " said Lord Norwich 
 —a scrupulous man, very delicate and hesitating under his 
 pomposity. 
 
 Lady Joan laughed. 
 
 " Poor dear lo ! Buy it ! He'll have to sell his own pictures 
 more likely, I'm afraid. You know he's so poor, thougli we try 
 to keep things straight for him in the country. No, he let it 
 hang here on the chance of finding a purchaser for the poor old 
 vicario. He'll be so delighted you have seen and fancied it. lo 
 loves to do good. Dear Lady Norwich, are you cold on this 
 marble floor V " 
 
 Lady Norwich began to think the rooms were cold : if Lord 
 Norwich had seen enough of the picture she wished to go. This 
 was precisely what Lady Joan wanted her to do. She was afraid 
 every moment that loris Avould come out of his own little room, 
 and she had no means of signalling to him to stay there shut 
 np ; Sind though of course she could readily have explained his 
 appearance on some hypothesis or another, still it was better to 
 avoid it. So she suggested that the apartment was cold. 
 
 " lo is so little at home, you know ; he is so much with us," 
 she said frankly. 
 
 " As if she loould say that, if there were anything between 
 them ! " thought Lady Norwich, and commented on the speech 
 to this effect afterwards to her friends. So Lady Joan piloted 
 them in safety downstairs, and was offered a seat in their carriage, 
 and took it, and drove home to luncheon with these great and 
 excellent people; and having begun the morning with a scene, 
 ended it with a success, like the truly clever woman she was. 
 
 " Not like to sell the Francia, lo ! " she screamed later in the 
 day. " But you must sell it — you shall sell it. If I hadn't sold 
 it I should have been compromised for life. "Would you dare to 
 compromise me by telling these old asses the picture is yours ? " 
 
 A gentleman cannot compromise a woman, even if she has 
 
178 PRIENDSHIP. 
 
 just made liim a stormy sceue in au unasked visit to Lis own 
 house. So loriSj with an impatient and embittered hearty saw his 
 Pruncia transferred to the Norwich collection. 
 
 The purchase-money was a large sum indeed. 
 
 " It will set your poor priest at ease for his life, I hope," said 
 the kindly stupid purchaser, who liked to think people were 
 comfortable through his means. 
 
 loris bowed in silence. 
 
 There was no poor priest to have the purchase-money ; bui 
 the Lady Joan shortly afterwards bought herself a riciere of 
 emeralds that was going cheap, and, from the Chemnitz sales, an 
 old cabinet of the first matchless Boule. 
 
 CHAPTEE XYIII. 
 
 Tui; gardens of the Colonua Palace are amongst the most charm- 
 ing thiugs of Kome. When the iron gate clangs behind you and 
 you climb the ilex-walk to them you will ten to one be all alone. 
 The gardens are just such gardens as Horace and Virgil used to 
 move in; you sit under the shattered pine planted to mark 
 Rienzi's death, and all the temples and towers of the immortal 
 city lie beneath, and the pile of the Capitol soars upward near 
 you, from the mass of roofs, like a cliff from out the sea ; the 
 pigeons pace to and fro, the ducks push their flat beaks amongst 
 the grass, swallows skim by, oranges drop, the sound of the many 
 trickling streams and fountains blends with the subdued murmur 
 of the streets tar down below. The world holds few sweeter or 
 nobler places to dream in than these gardens of Eienzi's foes. 
 
 Etoile found them out, and often went across the piazza to 
 them in the early morning or at the decline of day, with the great 
 dog Tsar. 
 
 One afternoon, having passed all the morning in the Vatican 
 galleries with Princess Vera, she entered the gardens to sit and 
 watch the sun sink to his setting. As she sat there, with volumes 
 of Giusti and of Leopardi on her lap, at which she had not even 
 looked. Tsar rose and moved his tail in animated welcome. She 
 glanced downward through the shelving descent of ilex and 
 orange leaves, and saw coming across from the palace, by the 
 little bridge that crossed the street, tlie figure of loris. 
 
 Tsar ran headlong down the winding walks and steps to 
 meet him. He came up, caressing the dog, and approached her 
 with uncovered head. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 179 
 
 " I saw you from the gallery of the palace ; I co;ild not resist 
 ascendius:. I saw you were looking more at Eorae than at your 
 books. You love my city ? " 
 
 " Ah, what a commonplace ! That is only to say that I am 
 not quite soulless." 
 
 " Pew care for Eome as you do." 
 
 "No? To be sure Lady Joan says that it is as dirty as 
 Cairo, as dear as Trouville, as ugly as Lriglitou, and as great an 
 imposture as Athens. Tastes dift'er." 
 
 He gave an impatient gesture. 
 
 " Why must you always speak of her ? Let mc forget that 
 she exists for a moment." 
 
 Etoile looked at him a moment, then looked away. 
 
 " Do not say those things to me. They are not loyal." 
 
 " Loyal ! Do slaves give loyalty ? You have called me a 
 blave." 
 
 She was silent. 
 
 " Can loyalty be enforced by cudgels and chains ? She thinks 
 it can, but it cannot." 
 
 " Tell her so, then : not me." 
 
 loris sighed impatiently. 
 
 '• Tell her ! How little you know her ! " he muttered. He 
 thought of the fierce storms, the violent reproaches, the tem- 
 pestuous outbursts which avenged the slightest opposition to 
 his tyrant s will. 
 
 All that men most dread, and which they have concentrated 
 in the one all-eloquent word a " scene," she could pour out upon 
 his head in any fatal hour that her whim was crossed or wrath 
 excited. 
 
 A woman's violence is a mighty power; before it, reason 
 recoils imnerved, justice quails appalled, and peace perishes like 
 a burnt-up scroll ; it is a sand-storm, before which courage can 
 do but little : the bravest man can but fall on his face and let it 
 rage on above him. 
 
 He walked to and fro, a moment or two, on the level path of 
 the upper terrace; then very wearily rested his elbows on the 
 Avail and leaned there near her where she sat. 
 
 It was a beautiful afternoon ; the sun was still above tlio 
 dusky lines of the pines of Monte Mario, far away in front, and 
 the warm light tinted the soft, clear olive of his cheek and the 
 delicate, proud outlines of his face. 
 
 His face and figure lent themselves to the beauty of any 
 scene. Standing on a reaped field, against the bare poles of the 
 maize, in his white linen dress, with the warm sun about him, 
 he had a poetic, supple, picturesque grace that Leopold Eobert 
 would have loved to perpetuate in a Koman sketch ; standing in 
 a crowded presence-chamber, with orders hanging to his coat 
 
180 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 and a sea of cotirt ladies' laces, and feathers, and diamonds 
 about him, in the waxlight, he had a grave, meditative dignity 
 of beauty that Vandyck would have liked to render in a portrait 
 which should have all the lordly sadness of his Charles Stuart 
 in it. 
 
 With loris all this was quite unconscious : hence its charm. 
 Nature had made him so : that was all. But his personal graces 
 gave him an irresistible sway over women. This kind of power 
 to charm is like a magician's gift. 
 
 Women shall honour great ability, shall behold true manliness, 
 shall be worshipped with knightly reverence, shall be assailed 
 by all the splendour of intellect, shall be wooed with all daring 
 and all humility, and yet shall remain cold, and as untouched, 
 as marble in the quarry. And then there shall come one who 
 has this magic gift — this wand that wakes the sleeping senses, 
 this rose that, slipped into the bosom, banishes all peace, this 
 power of love incarnated, — and though the magician be faithless 
 as the wind, and rootless as the windborn flower, yet in him 
 alone for ever shall be her heaven and her hell. 
 
 " What a life is mine ! " he said impetuously now, after a 
 long silence. " The life of a lackey ! You described it well that 
 day at Fiordelisa. No will of my own ; no time of my own ; 
 ordered here, ordered there; dragging through the same endless 
 and joyless routine. The lackey has more liberty than I, for he at 
 least stipulates for some few hours of freedom. What future can 
 I look forward to ? I dare not look forward ; a dead blank faces 
 me — faces me everywhere. With no home, with no interest, 
 with no children, with no hope, is it worth while living ? At 
 times I envy the very mules that creep past me with their loads : 
 they are less sensible of the weight they bear than I am." 
 
 Etoile looked at him and felt a pang at her own heart : half 
 of pity, half of pain. She could not doubt the sincerity of this 
 passionate lament. 
 
 " But your friendship " she murmured, and then paused, 
 
 with the colour in her face. 
 
 It was not friendship that thus dragged upon his life. She 
 felt ashamed to speak the sorry lie Society allows and loves. 
 
 loris, with one of his swift changes of mood, and uneasily 
 conscious that he had betrayed himself too far, turned and 
 laughed carelessly. 
 
 "rrieudship! Ah! yes. Friendship means anything — every- 
 thing — from deadliest hate and hottest love downward to the 
 zero of complete indifference ! There is only Tsar, 1 think, who 
 really gives one the honest friendship of a bygone day." 
 
 He drew the dog to him and caressed him, and sank down 
 on the bench beside her, and talked of Leopardi, whom he had 
 known when he himself had been a little child, and together 
 
FRIENDSniP. 181 
 
 they Wfitcliod tlic pilo of tlio Capitol grow darlc and tho sun 
 descend behind tho pnrplcs of the pines ; together they left tho 
 gardens, that grew drear and cold when once tho siau had set, 
 and passed across tho square in the fleeting twilight. 
 
 At licr door ho bade her adieu, and with a heavy heart and 
 a reluctant step went slowly back to tho house which stood to 
 him in the stead of home — a bastard home, warmed with the 
 dull tires of a worn-out passion ; ho felt a great rcluctauco to 
 enter, an utter weariness of all he would encounter. 
 
 Day after day, night after night, the comedy was always the 
 same. The curt command, tho hard contemjit, the commercial 
 discussion, the sensual gaze, the trite caress, the hollow ecstasy 
 — he knew them all, one after another, so well — so horribly well. 
 His heart failed him as he mounted the long stone staircase and 
 entered the familiar atmosphere, haunted with stale smoke and 
 stirred by the twang of tho mandoline. 
 
 He hated the scent; ho hated the sounds. They were all 
 fraught to him with the sickliness of an enforced habit, of a 
 perpetual repetition. Shining eyes flashing through tobacco-mist 
 over a ribboned guitar may be intoxicating for sis hours, six 
 weeks, even six months. But for six years ! . . . 
 
 In six years the laugh palls, the songs jar, the eyes repel. 
 
 A sense of dulness and jaded effort fell on him always now 
 whenever he crossed the threshold of that too terribly well-known 
 room. The deadly apathy of a familiarity that is not hallowed 
 by any sense of sanctity or sweetness fell on him, heavy as lead, 
 whenever he entered her dwelling. He knew all that would bo 
 said and done, all that would bo expected and exacted ; it had 
 no more interest for him than a comedy that has run three 
 hundred nights has for the stall-keepers. 
 
 A woman need never dread the fiercest quarrel with her 
 lover ; the temjjest may bring sweeter weather than any it broke 
 up, and after the thunder the singing of birds will sound lovelier 
 than before. Anger will not extinguish love, nor will scorn 
 tramjile it dead ; jealousy will fan its fires, and offences against 
 it may but fasten closer its fetters that it adores beyond all 
 liberty. But when love dies of a worn-out familiarity it perishes 
 for ever and aye. 
 
 Jaded, disenchanted, wearied, indifferent, the tired passion 
 expires of sheer listlessness and contemptuous disillusion. 
 
 The death is slow and uuperceived, but it is sure ; and it is 
 a death that has no resurrection. 
 
 This was how the passion which the Lady Joan desired to 
 cudgel into immortality, was dying now. 
 
 When he entered the Turkish room this afternoon he found 
 her the centre of an adoring circle of half a dozen youths, with 
 the white-haired Silverly Bell and the very dear old Mimo as 
 
182 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 more solid ballast. She was surrotinded by sketches of costumes, 
 Eastern stuffs, strings of sequins, and damascened weapons, and 
 was discussing her own and her companions' attire at a fancy 
 ball to be given by the Echeances. 
 
 " How late you are, lo ! Where have you been all this tune ? " 
 she said in greeting, a heavy frown upon her brows. 
 " Y/ith the King of Denmark," answered loris. 
 " What ? Why, Almeria's in attendance on him," 
 " Almeria is indisposed. They sent for me." 
 Lady Joan looked at him sharply. She had a vague sus- 
 ])icion that there was something withheld from her. 
 
 "Where did the king go?" she pursued, being por-fcssel 
 with the common feminine belief that catechisms produce truth 
 as tlieir results. 
 
 " To the galleries," answered loris, 
 
 "Will he buy while he's here?" said the Lady Joan, her 
 thoughts reverting to business and her eyes to Burlctta. 
 loris shrugged his shoulders. 
 " I really cannot say." 
 
 Then he took up the day's FanfuUa and sat down near the 
 window, whilst she returned to her costumes and her courtiers, 
 and put on her yashmaks and rattled her tambourines, and 
 screamed at the youths' jokes and smiled on their homage, and 
 petted her dear old friends Silverly and Mimo so cleverly that 
 neither was envious of the other. 
 
 " How different it is with her ! " he mused, with a sigh, to 
 himself. 
 
 Etoile had become "her " in his thoughts. 
 "You're as grave as an owl, lo," cried the Lady Joan, 
 snapping her fingers in his face as six o'clock sounded, and she 
 dismissed her slaves, and threw tlie windows open to let the cigar 
 smoke out, since the Dean of St. Edmund's and the Lady 
 Barbara, his wife, were going to dine with her, and other 
 eminent respectabilities were to meet them ; and her well-trained 
 servant was already clearing away the French songs, and the 
 cigar-ash, and the costumes, and the tambourines, and layjug 
 out in tlieir stead grave English journals and reports of Acade- 
 mies of Art and Science. 
 
 She was careful to give many dinners, and good ones. She 
 knew that money laid out on plovers' eggs and truffles, green 
 peas in winter, and salmon from the North, sherries from the 
 Xeres plains, and clarets from the Garonne's banks, will bring 
 forth high interest in the sha])e of much long-suffering from a 
 propitiated, and by consequence pardoning. Society, 
 
 She had never read the Satyrkon, and perhaps never heard 
 of it, but she acted on the principle iiiculcated by the priestess 
 ^linothea. lu this age, vas in that, two broad gold pieces, pro- 
 
FBIENDSIIJR 183 
 
 Tided they be big enough, will buy the right to Idll the sacred 
 goose of tlie terai^lo and even to cook it too. 
 
 The world is like aged iEnothea. 
 
 "Slay the divine bird! oh, vilest sinner!" she cried, and 
 banged her trencher down in ruthless rain of blows ; but, soften- 
 ing at the sight of a wcll-lilled hand, she relented, " Nay, sweet 
 youth, it was but in love and fear for thee I scolded. Nay, I 
 promise thee, surely it shall be known to none. And since tlio 
 bird is dead it were of no avail to avenge it ; I will strip it in 
 thine honour, and we will make merry over its baked meats ! " 
 
 Society has not changed much since the Satyrkon. It has 
 invented prettier names for the old vices — that is all. 
 
 loris now moved from her touch with that petulance which 
 took in him the charm of a woman's grace and a woman's way- 
 wardness. 
 
 " Carissima mm! One does not feel flattered when yon take 
 such ardent interest in young lads of twenty that can warble a 
 cafe ballad ; and, as you only reproach me when I come here, 
 and amuse yourself with others, why should I endeavour to be 
 anything but grave ? " 
 
 She did not know the secret of the impatience which moved 
 him, the comparison with the thoughts and ways of another 
 woman that he instituted to her own loss in his own meditations. 
 She believed that he was angered at her attention to the young 
 men, as he had been angry at the ivory lute, and such anger 
 argued jealousy, and jealousy had been very quiet in him for 
 some years. She was delighted at its revival. 
 
 "What a goose you are! Go home and dress," she cried 
 gaily to him as she disappeared into her own chamber. Ho 
 caught her hand and detained her a moment. 
 
 " Who dines with you to-night ? I forget." 
 
 " Oh, a heap of great people. Bores of the first water. Just 
 the folks that always make me want to dance the Cancan in 
 their faces, and make the seventh heaven of Mr. Challoner." 
 
 " You have not asked, — the Comtesse d'Avesnes ? " 
 
 " Etoile ! My dear lo ! Are you mad ? What, ask a Paris 
 Sai^pho to meet the Dean of St. Edmund's and the Countess of 
 Norwich ! When will you understand the decorum of the 
 inviolate isle of fogs and fogies ? " 
 
 And the Lady Joan went into her dressing-room with a laugh 
 and shut the door, to glance over the London reviews on the 
 Dean's learned study of the " Use and Import of the Letter 
 Koph." 
 
 loris went out, and down the stairs thoughtfully. He was 
 not at ease ; he f(;lt as if he had heard a blasiDlicmy, and had let 
 it pass, unrebuked, out of cowardice. 
 
 Lady Joan, her study of the Letter Koph completed, went to 
 
184 FEIENDSHIP. 
 
 licr toilette in a contented and radiant mood, and liad her velvet 
 dress put on, and ran a gilt spadella through her dark braids, 
 and clasped a gilt waist-belt round her, and saw that she looked 
 very well. 
 
 " He was actually jealous of those nice boys ! What fun it 
 is ! Poor lo ! " she thought to herself with that complacent pity 
 for the sufferer from her own fascinations which is the greatest 
 enjoyment of a very vain woman. 
 
 She was enraptured to think that the old folly was in him 
 still, and she was in happy ignorance of the workings of his 
 thoughts. 
 
 He was jealous ! She smiled at herself in the glass, with 
 perfect satisfaction. After six years he was still jealous ! 
 
 He was jealous — poor lo ! 
 
 Lady Joan smiled at herself, thinking of Abana and Phar- 
 phar, Orontes and Euphrates ; and so in perfect good humour 
 went into her drawing-room, to form a domestic picture on the 
 hearthrug with her husband and child, by the time that Lord 
 and Lady Norwich and the Dean of St. Edmund's and his wife 
 entered, coming all together from the Hotel des Hes Britan- 
 niques. 
 
 She was on such good terms with herself that she behaved 
 with admirable composure throughout live hours of dreary and 
 dignified platitudes, and enrai:)tured the Dean with her sound 
 views of the dangers of Christianity from the Greek Church, and 
 thauked Lady Barbara with effusion for a promised recipe for 
 knitting children's woollen stockings. 
 
 " AVe have only one treasure, you know," said Lady Joan, 
 with her warmest smile, " and I like to fancy she wears any- 
 thing of my own making when I can ! " 
 
 " Such a natural sentiment ! " rejoined the Dean's wife, quite 
 touched. She had left sons and daughters of all ages in the 
 monastic shades of St. Edmund's, and worshipped them, 
 
 " What an excellent young woman that is, my dear ! " said 
 Lady Barbara to the Dean as they drove home to their hotel. 
 " And such a devoted mother too, evidently." 
 
 "A vastly agreeable woman," murmured the Dean, in tones 
 as soft and thick as the ttte de creme he had been drinking. 
 " Good common sense in her — no sui3erficiality — her remarks 
 about my pamphlet were really astonishingly clever. Quite a 
 deep knowledge for a woman. A very bad marriage she made ; 
 a very bad marriage. I remember wondering at it at the time. 
 But it seems to have turned out remarkably well— house nicely 
 appointed-^-nice dinner — that sturgeon was particularly well 
 done." 
 
 " And Mr. Challoner such a good creature." 
 
 " Sensible man ; something in the East, wasn't he? Consul 
 
FniENDSHIP. 185 
 
 — carpets — somctliing that began with a 0, I know. Asked mo 
 to go with him to see a Gentile da Fabriano that is to bo had as 
 a wonderful bargain." 
 
 "Oh yes, she told me all about it. It belongs to that 
 striking-looking man that sat quite silent at dinner, an Italian, 
 a great friend of theirs ; he'd been with the King of Denmark all 
 day; and I fancy he's very poor by what sho said — that it 
 would bo a charity." 
 
 " Ah ! the Italians always are as poor as church rats. Cer- 
 tainly, let us go and see it. I always admire Gentile and all 
 that pcliool of Early Upper Italy. They aro very kind pcopl« 
 evidently — excellent people." 
 
 So the Dean of St. Edmund's droned himself into a doze, 
 and was ready whenever he should go back to his cloister to 
 vow in society everywhere that by all his clerical dignity Joan 
 Challoner was the most estimable of her sex ; and his wife was 
 ready to second him. 
 
 Thus just by reading about the letter Koph for ten minutes, 
 and by begging a recipe to knit woollen stockings, sho secured 
 champions in the Church of England, and sold a picture next 
 day at a net profit of three hundred pounds. 
 
 "Have I a soul?" said Voltaii'e's peacock. "Certainly I 
 have : look at my tail." 
 
 Lady Joan would have said, " Certainly I have : look at my 
 card-basket and my bargains." 
 
 " You were very stupid to-night, lo," she said roughly when 
 the Dean and his lady were fairly away, and loris remained 
 alone with her, with the lamps burning low. " You were very 
 stupid to-night," she said, giving a twist to the silver-gilt spilla 
 in her coiled hair. 
 
 " I have a headache, carissima mia." 
 
 Lady Joan looked dubiously at him. 
 
 " You're always having headaches now." 
 
 " And you do not pity me? " 
 
 " I wish you woiildn't always have 'em just when my friends 
 dine here," she said ungraciously. " You're always well enough 
 when that woman's here." 
 
 •' What woman ? " 
 
 " As if you didn't know ! You're twice as civil to lier as you 
 need be. Marjory's noticed it, I can tell you. Oh, don't look so 
 innocent. You're always after Etoile. You know you are." 
 
 " Mais, ma cJiere ! You always see me courteous, I hope, to 
 all your sex." 
 
 " All my fiddlesticks ! Courteous indeed ! You're much 
 more than courteous — talking to her all night, going away when 
 she goes away, sitting staring at her as if she were something 
 new-fallen from heaven," 
 
186 FRIENDSEIP. 
 
 "Mais, ma chere ! What exaggeration ! I told you the first 
 night we saw her that she did not even please me ; that she was 
 insolent, and was cold — she is lost in her art — she does not j^er- 
 ceive that stich mere mortals as myself exist." 
 
 " You try to show her you exist, at any rate. Marjory saw 
 you walking with her this very day in the Colonna gardens." 
 
 " La honne Marjory must want to make mischief. I came up 
 from calling on Marc' Antonio by the gardens to make a short 
 cut, and she was there — it M'as the purest accident." 
 
 " Humph ! " Lady Joan was a woman of experience, and did 
 not believe in accidents between men and women. 
 
 " Do not let us quarrel about nothing," he said, rousing 
 himself and altering the twist of the gilded si^illa. " She is no 
 woman to me. If I look at her at all it is merely as one would 
 look at old Grillparzer at Vienna, or Wagner at Baireuth — for 
 the sake of what she has done. When a woman has entered a 
 public arena she is half-unsexed. You know what I think of 
 notoriety for your sex." 
 
 His heart smote him as he spoke, as though he uttered a 
 blasphemy against the saints of his childish faith. But he did 
 speak with an admirable carelessness and contempt combined 
 which carried conviction to his hearer's ear. 
 
 Lady Joan liked to be persuaded that she had voluntarily 
 abstained from being a celebrity, as Eichclieu liked to be per- 
 suaded that he had voluntarily abstained from being a poet. 
 Besides, she was always easily lulled into complacent serenity. 
 A very vain woman is easily deceived, because it seems imi^os- 
 sible to her that any one can ever be preferred to herself. 
 
 He played with the spilla in her hair and leaned over her in 
 the mellow lamplight. She looked up into his amorous eyes, 
 and was content ; the lustre in them was dim to what she had 
 once seen there, and the fire spent, yet he knew how to make 
 their dreamy depths tell the tale she had heard ten thousand 
 times and never tired of; it was only acting now, but it was 
 acting so perfect that she lived its dupe in happy blindness. 
 Keen, and shrewd, and hard of temjier though she was, here she 
 was duped as vitterly as the softest and silliest of her sex. 
 
 Though very clever in many ways, one thing in her was 
 stronger than her cleverness, and that was vanity. 
 
 A very trustful woman believes in her lover's fidelity with 
 her heart ; a very vain woman believes in it with her head. 
 
 To Lady Joan it would have seemed more possible for the 
 stars to fall from the sky than for any man to desert her. 
 
 In passion for him she was as reasonless and as sightless as 
 any Juliet or Gretchen lying for the first moment in her lover's 
 arms. The years had blown low the flame in him, but in her 
 they had only fanned it to a fiercer strength. The ridicule of 
 
FRIENDSIIIP. 187 
 
 him, the command of him, the oppression and tlie tyranny and 
 tbo suspicion of liira, wcro only her way of showing power, only 
 her device for making her world believe the thing she wished. 
 Alone with hira, love intoxicated, drugged, subdued her ; alone 
 with him, she was only an eager, passionate, voluptuous mistress ; 
 alone with him, she was only Cleopatra — the Dame du Comptoir 
 Avas dead. 
 
 loris was in everything the superior of his tyrant. 
 
 In intelligence, in taste, in culture, in disposition ho was 
 alike far beyond her. Yet, by a coarse, rough energy which 
 swept before it his hesitating temperament, and by a sensual, 
 fierce jDassiou which his soft nature recoiled from conflict with, 
 die had obtained a dominion over him which he had ceased even 
 to think of contesting. The women who love men truly never 
 obtain this power : they love too well to watch the occasion to 
 seize it. The old proverb that, between tv/o, one is always 
 booted and spurred, the other always saddled and bridled, is as 
 true as proverbs always are, which are " the distilled drops of 
 the experience of nations." It is not superiority of mind, or of 
 character, or of person that determines which shall ride and 
 which shall be ridden; it is generally rather the result of a 
 certain hardness of temper which determines the question early 
 in the day and never loses the supremacy. Taken roughly it 
 may be safely i^redicted that it will always be the higher nature 
 which will submit. Often it is the jade that rules the hero, the 
 fool that has feet kissed by the genius. 
 
 The very fierceness and force and fire of this woman, which 
 had at fir.st intoxicated him, served now at once to repel and to 
 intimidate him. 
 
 From the stern eyes, from the imperious voice, from the 
 vigorous gestures, from the resolute will that had once fascinated 
 him by their sheer strength which swept his softer nature away 
 on it as a mountain torrent sweeps a tree, he had little by little 
 grown to recoil in the inevitable reaction of all jjurely animal 
 passion. Her heel was set on his throat. Once he had kissed 
 the foot that so degraded him. But little by little he had begun 
 to breathe labouredly under its oppression. Little by little the 
 desire to raise it and rise had come to him. He was tired of 
 his life. 
 
 Tired of the orders and counter-orders, of the buying and 
 selling, of the petty hyi^ocrisies, of the puerile aims, of the exac- 
 tions that compelled him to follow like her shadow her path 
 through society, of the ol)ligation to show himself wheresoever 
 she might choose to go in that continual attendance which is a 
 rapture when voluntary from passion, a deathly fatigue when 
 ini loosed fiom habit — he was like a prisoner who drags a cannon- 
 ball at his ankle. 
 
188 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Night after night, as lie dressed to go through the social 
 comedy whose every speech and gesture he knew beforehand, he 
 sighed impatient to be free ; and yet he went. Habit is an ever 
 lengthening chain, whose links get heavier with each added 
 ring. 
 
 With her their love was still alive, an ever-burning fire, irre- 
 sistible and insatiable in its hours of abandonment. With him 
 their love was dead, and was replaced by habit. 
 
 It is a terrible difference. 
 
 Letting himself out of her house in the cold rosy dawn he 
 shuddered, not with the physical chill of the wintry night, but 
 at the vision of his own future. 
 
 " This woman always ! " 
 
 So he thought every morning, yet every night he went back 
 to her, as the mill-horse to its yoke. She was not faitliful to 
 him, because such women as she know not fidelity. She was 
 not truthful to him, because truth was not in her and could not 
 find its home in her mouth. She was the ruin of his life, whilst 
 she declared herself his salvation. Her tyranny, her exactions, 
 her ridicule, and her overwhelming egotism cast into the cold 
 shade of men's scorn the man whom she delighted to oppress 
 and wound, as a child loves to hurt the pet that it hugs to its 
 bosom. His idiosyncrasies were lost under her inordinate 
 vanities, and her obtrusive personalities drove him to the refuge 
 of silence and self-repression. He passed his life like a tree 
 under the shadow of a high wall : only the wall had been built 
 up brick and brick, so that he had never noticed it till it was for 
 ever there between him and the sun. 
 
 She herself was in love still — with that terrible and untiring 
 passion which can exist in a woman who to masculine vigour 
 unites feminine caprice. 
 
 She delighted to make him subservient, to render him 
 absurd, to deny him any will of his own, to ridicule his words, 
 to mock at him before the world. But this was the result only 
 of her natural temper. It was only as she beat a dog, or 
 punished a child, or tyrannised over whatever lay at her mercy. 
 Besides, she thought that it imposed on her society ; she thought 
 that it veiled her own passion for him, which was strong and 
 fierce and keen ; which begrudged a glance or a smile from him 
 elsewhere ; which took a voluptuous delight in his person, in his 
 touch. Biit in his presence, in his regard, in his caress, there 
 was still intoxication for her; she would have seen him dead 
 sooner than given to another ; her passion was violent, faithless, 
 cruel, ignoble, but it was passion, and it was living still ; a rest- 
 less sea of fire that beat itself upon the cold ashes of his own 
 dead desires till it warmed them to a semblance of itself. 
 
 Once he had felt as tiger-tamers feel, and the very danger 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 189 
 
 that Ihcro was in the creature he caressed had served to en- 
 thrall hira. Little by little the reality of the tic,rcss temi^cr 
 had become visible to him, and its p:;rced and hardness and pre- 
 datory instincts were revealed. Tliis queen of the desert that 
 laid her soft cheek against his was, after all, only a cat that 
 growled. Little by little the sense stole on him that his arms 
 held what preyed on him — and would devour him. 
 
 But when he awoke to In's own peril it was too late— the 
 tamed tigress had sprung and mastered him. 
 
 CHAPTEE XTX. 
 
 Cleopatra after sunset, the Lady Joan rose nevertheless every 
 morning Dame du Comptoir to the tips of her lingers. Eventide 
 might be for the mandoline or the mask, and the tender passions 
 and the tierce ones, but noonday was none the less for business. 
 
 Her forenoons were sternly given to those commercial con- 
 siderations for which she had brought a leaning from the banks 
 of Abana and Pharphar, Orontes and Euphrates. Telegrams and 
 letters about her various speculations and gigantic commercial 
 transactions scarcely let her swallow her breakfast in comfort ; 
 and these attended to, there were the teacups and triptychs, the 
 pots and the pans of her excellent friends and brothers Mimo and 
 Trillo; china to be packed, canvases to be backed, and all the 
 minutifc to be attended to of that sublime mission of the diffusion 
 of Art which she had set herself as her object in life, only 
 secondary to the Berkshire pigs and the Brahma poultry, and the 
 general salvation of Fiordelisa. 
 
 IMimo and Trillo. were the very Dioscuri of Art ; twin Tyn- 
 darids of connoisscurship and commerce ; Gemini of genius who 
 were both unspeakably dear to her ; though plump Mimo bore 
 off the palm as far as being petted by her went, and was by far 
 the most enthusiastic in her i)raises. According to him she was 
 angelic, heroic, unequalled, far above all the mortal weaknesses 
 of her sex, and only possessing one little, little, little fault — that 
 of being so unnaturally and superhumanly perfect that she was 
 incapable of conceiving that a base-minded world could ever put 
 incorrect constructions on her noble actions. 
 
 "Poverina! Certainly she compromises herself; alas! she 
 does compromise herself; but it is only the boldness of innocence! " 
 said Mimo, witli a bit of cracked Limoges in his hand and a big 
 cigar in his mouth. 
 
190 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " It was the boldness of innocence." It cost the good fellow 
 no more to say so than it did to say that any one of his round 
 ])latcs, painted and baked by a living worlvmau in a cellar in the 
 Trastevere, was pure Gubbio ware, with the iridescent hues 
 coloured by Maestro Giorgio himself. 
 
 " It was the boldness of innocence." 
 
 The phrase tickled the fancy of Mimo very much, and was for 
 ever ready on his tongue, as " Antko — proprio anticol " was for 
 ever on it before any doubtful plaque of repousse work or any 
 quattrocentista bridal coffer that had been carved and gilded the 
 week before. "It was the boldness of innocence." After all, if 
 the phrase pleased her so much, it cost him very little to say it ; 
 and what mortal man would not learn it by heart, when, just for 
 saying it, you get a cosy sofa to lounge in, and a nice little dinner 
 to eat, and a handsome woman to pet you ? 
 
 Besides, " the boldness of innocence " is like the reputation 
 for oddity — once accorded, it is as elastic as indiarubber and as 
 comprehensive as the umbrellas of the kings of the East, which 
 Avould shelter three hundred men. There is nothing you cannot 
 explain away with it ; before it Juvenal himself would be obliged 
 to make his bow and retire quite satisfied. 
 
 Trillo was somewhat more austere, and had not the comfort- 
 able roundness as of a child's tumbler or an Indian god which 
 characterised Mimo ; he was also more astute, and could never 
 be brought to rhapsodise as Mimo would do over the Berkshire 
 l^igs and the jMiuerva who had imported them. Trillo went iu 
 for high art ; found marvellous Eaffaelles and Luca delta Eobbias 
 iu old cellars and old walls : aud though occasionally to oblige 
 he would condescend to furniture, he would never run about aud 
 find old chairs for you, as Mimo would do any day of his life. 
 Trillo had only a studio, aud never had anything else, whereas 
 Mimo, if you were buying a good deal of him, did not so much 
 mind your calling his chambers a shop. But this unbending 
 austerity of Trillo made him, perhaps, the more useful of the 
 two in the main. Trillo even impressed' the great Hebrides 
 family, and found them a stove painted by Hirschvugel when 
 that master stayed and worked in Venice, aud an altar-screen in 
 ivory carved by Desidirio, before which all South Kensington 
 subsequently went on its knees. He had been, indeed, so fortu- 
 nate as to find these exact works of art three years before for 
 Prince Kouramasine, who had borne them off to bis castle iu 
 White Eussia; but White Eussia and Ben Nevis are far-sundered ; 
 and the designs were so beautiful that it was not extraordinary 
 that both Hirschvogel and Desidirio should have been so enam- 
 oured of them as to have executed them twice. 
 
 Both Tilimo and Trillo, who were men of judgment, suffered 
 mauy things from the ignorauce of their Minerva. She would 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 101 
 
 confuse styles and orders, jumble tip schools aud epochs, call 
 Turin Arazzi Gobelin, and Franlcenthal china Worcester; attri- 
 bute a Dutch ivory to Alcssandro Algardi, and a post-Ecnaissanco 
 jiaiutiug to Spineilo or Fraucia; aud they would shiver wheu 
 these mistakes were made before folks that knew, and would 
 groan together in secret. 
 
 But these were trifles after all ; there were so very few folks 
 that knew; and their Minerva was invaluable to them, and they 
 sat at her feet solemn as the owl of her emblem, whenever the 
 great Scotch cousins came witli her, or the much-enduring 
 British tourist was brought in her train. Indeed, in one sense 
 Lor ignorance was advantageous : it looked so frank. 
 
 Indeed, her very blunders became useful. 
 
 Trillo would piiU his beard and sigh that the dear and noblo 
 lady had such wonderful natural intelligence that she had never 
 been brought to correct it by study. She had too much good 
 faith too : she fell a prey to designing persons ; and Trillo pulled 
 his beard, and sighed again, and confessed that a good deal the 
 dear and noble lady had in her house was rohacda — all sheer 
 robaccia ! She had been imposed on ; she was always imposed 
 on Vv'hen he aud Mimo were not by ; she had a few real gems — 
 yes, a few real gems — Mimo and he had secured them for her ; 
 
 but as for the rest ! Now, mutual admiration societies 
 
 answer well ; but mutual depreciation societies answer, perhaps, 
 still better. The former is a gilded screen that may soon fall to 
 pieces ; but the latter is an impenetrable haze, such as hid Jove 
 from mortal eyes profane. 
 
 The tried partnership between the Temple of All the Virtues, 
 and Mimo and Trillo had never been signed or sealed — nay, never 
 even been whispered — but it served its purpose admirably. 
 
 When people took tea and a mnftin in the Temple, they did 
 not see the fine wires connecting it with the shop and the studio; 
 and when they went to the shop and the studio they did not 
 discern the metaphorical telephone by which shop and studio 
 took counsel with the Temple. But nevertheless the impalpable 
 lines were there ; and Mimo and Trillo, who were the Owl aud 
 the iEgis of Minerva, naturally absorbed much of Minerva's 
 attention, especially when there came any mighty cousin want- 
 ing teacups and triptychs, or an ^Esthetic Dean or a Eitualistic 
 Eector with a pretty taste in the way of carved choir-seats or 
 ornamented vestments. 
 
 So that in one way or another she was always very busy. 
 
 That practical half of her temperament which Voightel had 
 called the chme du compfoir was filled with a multiplicity of 
 objects aud interests, from new people to conciUate to old china 
 to sell, from bargains to be disposed of to balls to get invited to, 
 from compauics to be floated to visiting cards to be left; aud 
 
192 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 this harassing and multitudinous minutise of interests so 
 absorbed her at times that she actually forgot to watch loris, 
 and left him a certain slender enjoyment of personal liberty of 
 •which he was quick to avail himself to the utmost. 
 
 Prudence at times required that she should call on people 
 with no escort but Mr. Challoner's ; business at times required 
 that she should rummage amidst old lumber shops with Bur- 
 letta as her guardian and guide; her own pleasure at times 
 required that she should disport herself at theatres or in 
 Campagna rides with Douglas Grseme or young Guido Serra- 
 vallo. Occasionally, too, there would j^ass through Eome some 
 old friends of the camping-out days of the Desert, of whom it 
 was not judicious to allow loris to see too much, since loris had 
 queer fancies, and amongst them was one that she had been a 
 stranger to Eros and Anteros till he met her. Men will have 
 these notions — pure vanity, no doubt — but it is never worth 
 while to disturb them. 
 
 So thus — here and there — he gained his morning or evening 
 of freedom; and whenever such a release came to him he 
 hesitated never now as to how he should spend it, but Avended 
 his way to the old house by the Eospigliosi garden and made 
 friends with Tsar, and sat in the dreamy fragrance of Etoile's 
 narcissi and winter-roses. 
 
 Very clever as both the Lady Joan and Marjory Scrope were 
 in their several manners, and experienced as the latter certainly 
 was in masculine ways and wiles, to neither of them did it 
 occiir to remember, in their observations of loris, two things. 
 
 First, that human nature yearns for freedom. 
 
 Secondly, that human nature has a tendency towards |that 
 which is forbidden. 
 
 When they set themselves in their several modes to watch 
 him, and were convinced that they succeeded in learning all his 
 actions, they never took into account that men are like school- 
 children, and cannot by any amount of spying be hindered from 
 wholly following their bent, and will only be driven into devices 
 for concealing it. 
 
 The real temper of loris, the amorous but reticent, impas- 
 sioned yet impassive temperament of his nationality had been 
 long lost sight of under the dulling influence of a galling 
 routine. The semi-conjugal character of his position in the 
 Casa Challoner and at Fiordelisa had long taken all savour of 
 intrigue out of it; was impossible to cheat himself into thinking 
 he was climbing an cscalier clerohe when Mr. Challoner welcomed 
 him so blandly up the grand staircase ; his life had long lost the 
 supreme charm of life : it had lost all possibility of the unfore- 
 seen arriving in it. Eising in the morning he knew all the 
 routine of the coming twenty-four hours as well as he knew the 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 193 
 
 numerals on the clock's face which would tell them as they 
 passed. 
 
 In her intense eagerness to absorb him completely, she had 
 overshot her mark ; she had washed out of his lifo all expectation 
 and all desire. She had made it a mere sand-plain, monotonous 
 and arid, with her own figure looming perpetually in mirage 
 on its horizon, till turn where he would l^e could see nothing 
 else. 
 
 When the charm of a new interest, the mystery of a character 
 he did not comprehend, the attraction of a woman unlike any 
 that he had ever known — when all these fell in his path he gave 
 way to the impulse that moved him to pursue them, with hardly 
 more thought at first than a child has as it runs down a by-path 
 to see nearer a butterfly on the wing. 
 
 " Vous I'avez voulu ! " he would have said to the woman who 
 had sought to blind his eyes and bind his fancies. She had done 
 it herself : the slave's life into which she had enchained him had 
 made the slave's instincts a^vake in him : the instincts to hide 
 and to escape. 
 
 He had fallen' into an utterly cheerless routine of existence, 
 to which he was only reconciled by the sort of ferocious seduc- 
 tion that she still possessed for him; but when the eyes of Etoile 
 first met his they had awakened the dormant romance and the 
 forgotten dreams of his youth. 
 
 It became sweet to him to have thoughts that his tyrant 
 could not divine, sympathies that she could not reach, happy 
 hours that she could not mar ; and at first he merely concealed 
 the frequency of his visits to Etoile as he concealed every better 
 emotion that he felt from his mistress. As it was she never 
 suspected them. 
 
 In the forenoons that she gave to Mimo and Trillo, and to 
 business generally, she seldom ordered or expected his attend- 
 ance, and most of those forenoons found him by Etoile's hearth, 
 sitting in the fragrance of her heliotropes and hyacinths. When 
 Lady Joan questioned him as to his morning he would say he 
 had been at the Court or the Vatican, at the studios or the 
 stables, and she was content. 
 
 To loris, who had much of the artist and something of the 
 poet, and who might say, like Camors of his imagination, " J'en 
 ai, mais je Vetou[fe," there was a pure and fresh pleasure in 
 roaming over Eome with Etoile. 
 
 Accustomed for years to a woman who ransacked all art only 
 to get something to buy cheap and sell dear, and who regarded 
 a picture or a bust only with an eye as to what it would fetch 
 in ten years' time, he found a new delight in the culture and 
 fancy of a woman to whom every stone had a story and every 
 statue was a living friend. When he went with Etoile and stood 
 
;194 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 before the Fauu of the Capitol he saw that she grew very pale 
 and was quite silent. 
 
 " What do yoti feel ? " he asked her. 
 
 After a little while she answered him what she did feel and 
 what with her was truth. 
 
 "I can hardly tellyou. I have thought of all these marbles 
 so long that really to see them seems stranger than a dream. 
 The Faun is the very incarnation of the youth of the world. 
 Three thousand years have passed since he was called to shape, 
 and he smiles as if he had been called out from the white rock 
 but yesterday. Yet so many creeds have changed, and so many 
 empires fallen, and so many cities perished since he saw the 
 light ! — the Apollo again, he should not be the god of any art, 
 for all art changes ; he is the god of nature, the god eternal, the 
 god of the flowers that grew out of Cfesar's ashes and the sea 
 that smiles though it drowned Shelley, and the sun that shines 
 
 on while nations perish " 
 
 loris, standing by her, thought of another woman who, coming 
 there for the first time also, had made a wry face at the Apollo 
 and snapped her fingers at him, and called this glory of the 
 Belvedere a moonstruck posture-master, and this Faun of the 
 Capitol a jolly little rogue, but had said she never could see 
 what anybody found in stone dolls to rave about. He had dwelt 
 with the lower and coarser intelligence till he had got used to it, 
 but it had never altogether ceased to jar on him. The finer and 
 more spiritual impulses in him revived and sprung up eagerly 
 to meet the purer atmosphere of Etoile's fancies as pressed-down 
 reeds spring up to meet the breeze. 
 
 Meditation and fancy were with her the very sap of life, per- 
 vading her from root to branch, as its sap a tree ; with him 
 they were but the upmost crown of leaf that fluttered in the 
 wind, and was put forth, or frozen back, according to the air 
 around. Yet there was likeness enough in them to give 
 sympathy, and whilst he was with her he thought and saw and 
 spoke as she did — and was true in it. 
 
 He also met Etoile at one or two great houses, embassies, and 
 palaces, where the Lady Joan did not penetrate, and where she 
 permitted him to go, because she always hoped, some day or 
 other, to squeeze herself in by his means. 
 
 When his tyrant was near, her boisterous self-assertion com- 
 pletely subdued him; her incessant watchfulness made him 
 constrained; and, annoyed by her persistent claims on his 
 attention, yet afraid to resist them, he had grown into the habit 
 of a silent self-eifacement in sheer self-defence. 
 
 Away from her he was transformed, and all the grace, talent, 
 and social gifts natural to him had their play. Nature had 
 bestowed on him a graceful and dignified presence, a face that 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 195 
 
 attracted the eyes of all women, and that happy tact and cliarm 
 of manner which in society outweigh all acomplishment and 
 achievement. 
 
 He would have looked well in a panel of Giorgione's or a 
 canvas of Vandyck's, and his grace and bearing went fittingly 
 with these grave old palaces of Eome, where the motley of 
 modern society almost gathers the grace of a dead day by the 
 spell of its surroundings, in the solemn beauty of galleries tliat 
 Eaffaelle painted, and the gorgeous vastnessof halls that Michael 
 Angelo built. 
 
 Etoile had looked at him at first as she would have done at 
 a portrait or a statue; then the portrait smiled, the statue spoke; 
 he lingered beside her in those noble galleries, where the genius 
 of the past gazed down on the frivolity of the present; when she 
 was occupied by others he stood near, mute and listening; when 
 he was there he was her shadow ; when he was not there she 
 missed him. 
 
 Etoile, from the years when she had pored over Shakspcare, 
 and Eacine,and Goethe in the woodland shadows of her tranquil 
 Ardennes, had had no passion save for her art; though it was 
 not likely that the world in general was going to be so simple as 
 to believe this. It is seldom that the world is simple enough to 
 receive a truth. " I am Truth, and have few acquaintances," 
 says the gentleman in Congreve's comedy : when he comes in, 
 most people look the other way. 
 
 Etoile in every fibre of her mind and temper was an artist. 
 The artist quite absorbed and extinguished the woman in her. 
 Men thought her— because they found her — cold. They paid 
 her court and wooed her in all kinds of ways, but they all left 
 her unmoved. 
 
 Sometimes she would watch two lovers glidiug under moonlit 
 trees, or look at a woman with a young child in her arms, and 
 wish that this warmth of human love would touch her. But it 
 did not. 
 
 She had many who wooed her, but none who moved her. 
 Sometimes it seemed to her that she was like a liigh-strung 
 instrument, that echoes all the emotions of the soul but remains 
 itself insensible to them. 
 
 She led a life of much isolation by choice, and of much 
 retirement by preference. She considered that to be great the 
 artist must be much alone with himself and with nature, and 
 the leisure she had was given to the arts. When she went into 
 the world it amused her for half an hour; then it grew tedious. 
 She liked better her library, her atelier, her solitude ; or the open 
 air, where every breath that blew took her in fancy to the woods 
 and waters of her happy childhood. 
 
 " You are an innocent woman, you are a famous woman, but 
 
196 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 you are not a happy woman," said a great wise man to her 
 once. 
 
 "No? I suppose there is always something missing," she 
 answered him. 
 
 Meanwhile the world in general know that she was famous, 
 thought that she was happy, but did not in the least believe her 
 innocent. 
 
 To loris, as to the world, it seemed strange to find a woman 
 who was still young, and had some place in the great world, 
 passing her time in study and in thought. To come in with the 
 early morning to her, and see her, with old chronicles and 
 crabbed manuscripts, following the threads of disputed histories 
 or gathering the thoughts of forgotten pasts, had a charm for 
 him. In his youth he had been a student too, and to meet her 
 in her own field he shook off him that worldly levity, and that 
 lower habit of thought which had obscured and absorbed his 
 mind in his later years. It attracted yet it tantalised him to find 
 her pure intellectual abstractions absorb her, whilst the daily 
 pleasures of other women's lives scarce held her for a second. 
 He felt that to make this woman know a human passion would 
 be to draw her down to earth, and break her skyward-bearing 
 wings, and yet he desired to do it— daily desired more and 
 more. 
 
 As with him so with a chamois hunter, who, seeing a mountain 
 hawk sailing far, far away in the clear rarefied air above the 
 cloud, lifts his rifle, and sends death through the blue serene 
 sacred peace of the still heavens. 
 
 The bird drops into a deep abyss where no eyes see its dying 
 agony. It is out of reach, and if reached were of no use to liim 
 who shot it, since he only seeks the chamois of the hills that 
 gives him food and shoe-leather. And yet he fires. 
 
 And the bird is dead. 
 
 Something of the hunter's feeling woke in him now. She 
 was so far away and so content in that high air where nothing 
 mortal followed. He wanted to bring her down and handle her 
 closer, and feel if her heart beat — make it beat, indeed, by pain, 
 if only pain would do it. Not from cruelty — oh, no. He was 
 never cruel to the lowliest thing that moved. Only from vague 
 curiosity, and a baflaed wonder, and an awakening desire ; and 
 that eagerness for what is rare and strange, which is as eager in 
 the man with his loves as in the child with his pastimes. 
 
 So he came to her constantly in the long mornings of the 
 winter, when the sun grew warm at noon ; and went to houses 
 where he could meet her, when he could secure an hour's freedom ; 
 and studied her, and grew a little more fiimiliar with her day by 
 day, and learned the details of her life, and told her stories of 
 his own, and gave her that delicate, half-uttered, all-eloquent 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 197 
 
 sympathy "which his tact, perhaps, rather that his heart taught 
 him at first; and at times would sit quite silent gazing at her 
 with that mystical, voluptuous, contemplative light in liis 
 dreamy gaze which Love has given to the southern and the 
 eastern alone of the sons of men, and which will draw a woman 
 towards it as the sun draws up the dew. 
 
 Meanwhile the one who believed she held the key of his 
 thoughts, knew nothing of the truth. 
 
 So long as he was always close at hand, to be shown off as a 
 slave, so long as he consented to follow her about and be made 
 absurd at her pleasure; so long as he bought and sold, and 
 fetched and carried for her, and she could call on lo aloud to all 
 the four winds of heaven wheresoever she went, with the display 
 and vanity that were so sweet to her, so long the Lady Joan was 
 not a woman to notice a stifled sigh, a laggard step, a look of 
 weariness, a gesture of reluctance. These are the signs that 
 women who love well, read, trembling, and in themselves droop 
 by, as the field-born pimpernel droops by the darker passing of 
 a summer rain-cloud. But she was not one of these. Her vanity 
 bore her buoyant against all perception of such changes. He 
 was her servant, her worshipiDcr, her lover, her plaything — what 
 more could he want of heaven or of earth ? 
 
 So long as she enchained his person it never occurred to her 
 that his mind, and his heart, and his soul might be elsewhere. 
 
 Now and then a thrill of savage jealousy ran through her, 
 wakened by some word of Marjory Scrope's or some sight of 
 Etoile; but it was soon lulled by a careless laugh or a con- 
 temptuous denial from loris. 
 
 She was duped where a less vain and less arrogant temper 
 would have been instantly alarmed. 
 
 Meanwhile oppression had its usual result, and produced as 
 its fruit deception. 
 
 loris was of a frank and tender nature, but he had lived much 
 amongst women, and they had made him false. 
 
 The untruthfulness of women communicates itself to the man 
 whose chief society they form, and the perpetual necessities of 
 intrigue end in corrupting the temjDer whose chief pursuit is 
 passion. 
 
 Women who environ a man's fidelity by ceaseless suspicion, 
 and exaction, create the evil that they dread. 
 
 _ loris deceived this woman at first in trifles, later on in graver 
 things, because she ruthlessly demanded from him an amount 
 of time and a surrender of will which no man will ever give 
 without becoming either openly or secretly a rebel. She had 
 made him fear her, so he betrayed her. In love, as in a kingdom, 
 the tyrant sits upon a hollow throne. 
 
 But she was one of those to whom " an immense Me was the 
 
198 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 measure of the Universe ; " and this " immense IMe " obscured a 
 sight othewise sharp as the hawk's and clear as the pigeon's. 
 
 Meantime loris once more rose to the h'ght of the day with 
 the sense that the day might bring some charm he was not sure 
 of, some interest he would not exhaust. Once more the delight 
 of the uncertain had come to him, playing fitfully about his 
 path ; and once more the sound of the lutes in the moonlight, 
 the sheen of the stars above the palms and laurels, seemed in 
 unison with his fancies, because, once more, he felt young. 
 He did not reason about it, because he was a man who never 
 reasoned when he could avoid doing so, and who always shut his 
 eyelids as long as he could to what was inconvenient or painful. 
 But he resigned himself with few struggles to the fresh influences 
 that stole on him, and never asked himself when they would 
 leave him. 
 
 His mistress had been right when she had said that there was 
 something of the Faust and something of the Eomeo in him, but 
 there was still more of the Hamlet. He would bear the ills he 
 Lad, for fear of others that he knew not of, and would question 
 himself at times — 
 
 " Am I a coward ? 
 
 It cannot be 
 
 But I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall 
 To make oppression bitter." ^ 
 
 The delicate, fanciful reasoning, the vacillation of thought 
 which produced infirmity of purpose, the wounded pride which 
 took refuge in silence, the complexity of impulses which baffled 
 at unravelling them both friend and foe, the armour of jest, the 
 inner core of sadness, had all of them the Hamlet cast. Like 
 Hamlet he could smile upon liis foe ; like Hamlet he could make 
 mock of his own dishonour ; like Hamlet, he was destined to say 
 of the deepest passion of his life, " You should not have believed 
 me; I loved you not," — and love the more all the while he 
 said it. 
 
 I 
 
FEIENDSniP. 199 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 " How ridiculous it is thcat she slioi;ld go to sucTi places ! " said 
 the Lady Joan a day or two later, -with wrath and scorn, as she 
 ate her breakfast, flinging away a local journal which recorded 
 the name of Etoile in the list of guests at a Paissian Grand 
 Duchess's party. 
 
 "_ "Why ridiculous ? " said loris between his teeth, without 
 looking up. His face grew darker as he stooped and picked up 
 the paper. 
 
 " Why ? " screamed the Lady Joan. " Wly ? It is worse 
 than ridiculous ! It is disgusting ! " 
 
 " Why ? " said loris very coldly. 
 
 The Lady Joan burst out laughing. 
 
 " Good heavens, lo ! Where have you lived ? You who 
 used to know Paris like a book ; you who pretend to know the 
 world ! " 
 
 " I do not understand," said her lover still coldly. 
 
 " Oh, don't you ! I should think you might well enough, 
 though you never can see half an inch before your nose ! Look 
 what a life she's led ! " 
 
 "Perfectly innocent? That is rare. But is it forbidden,, 
 objectionable ? " 
 
 The Lady Joan shrieked with fresh laughter. 
 
 " Innocent ? You're innocent ! Why, only listen to anybody 
 talking about her for ten minutes, and you'll hear enough to set 
 your very hair on end. You never went to 'em I suppose ; but 
 her Sunday evenings in Paris were ! — that I do know for a fact. 
 Even respectable men wouldn't go." 
 
 loris laughed a little slightingly. 
 
 " I have never met any one of my sex so very virtuous. I 
 suppose those very virtuous men belong to your country. But, 
 ma chore, since you know siacli things of her, why receive her ? " 
 
 " It was that old beast Yoightel." 
 
 " Surely it was your father ? " 
 
 " Oh, Lord, no ! She hardly knew papa. At least, yes, of 
 course, she did know him, but he only went to her now and 
 then." 
 
 "Where the respectable men would not go. Poor Lord 
 Archie ! " 
 
 The Lady Joan coloured and grew angry. 
 
 " You know very well what I mean ; poor dear papa never is 
 
200 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 as particular as be ought to be." (loris tbougbt of Lord Arcbie 
 lying smoking under the cberry-trees of Fiordelisa, and mentally 
 agreed tbat be was not.) " And she cbarms men, and all that 
 kind of thing ; improper women always do," continued the Lady 
 Joan, who was so used to putting on her ruff of decorum that . 
 she would put it on sometimes even with those who bad rufHed 
 it the most. " The life of Etoile has been infamous, altogether 
 infamous. I know so many people who know all about her, and 
 of course since we became acquainted with her, I've naturally 
 inquired more. If I bad known all I do now, of course I never 
 would have let her set her foot in my door." 
 
 " It is a very beautiful foot," said loris, who felt a great anger 
 in him tbat he dared not display, and could not altogether 
 smother ; and, either by accident or design, bis eyes glanced at 
 the foot of the Lady Joan, visible from the shortness of her skirt, 
 in the large stout boot which tramped over -bis ploughed fields 
 and in and out so many studios, and lap and down so many stairs 
 of the Bona Dea's temples. The glance and the words filled up 
 the measure of her fury — a fury she smothered as be did bis 
 anger, for these two people, whilst living in the closest intimacy, 
 almost habitually deceived one another. She flung herself round 
 to a bureau, and took out a letter and threw it to him. 
 
 " There, read tbat, since you don't believe me I " 
 
 loris read ; bis eyebrows drew together a little, but otherwise 
 bis face did not change. He read it calmly through, then gave 
 it back to her. 
 
 " Conclusive— if true." 
 
 It was a letter from a man who did ill in art what Etoile did 
 supremely well ; a man who bad hungered after her successes 
 with envious greed for many a year; a man, moreover, who bad 
 endeavoured to pay court to her and had failed. To him, know- 
 ing him well, the Lady Joan bad written a careless question or 
 two about Etoile : in answer be bad poured out — exaggerated — 
 all that calumny bad ever invented of her. Lady Joan bad 
 relied on the almost certain fact tbat when a man's or woman's 
 nature is not noble, it will be very petty indeed ; there is but 
 little middle way betwixt the two. 
 
 " Conclusive* if true," said loris carelessly, and banded her 
 the sheet. "But why should we quarrel about her? She is 
 nothing to us: and she is here to-day and will be gone to- 
 morrow." 
 
 His heart was beating with anger and impatience, and a 
 certain sickness of doubt was stealing upon him, and with it 
 also a better impulse of chivalrous championship of the wronged 
 and absent woman. But habit was stronger with him than any 
 of these feelings, and it was his habit constantly to conceal all 
 his real thoughts from his inquisitor. The screw never brings 
 forth but a galled lie. 
 
 I 
 
FlilENDSEIP. 201 
 
 "If true!" echoed the Lady Joan a Httle more satisfied, 
 locking up her letter. "There's no 'if about it. Anybody 
 "rtho knows her will tell you the same thing. It was disgraceful 
 of my father to send her to me; but Voightel can always turn 
 him round his finger, and Voightel's a beast." 
 
 loris remained silent ; he had heard Voightel rhapsodised over 
 in the Casa Challoner with the most fervent worship as the most 
 learned, most distinguished, most marvellous of men, and once, 
 when he had been expected there, thongli he had not arrived, 
 had seen the driest of wines, the choicest of pipes, the sweetest 
 of words got ready to salute his arrival. 
 
 At the instant Mr. Challoner entered. 
 
 " We were talking of Etoile, Robert," said his wufe " Aren't 
 you disgusted with that brute Voightel, persuading my father 
 to send her to me ? " 
 
 Mr. Challoner was used to catching quickly a clue. 
 
 " It was certainly ill-advised," he said in his best and most 
 wooden manner. " One cannot be too careful, and there are very 
 odd stories " 
 
 The Lady Joan felt that there were moments in which Mr. 
 Challoner was priceless. 
 
 " So I was saying to lo," she answered him. " Her life in 
 Paris was always very queer, wasn't it ? " 
 
 "And you are always over-indulgent and hasty," said Mr. 
 Challoner, with the paternal manner which now and then he 
 assumed with much effect. " Yes ; yes. Of course it would 
 have been better not to have known her, but when we go to the 
 country the acquaintance will die a natural death, and if she be 
 here another winter we need not resume it. Here is a telegram 
 from Sicily, loris." 
 
 Telegrams from Sicily were always flying in at the Casa 
 Challoner. 
 
 In gratitude to Free Italy for the agi'eeable refuge she gave 
 them, and the many teacups and triptychs she let them pick up, 
 Mr. Challoner and his wife (or rather his wife and Mr. Challoner) 
 had determined on creating for her a tubular bridge. 
 
 The bridge was to go over the Straits of Messina, by the Gulf 
 of Faro, and connect Sicily with the mainland, and do away with 
 brigandage and barbarism for ever and aye. There was very 
 little of it made as yet, except upon paper; nothing, indeed, 
 except some piles that had been driven in on the shore byScylla; 
 but the prosi^ectus had been out, and the shares all sold for four 
 years past, and a Scotch duke was the nominal head of it, and 
 a great many clerks and contractors were fussing and fuming 
 over it alike in Calabria and Cannon Street, and money was 
 turning about it in the churn of the Exchanges and Chambers 
 of Commerce. 
 
202 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " My bridge/' the Lady Joan called it, with a fine wholesale 
 approiDriation — as she said '' my farm " when talking of Fior- 
 delisa. 
 
 She thought herself a great woman of business. The age of 
 Money, of Concessions, of Caj^italists, and of Limited Liabilities, 
 has largely produced the female financier, who thinks, with M. 
 de Camors, that " rhumanite est composes des actionnaires." 
 Other centuries have had their especial type of womanhood : the 
 learned and graceful hetaira, the saintly and ascetic recluse, 
 the warrior of Oriflamme or Eed Eose, the dame de heaute, all 
 loveliness and light, like a dew-drop ; the philosophic precieiixe, 
 with sesquipedalian phrase; the revolutionist, half nude of body 
 and wholly nude of mind — each in her turn has given her sign 
 and seal to her especial century, for better or for worse. The 
 nineteenth century has some touch of all, but its own novelty of 
 production is the female speculator. 
 
 The woman who, breathless, watches la hausse and la haisse ; 
 whose favour can only be won by some hint in advance of the 
 newspapers ; whose heart is locked to all save golden keys ; who 
 starts banks, who concocts companies, who keeps a broker as in 
 the eighteenth century a woman kept a monkey, and in the 
 twelfth a knight ; whose especial art is to buy in at the right 
 moments, and to sell out in the nick of time ; who is great in 
 railways and canals, and new bathing-places, and shares in 
 fashionable streets ; who chooses her lovers thinking of conces- 
 sions, and kisses her friends for sake of the secrets they may 
 betray from their husbands ; — what other centuries may say of 
 her who can tell ? 
 
 The Hotel Eambouillet thought itself higher than heaven, 
 and the generation of Catherine of Sienna believed her deal 
 planks the sole highway to the throne of God. 
 
 But the present age is blessed with the female financier, and 
 must make the best of her, as it must of the rotten railways, the 
 bubble banks, the choked-uiD mines, the sand-filled ciinals, the 
 solitudes of brick and mortar, which it owes to her genius. 
 
 Lady Joan believed herself to be one of these modern bless- 
 ings. For those who would listen to her she had always 
 miracles to tell of firms she saved and concessions she obtained, 
 of ministers' graces won by her smile, and monarchs' signatures 
 obtained by her intercession. According to herself, there was 
 scarce a steamer that floated or banker that prospered, or 
 traction-engine that ran, or new street that was traced out, from 
 the Thames to the Nile, from the Danube to the Tigris, that did 
 not owe something to her procreative or protecting powers. She 
 described herself as a kind of ambulatory Lamp of Aladdin, and 
 if you only rubbed her xip (the right way) she would make a 
 palace spring up for you like a mushroom. How much of this- 
 
FRIENDSUIP. 203 
 
 was true, and how mucli imagination, was perhaps one of those 
 things that no man will ever know — like the real thoughts of 
 Lord Bcaconsfield, or the real use of the secret service money in 
 England, or the real discoveries of tlic Black Cabinet under 
 Persigny. It was an Eleusiniau mystery. 
 
 Profane persons were apt to consider that her ability for 
 commerce was chiefly exercised in buying pots and pans o,nd 
 chairs and tables, in old shops, in old highways and byways 
 Avherever she went, north, south, east, or west. But this was 
 ill-nature. She really had a talent for getting \\\) companies, and 
 persuading people to take shares in them, and was very fond of 
 running up the back-stairs of politics, and coming down them 
 with the pot-luck of a ministerial concession or of a royal 
 subsidy, i^icked up from the seething stew-pan of international 
 jobberies. 
 
 Her lovers devoutly believed in her as a woman of business. 
 It was not an attribute that attracted, but it was one that awed 
 them. "Damn it, madam, who falls in love with attributes ? " 
 says Berkeley. Probably no one. But the chain once fastened, 
 certain attributes may serve to rivet it, especially when they are 
 fear-compelling. 
 
 In his soul loris detested these South Sea Bubbles that his 
 mistress was so fond of blowing. It is not engaging to see the 
 Bourse quotations seized as eagerly as your love-notes could be, 
 or to have a tender silence broken by a sudden recollection that 
 Macmaw and Filljaw's telegram at once must be answered. 
 
 But, though it revolted him it served to entangle him. His 
 name was of use to her ; she taught him how to obtain conces- 
 sions, and knew herself how to work them when got; his in- 
 fluence was of use to her; his title sparkled on the Messina 
 Bridge prospectus before the Board in Cannon Street, and 
 enabled her to say in England that she had all Italy at her beck 
 and call, as in Italy she said that she had all England. She was 
 a woman of resources and of foresight ; gradually she drew all 
 his affairs into her hands, and made him drift at her will hither 
 and thither ; she got him into the habit of being guided by her, 
 and habit has much weight on a southern temper ; she thrust 
 through her amorous butterfly the honey-laden pin of commerce, 
 and fastened down the wings that, without it, would have borne 
 him to fresher flowers. 
 
 Besides, Finance served her well in other ways than this ; if 
 Paris and Menelaiis had gone together to build a bridge or dig a 
 canal, they could never afterwards, for very ridicule's sake, have 
 called up Greece to arms. 
 
 " They've gone to Calabria together to see about my bridge ! " 
 she would .say to Mrs. Grundy at five o'clock tea. " Such a 
 bore, isn't it? I'm quite dull without them. But it will be a 
 
■204 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 grand thing for Italy ■s\hen it is done ; so one must not mind 
 trouble." 
 
 " They " was her pet pronoun, her horse of battle, her choice 
 piece of prudence, and Mrs. Grundy would go away and say to 
 Mrs. Candour, " He's only with her so much because they're 
 making a tubular bridge by the Gulf of Faro. The Duke of 
 Oban is president of it ; a great deal of English money is put 
 into it. Fine idea, very. Her idea originally, I believe. Oh ! 
 what a cruel backbiting world we live in, my dear ! " 
 
 Meanwhile, until "they" came back from Calabria, Lady 
 Joan petted good-looking Douglas Grpeme, or handsome Eccel- 
 lino da Sestri, or Guido Serravalle with his guitar, or anybody 
 «lse that came handy, and had cosy little dinners with plump 
 Mimo in the corner, and tuneful Guido to sing to her, and 
 enjoyed herself exceedingly, and wrote to loris word^very day 
 that she was wretched. 
 
 This winter morning, however, the telegram brought no call 
 to Calabria, and she had planned to spend it at Fiordelisa. Mr. 
 Challoner — the telegram disposed of — proceeded to tell her that 
 it was ten o'clock, and the ponies were standing at the door. 
 
 The morning was still very cold ; snow was still upon all the 
 hills, a fierce wind was blowing boisterously down the face of the 
 river ; it was not attractive weather for the country. loris 
 sighed uneasily as he took up all her shawls, and went down- 
 stairs, to be driven by her across the Campagna in the teeth of 
 the Alpine blasts. 
 
 Mr. Challoner stood in the window upstairs, and watched 
 their departure with the nearest approach to a smile that ever 
 appeared upon his countenance. Then he went into his own 
 little sanctum, stirred up his fire, sat down in his most comfort- 
 able chair, and began to read his French and English papers. 
 He felt that this morning at least he had the better part. 
 
 " He's a very useful fellow to me," Mr. Challoner had said in 
 an unguarded moment once, over some sherry, to old Lord 
 •George Stair, who had mumbled a vagiie assent, and had 
 thought, amongst other wicked things he had read in his far- 
 away youth, of Diderot's song of Six Sous that Grimm quotes in 
 his Memoirs. 
 
 Meantime, while Mr. Challoner enjoyed his Pall Mull Gazette 
 and his Fif/aro before an oak fire, with a pijie of fragrant tobacco 
 to make him yet more comfortable, the ponies sped on, under 
 the lash of his wife's whip, through the chilly and windy 
 morning. 
 
 "Are you'grown dumb, lo?" she said, sharply, as they flew 
 over the frosted turf. 
 
 loris drew his furs closer across his mouth. 
 
 "It is not agreeable to swallow ice," he said coldly, but the 
 
FEIENDSHIP. 205 
 
 ice that hurt him was tho ice at his heart, not the ice in 
 the air. 
 
 " It is only jealousy made her say those things ! " he was 
 thinking to himself, and his fealty went out to Etoile, with the 
 eager revolt and the caressing devotion that slander of an absent 
 thing he cares for will rouse in any man who has a man's heart 
 beating within him. 
 
 And he cared for her greatly already, though he was half 
 unwilling and half afraid to face the truth of it and all its perils, 
 and hid it from himself under the shelter of a thousand plausible 
 synonyms and reasons. 
 
 The Lady Joan, who heeded cold weather no more than she 
 heeded the cold shoulder of a desirable acquaintance, cut his 
 ponies over the ears and rattled onward ; with her pistol-case 
 under her feet in case she should be in a mood to shoot cats or 
 robins, on both of which she waged fiery war. 
 
 The cats might kill a chicken, and the robins steal a cherry. 
 
 loris often i:)leaded for both, but in vain. 
 
 The grand old house looked bleak and dreary in the cloudy 
 angry day, with the mountain winds rushing through the 
 leafless aisles of its vineyards. Imperator howled in his kennel, 
 and the heart of his master ached. The Lady Joan sprang down 
 at the courtyard gate, and kilted her skirts high, and wrapped 
 her waterproof about her, and calling out for Gian, for Vico, for 
 Eeppo, for Cecco, whilst those frightened servitors came tum- 
 bling out from stable, wine-cellar, tool-house, and barn, strode 
 away, to the delight of her soul, scolding, weighing, scrutinis- 
 ing, ordering, railing, altering, chaffering, bullying, raising 
 heaven and earth because a measure was short, and unpacking 
 a waggon-load of cabbages to make sure that their number was 
 right. She had a hundred thousand things to do before she 
 could enjoy herself, and shoot her cats and robins. 
 
 loris, free for the moment, lighted a cigar, and strolled away 
 by himself over his lonely fields, green with the tender young 
 corn and red with bearberry and briony. He heard her voice in 
 loud discussion with his bailiff as to which Eoman bull was to 
 be mated with the new brindled cow from Alderney, and 
 shuddered a little in disgust as he heard. " Her Breviary is the 
 stock-book ; " he thought, and went on his lonely walk under 
 the edge of the woods. 
 
 He thought of Etoile by her hearth. 
 
 "Would she miss him this morning ? 
 
 With loris gentle impulses were natural. His character had 
 in it that honey of softness which the flies will eat — and tigers 
 and bears as well as flies. Old people lived on him with no 
 other claim than their utter uselessness; hangers-on devoured 
 his substance because he had not resolution enough to cut them 
 
206 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 adrift ; a pocr old homeless soul slipt and broke her limb as he 
 Avas passing, and he took her into his own house and kept her 
 there year upon year ; an. uuwiHingness to see pain, and an 
 aversion to wound, Avere strong in him ; Lady Joan fouud it out 
 and despised it, and laughed at it, and profited by it all at once. 
 " lo's such a fool," she would say — and think him such a fool — 
 and yet all the while love the folly in him from its own utter 
 unlikeness to herself. 
 
 It had grown to be with him as of old it was with the Capet 
 kings and the Maires du Palais. The natural indolence and 
 infirmity of purpose which often cripples many fine and delicate 
 minds, found relief in her strong opinions and her decisive 
 action. It became so much easier to answer, " Ask the signora," 
 than to decide for himself between disputing servants or to 
 refuse for himself a supplicant's petition. Things had to be 
 done that he was not hard enough or rough enough to do him- 
 self; it became so much simpler to say, " Go to "the signora," 
 than incur an hours contention, or send away an old "farmer 
 with tears in his eyes. She liked all this kind of authority and 
 tyranny; and he detested it. So the habit of reliance on her 
 grew; and being first sown by the generosity of his nature, 
 became fast rooted in his nature's weakness. 
 
 There was not a question but that things went on in much 
 more orderly mode since she had hung up her cachemire at 
 Fiordelisa. 
 
 The old happy, careless, wasteful ways were ended, just as 
 the old wooden ploughs that might have served Cincinnatus 
 were replaced by new steel ones from Sheffield. True, the 
 people we-re sullen and discontented; true, there was not a 
 shepherd that did not scowl where he had been used to smile, 
 as he leaned on his staff on the thyme-covered hills and watched 
 his padrone go by. 
 
 " But look at the figures at Torlonia's," she would say if he 
 remonstrated. 
 
 And how could he remind her that the figures at Torlonia's 
 were not at the head of his own balance-sheet ? 
 
 There are things that a man cannot say. 
 
 She had twisted the steward's whip and pen out of his hands 
 with a jerk, had sent the drones and parasites flying, had 
 brought the devil incarnate, the people thought, in screaming 
 farm-engines; had cut down all the estimates and all the wages, 
 had nipped off the beggars's crusts to crumble whole loaves 
 away on her own hobbies, and had let her fancy run riot in 
 building and cattle-breeding, if she could be said to have any- 
 thing about her so aerial and foolish as a fancy. 
 
 All this was noisy, unpleasant, interminable work, though 
 she thought it a paradise, and pooh-poohed any demurrer or 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 2ffJ 
 
 I'emonstraiice on the part of the niastcr of Fiordelisa with the 
 sublime disdain she always sliowcd for other people's feelings. 
 
 In the years that had elapsed since the family had gone 
 there Avith the flower-seeds, and the kitchen boiler, and been first 
 visited there by Lady George Scrope-Stair with her sanctifying 
 knitting-needles, the quiet noble old place had known few 
 moments of peace. Hammers had almost always been going ; 
 w^orkmen working ; smiths soldering ; delvers digging; in a con- 
 fusion of sounds that made loris's head ache, and made yawning 
 gaps in his capital for endless wages. There is nothing in the 
 world so amusing as to make improvements when other people 
 will pay for them ; vestries, landscape-gardeners, architects and 
 city jiediles, all know this ; and Lady Joan was not a whit behind 
 vestries and a^diles in her appreciation of it. 
 
 loris looked wistful when a brave row of evergreen oaks fell, 
 to give place to a row of bran new granaries, raised on new 
 principles; or a rose-garden perished to make an acre of 
 asparagus and pine-apple beds ; he looked grave when he saw 
 the sum total that the new granaries and the asparagus and 
 pine-apple beds cost : did not the old barns and threshing-floors, 
 the old vegetables and orchards, do just as well ? 
 
 " You'll find the profit of it all by-and-by," said the Lady Joan 
 to him : as the vestries and ?ediles say so to the public. But he 
 failed ever to see the profit ; he could only see Black Care as the 
 bills came in, and the labourers crowded round his steward to 
 be paid, week after week, month after month. 
 
 No doubt Lady Joan was a great administrator, but great 
 administrators are expensive luxuries to the states which 
 support them. 
 
 loris had never been rich, and with the new granaries and 
 asparagus-beds, and all the other improvements, he felt himself 
 growing poorer every hour. 
 
 He was very tired of it. He was stung by the muttered 
 words and dark glances of his peasantry. He liked to be well 
 with all people, and the discontent of his contadini oppressed 
 him. In other years, when he had made brief visits in the 
 vintage time, the people had worshipped him and met him with 
 music and laughter and song, and their tributes of fruits and of 
 flowers ; now they passed him siallcnly, or if they Btoj^ped him, 
 stopped but to complain. He was pained by them and for them 
 — but he did nothing. Personal kindness he would show them 
 whenever he could. But he did not lift his hand to stay hers 
 that fell so heavily on them. 
 
 He loved them as he loved the hound Imperator. But he 
 feared her more. 
 
 Often he would go out in the fields and roam by himself, for 
 very weariness, and then on the beautiful wild hillside, scarlet 
 
208 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 with poppies, and fragrant with the wild cistus bushes, he would 
 meet some old mau or some young child, who would stop him 
 and hold their hand out, and mutter of the tyrannies of the 
 " imdrona " up at the house, and he would give them money that 
 he could ill afford, and go back impatient and sorrowful, and,, 
 as he passed through the house, hear the notes of the mandoline 
 twanging, and the tinkle of the coffee-cups upon the terrace, 
 and the laughter of Lady Joan and of Burletta, and would avoid 
 it all with a vague distaste, and go w]} to his own room and lock 
 himself in there and glance at his mother's portrait, and know 
 that he had sinned and met his retribution. 
 
 In these old noble places life should be "set to music; " Love, 
 in its highest passion and its fairest forms ; Art as the gift of 
 God to mau ; day dreams, in which the hours unfold, beautiful 
 and uncounted, like the leaves of the oleander flowers ; nights, 
 when " the plighted hands are softly locked in sweet unsevered 
 sleep;" gay laughter here and there, glad charity with all 
 things ; meditation now and then to deejien the wellsprings of 
 the mind^ the open air always ; limbs bathed in the warmth as 
 in a summer sea ; opal skies of evening watched with fancies of 
 the poets ; and everywhere perpetual sense of a delicious rest, 
 and of desire and of hope crowned to fruition ; this was the life 
 for Fiordelisa. 
 
 And he knew it. 
 
 And he instead abode in this : fierce wrangle, lowest aims ; 
 shrewd watchfulness for gain, perpetual chatter of art as 
 means of loss and profit; hard tyranny and sated possession 
 that dress themselves as passion, and made dupes one of each 
 other ; and all through the long and radiant hours of the day 
 one voice for ever ringing in glee or wrath because a bird was 
 shot, or theft of grain iinpunished, or grapes by the high road 
 poached, or old coins dug up under the garden-mould that 
 could be sold again, or old pottery found in some poor peasant's 
 hut, bought for a loaf of bread, and good in the winter for the 
 guineas of a millionaire. 
 
 And he endured the one life and he dreamed of the other ; 
 and knew what the years might be, yet bore with them as they 
 were from habit and from fear and from inertia, and meanwhile 
 the Lady Joan reigned as she chose in Fiordelisa, and cut the 
 trees, and weighed the jDroduce, and vulgarised the rooms, and 
 harried the peasantry, and meddled with the wine-presses, and 
 rooted herself into the soil, so that never should any step save 
 hers be heard there, and never any offspring of his old race bloom 
 there ; and heeded not the desolation that she worked for him ; 
 heeded it no more than she did the curse of the peasant hunger- 
 ing in his hut, or the pangs of the song-bird dying in the 
 summer. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 209 
 
 What did his sighs or his people's matter to her ? 
 
 So long as slie kept Fiordelisa and drove Pippo and Grillo 
 about, and trafficked in pictures and laces and furniture, and 
 exhibited her lover in all places and possibilities to everybody 
 as her prey and property and appendage, what did it matter to 
 her whether the heart of the man was weary, or his nerves 
 jaded, or his passion worn out — what did it matter to her that 
 all liberty and peace and gladness had withered for him under 
 her touch ? What did it matter to her that he shut his eyes 
 with a shudder from facing the blank that was all his here- 
 after? 
 
 Women who love to folly may watch with terror a weary 
 glance, may torture their own hearts in endless doubt whether 
 they be not unworthy of the heart that beats upon theirs, may 
 be ready to cast themselves adrift on a sea of misery rather than 
 drag as a weight for a day on the life that is dearer than their 
 own soul to them. But the Lady Joan was no such fool. 
 
 She had got him and she held him fast, as a fisherman a 
 prize from the sea. He might writhe, might sigh, might 
 struggle, might sicken, might be weary at times unto death — ■ 
 what did she care for that ? She saw a glimpse of it sometimes, 
 and it smote her vanity to the quick, though she never compre- 
 hended its full import; but it never entered her thoughts to 
 release him or oflFer him release. She only pulled the curb 
 tighter, and revenged herself by sharper observation and by 
 harder tyranny. 
 
 So long as she had what she wanted, and incurred no mortifi- 
 cation in the sight of others, she was not likely to set him free 
 for any consideration so slight and unimportant to her as his 
 own wishes. Weak women thought about those things, but 
 Lady Joan was strong. 
 
 This day seemed to him more long and tedious than any he 
 had ever passed. 
 
 When they sat down to' luncheon in the chilly tapestried room 
 which wanted summer and the roses of summer to brighten it, 
 she entertained him with a bead-roll of her victories and her 
 captives, of a stable-boy's theft ijunished, a kite killed and nailed 
 to the door, a hundred thrushes trapped for market, a fox's 
 earth found and stopped that the fox might die of suffocation in 
 its hole, a false bottom to a sieve detected as the grain was 
 measured, an error found in the manure receipts, a stray dog 
 shot, a cat hanged by the neck, a litter of pigs born. He 
 listened wearily ; he was tired of it ail, because he was tired of 
 her. 
 
 As yet he scarcely realised that this — the quart d'heure de 
 Rahelais, to which all passion that is merely passion comes soon 
 or late — had struck for him. He was silent and inattentive 
 
210 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 througliout the midday meal ; and, •when at length the Lady 
 Joan, furious at his indifference, uprose from his table and threw 
 some silver off it, and told him that he deseryed to be ruined 
 and die in the hospital, and that she was a fool to fag out her 
 life for him as she did, he could only sit silent still, being i;nable 
 to reiDly according to his honest thoughts, and only hoped that 
 she would not go into hysterics. Lady Joan could have hysterics 
 when all other weapons failed, as well as the merest Eosa- 
 Matilda that ever breathed. 
 
 This time, however, she did not go into them, because she 
 had a great many last instructions to give to the huttero about 
 that Alderney cow, and also remembered that she was to dine at 
 seven o'clock with her cousins Lord and Lady Fingal at the lies 
 Britanniques. For checking hysterics there is no receipt so 
 good as to remember a dinner-party. 
 
 It was twilight in the freezing winter's day when she deigned 
 at length to depart, with some pine-apples out of the hotbeds for 
 her friends, and give her last order, and leave the grand old 
 house to the night and the cold, and drive back across the plain 
 with two mounted shei^herds behind them, well armed, in case 
 of any thieves that might spring from behind a ruined tomb or 
 cluster of acacias. 
 
 They reached home in safety, where Mr. Challoner, having 
 passed a tranqnil afternoon in the club and at the Messina 
 Bridge offices, where he was held an oracle, was waiting, ready 
 dressed for the Fingal dinner, with lighted lamps and an even- 
 ing newspaper, serene and solemn in his solitude as a Eed Indian 
 chief at a " big smoke." 
 
 loris, who was not invited to the Fingal party, excused him- 
 self from remaining to see them off on the plea of a chill he had 
 felt and much correspondence to answer, and hurried to the 
 honse of Etoile ere it should be the hour for his attendance at 
 the Quirinal. 
 
 " I cannot sleep without seeing her," he said to himseif. 
 
 " What on earth's come to lo, I wonder," said the Lady Joan 
 very crossly. " He's always ill now — or stupid." 
 
 Mr. Challoner lifted his eyes from his Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 " In love," he said, curtly, with immovable visage, and re- 
 placed his eyeglass, which had dropped. He and his wife 
 always kept up a polite fiction between themselves, even in 
 private ; loris was their common friend. 
 
 Lady Joan darted from her brilliant eyes such a look of 
 flame as a tigress might give whoso hard-earned prey was 
 snatched from her jaws. 
 
 "Pshaw!" she said, savagely, "what an idiot you are, 
 Eobert, always 1 " 
 
 Mr. Challoner perused the Pall Mall Gazette unmoved: 
 revenge was sweet, but peace was sweeter. 
 
FRIENDSniP. 211 
 
 Fortunately, to preserve his peace in the ab.sence of the 
 supreme guardian of it, there entered handsome Douglas 
 Grreme, her cousin,' who came to escort his cousin to their other 
 cousins, the Fingals ; and Lady Joan rushed to get herself into 
 Genoa velvet, Irish point, and English propriety. 
 
 Meanwhile loris went and found Etoile in her chamber alone 
 by the warmth of the hearth, and the spacious, quiet room, 
 with its smell of hot-house heliotropes, and the odorous many- 
 flowered narcissus — which in Italy we call tuzzette, and iu 
 France Jeannettes, and in England have no popular name for, 
 because we have not the plant — looked very familiar and inviting 
 to him as he entered it, himself jaded, cold, and weary. 
 
 "I can stay but a few moments, I fear, but I thought I might 
 venture to ask if you were well," he &aid, softly bending to her 
 with that look iu his eyes by which a man tells the woman he 
 looks on that she is a dearer sight to him than any other the 
 Avorld holds. 
 
 " You are not well yourself, you seem tired ? " Her voice 
 trembled a little as she spoke to him, and her eyes fell before his. 
 
 " I am tired," he said, with a sigh. 
 
 The long, tasteless, dreary day imrolled before his memory as 
 he spoke, begun in the chilly morning with altercation and strife, 
 worn away in common cares and calculations of price and profit, 
 ended with rough dispute or with coarse mirth as the sun began 
 to grow low behind his leafless vineyards. They were all alike, 
 tliese weary days, when it pleased his despot to call him forth 
 in the cold mist that rose from the river, and make him go out 
 to the old grey castle on the hill to levy tribute from his farms, 
 and number his winter fruits, and harry the hearts of his 
 people, iu the pastime that she called looking after Fiordelisa. 
 
 Once, when this passion had been yoi;ng in him, he had 
 risen joyfully enough to skim the grey Campagna with her ere 
 the day was fully up, and pass the hours in enamoured willing- 
 ness in the solitudes of his deserted halls. But now ! — he rose 
 to these days with a yawn, he felt their dull length drag on and 
 on with a sigh ; they left him at their close worn out and dis- 
 dainful of himself. 
 
 " I am tired," he said, now, standing by the fire, and letting 
 his eyes rest themselves in dreamy contemplation on Etoile. 
 
 She gave him a yellow rose from a cluster that she had been 
 placing in water as he had entered ; there was tea standing near 
 her on a little Japanese stand ; she poured him out a cup, and 
 brought it to him by the hearth; he followed all her movements 
 with a sense of content and peace. 
 
 As she tendered him the little cup, his fingers caressed hers, 
 and as he drew the cup away, his lips lingered on her wrist. 
 
 She coloured and left him. 
 
212 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Where have you come from now ? " she asked him as she 
 went to the roses. 
 
 The words stung him as a snake stings. 
 
 " I have come from Fiordelisa." 
 
 " Alone ? " 
 
 " No ! Have I ever the luxury to be alone ? " 
 
 Her heart beat quicker with an anger that slie did not seek 
 to analyse. 
 
 " Why complain of what is your choice ? " 
 
 " Was it ever iny choice ? " he muttered, thinking of those 
 earliest hours when a black-browed stranger had set her will to 
 bring him to her feet. 
 
 "Surely it must have been when you gave Tiordelisa." 
 
 " I never gave Fiordelisa. I thought at most of one summer 
 —of two " 
 
 " Then how is it ? " 
 
 "How? Can I bid her go ? I?" 
 
 Etoile rose and walked to and fro a moment impatiently, 
 pusliing her hair out of her eyes. 
 
 "It is useless for me to pretend to misunderstand. Your 
 position is not one a woman can talk of — without shame. But it 
 were absurd to deny that I see it in its true light, and that I 
 am very sorry for you ; very, very sorry ! And yet how can you 
 live on in it? The triangle of Dumas! — how unreal, how 
 deceitful, how contemptible, how absolutely immoral in the 
 deepest sense of immorality's degradation, is this sin that you 
 and she, and the world with you, call Friendship. Sin ! — the 
 naked sins of the old days were innocence and decency beside it. 
 One can excuse sin that is honest, one can comprehend the fatal 
 force of a blind passion, one can see how even an unholy love 
 may be redeemed by sacrifice and courage. But this ! — it is 
 only one long lie palmed off upon the world, and as cowardly as 
 every lie must ever be ! " 
 
 " The world is not deluded by the lie, believe'me," said loris 
 with his delicate contempt. 
 
 " If you had loved this woman," she pursued disregarding, 
 " if you had loved her really with any kind of great love, how- 
 ever guilty before the laws of man, could you have ever borne to 
 live like this, to take the husband's hand, to caress the child, to 
 act the social farce — if you had really loved her with any truth 
 of love, such share of her with her duties and her friends would 
 have been impossible to you, such adoption of her hearth and 
 home would have been loathsome ! " 
 
 " There is love and love," said loris. " You think of a kind 
 of love that is seldom felt, that women like her cannot kindle. 
 You do not understand " 
 
 " No ! I do not understand. I understand passion, though 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 213 
 
 I have not felt it— if you had struck tlie husband down upon 
 the hearth, and borne the wife away from all the world — that I 
 could have understood." 
 
 loris laughed a dreary scornful laugh. 
 
 " I know not which soonest would have repented such a 
 tragedy — she or he or I. There are women for whom tlie world 
 may well be lost. Seriously, can you think her one of tlicm ? " 
 
 " You must have thought her one of them once, at the least, 
 or else " 
 
 " Good heavens! how little you realise, how little you com- 
 prehend " 
 
 His thoughts drifted back to the early time when a new 
 comer with basilisk eyes had cast her toils about him. The 
 love born and matured behind black masks, in the fumes of 
 cigarette smoke, in the riot of cotillons, in the daybreak hours 
 after a ball, was not the love of which his companion spoke. 
 The world well lost for love ! — he laughed out of the very weari- 
 ness and heart-sickness of his soul, fhinking of his mistress in 
 loup and domino — in ruff and starch — screaming in the dingy 
 crowd of the opera ball — lunching off lamb and lettuce with a 
 dean ! 
 
 " Perhaps I do not comprehend. I am glad then I do not ! " . 
 said Etoile, with more impatience than she knew. " If you slew 
 the husband — or he you — I am barbarian enough to feel that 
 that might come within my sympathies. It would at least be 
 frank ! " 
 
 loris laughed lightly and bitterly. 
 '■' "Poor man! he is terribly tiresome and fres bourgeois. But 
 why should I kill him for that? As to his killing me, I am his 
 best friend, his souffre-douleur, his whipping-boy. Whatever 
 other qualities he may lack, he is not ungrateful — to me ! " 
 
 Etoile unconsciously pulled asunder a rose she held, and 
 shred its petals on the floor. 
 
 " I said I was sorry for you. I retract it. Since yoii can 
 jest so about your fate, you are worthy of it." 
 
 " Jest !— I ? " 
 
 He stooped and took her hands, and kissed them with a 
 half-timid and half-passionate tenderness. 
 
 "If I jest, it is to hide that I suffer. Be sorry for me, 
 Heaven knows I need it ! 
 
 And he kissed her hands again, and went to the Court, where 
 he was in waiting that night. 
 
 Etoile stood by her hearth with the fallen rose leaves -it her feet. 
 
 She felt as if some share of their falsehood and of their shame 
 had fallen on her. 
 
 And yet a sweet and subtle joy which she felt afraid of stole 
 upon her too. 
 
214 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXI. 
 
 Meantime the Lady Joan went and dined with her cousins the 
 -FingalSj and retm'ned thence, much out of temper, to her o^Yn 
 iouse. The dinner at the Fingals had tried her patience sorely ; 
 it had been severe, di-eary, dull ; she had sat between an 
 archaeologist and a travelling Oxford Professor ; neither had felt 
 her fascinations, one had corrected her on a point of art ; it was 
 an utterly " blank day," both for business and amusement. She 
 felt as ill-used as any M. F. H. who had been out from noon 
 to night in rain and fog, and has never once " found." Lady 
 Joan hated waste of time, or waste of anything, even of lamp- 
 cottons ; and she scolded her servants for having so many lamps 
 burning when she went home. 
 
 By the light of one of them she read some telegrams and 
 letters ; they did not improve her temper. They told her that 
 the shares of the Bridge over the Messina Straits, to which the 
 Italian ministers had refused the subsidy were a drug on the 
 market, and that a fine Parmeggianino she had sent to London 
 for sale had been examined by rude experts, and declared good 
 for nothing but the big piece of cypress-wood on which it was 
 painted. 
 
 "Fools! dolts! idiots!" said Lady Joan, sweeping all the 
 European exchanges and all European connoisseurs into the 
 mighty circle of her scorn. ^:he had promoted the Bridge, she 
 had purchased the Parmeggianino ; was that not enough for 
 the world '? 
 
 " They'll say my pigs are not Berkshires next ! " she said in 
 her wrath. 
 
 " No, no, no," murmured Burletta, who had come in for a 
 midnight cigar. " No, no, no ! — the pigs are transcendant pigs ; 
 of the plumpness and the roundness and the pinkness of babies 
 are those pigs, and their bacon will be as a foretaste of paradise ; 
 but as for pictures, and especially the Parmeggianino, you will 
 do me the justice to admit, cara mia " 
 
 "That you're a transcendant ass!" said the Lady Joan, 
 furiously. 
 
 The very dear old Mimo hfted his shoulders to his ears and 
 his eyebrows to the ceiling, and solemnly lighted an enormous 
 cheroot. 
 
 " I always said the Parmeggianino would not go down in the 
 ■City of London ; I always said that it would not go down," he 
 
FBIENDSIIIR 215 
 
 reiterated, for he adored liis goddess, but he adored still moro 
 proving himself in the right, and he Iiad always averred that tlio 
 Parnicggiauino was too crude, was too brown, was too big, was 
 too glazed, was too strong meat, in point of fact, even for Shoddy's 
 acres of plaster walls. 
 
 " You thankless brute '."cried his Minerva, flinging all her 
 letters away in a crumpled ball. " Is that all your gratitude for 
 my getting your Tabernacle sold to the Fingals ? " 
 
 The very dear old Mimo reposed his fat person comfortably 
 amongst the sofa cushions. 
 
 " My Tabernacle is a beautiful Tabernacle," he said, tranquilly. 
 "Pure Quattro Cento; pure Quattro Cento; that I will swear — 
 not a detail of it that is not Quattro Gentisto ; I chose every detail 
 myself; and the wood is old — old — old — that too I will swear, 
 and I ought to know, for the wood was a tlour-hutch of my 
 mother's when I was a baby, per Bacco ! What more would 
 Milordo Fingal have?" 
 
 "■ You are an ass, Mimo ! " said Lady Joan again, but she 
 laughed a little whilst she frowned. 
 
 " Che-che — no ! That I am not," said Burletta stoutly. " In 
 my w\ay I am very wise. I know what the City of London and 
 its very clever people will accept and what it will not accept, 
 though I have never been there. It will be on its knees before 
 my Tabernacle, if Milordo Fingal will show it in their Fine Arts 
 Court ; all their South Kensington will adore my mother's flour- 
 hutch. But I did always say, you will allow, that the Parmeg- 
 gianino " 
 
 Lady Joan gave him a sounding box on the ear. Undisturbed, 
 Burletta picked up his cigar, which had been shaken out of his 
 mouth by the shock, and kissed the Lady Joan's cruel fingers. 
 
 "Keep to the pigs, mia carissima, and let me choose the 
 pictures," he said, with paternal tenderness. And together 
 they smoked the calumet of peace. 
 
 In the recesses of his own soul Burletta began to have his 
 doubts about Palmerstone ; began to think that Palmerstone 
 might after all not be very much more genuine than the over- 
 big Parmeggianino. He began to think that Minerva, like Jove, 
 sometimes nodded, and that the Messina Bridge, and other 
 wonderful benefits to mankind, were not very much more trust- 
 worthy than his own rickety Eenaissance chairs, and not one 
 half as solid as that venerable flour-hutch, which his zeal for 
 the antique had transformed into a tabernacle. But his mis- 
 givings he shut into his own loyal soul ; and trotted about none 
 the less valiantly, holding, up his plump hands, and crying — 
 
 " What a woman — ah, what a woman ! Such influence, such 
 power, such wisdom ! And yet, look how she stoops to trifles — 
 
 those hams, those wines, those capons " And then would 
 
 be unable to proceed further from sheer ecstasy. 
 
216 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 For to the very dear old Mimo who had slender fare at home, 
 and indeed had been used to satisfy nature off a roll and a sausage 
 at a small osteria, the breakfasts and dinners of the Casa Challoner 
 and Fiordelisa were as banquets of the gods ; and it would have 
 been hard indeed if, in return for them, he would not have held 
 up his hands and cried aloud — 
 
 " Such a woman — ah, such a woman ! The world has not her 
 equal. There is nothing that she does not know, and nothing 
 that she cannot do — nothing, nothing, nothing ! " 
 
 And a good many people believed him, as they believed in 
 his cracked bits of Limoges and his flour-hutch that was pro- 
 moted to a tabernacle. There is nothing that you may not get 
 people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud enough and 
 often enough, till the welkin rings with it. A claque is an insti- 
 tution not confined to theatres, and naturally for a well-born 
 lady who would take Lord and Lady Fingal to see his yellow 
 ivories and his old Cremona fiddles, and could get him sublime 
 orders from the mighty Hebrides for all sorts of things, from 
 church doors as big as Alps to enamels no bigger than youi- 
 thumb, the good and grateful Mimo felt that he could never clap 
 his hands loud enough before the stage of the world. 
 
 If she made mistakes — otif I — she was a woman, or, at least, 
 Mimo would say, with a sudden misgiving that this admission 
 was derogatory to her — she was a goddess. But he,''who meta- 
 phorically was the owl at the feet of this Minerva, could be familiar 
 with her, as the owl may have jovially flapped its wings in merry 
 moments over the disbarred Casque and the unbuckled .ffigis, 
 and in such confidential familiarity would venture to say to 
 her — 
 
 " Keep to the pigs, mia carissima, and let me choose the 
 pictures." 
 
FlilENDSUIP. 217 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 Lady Joan, who, when she was not blinded by the mnfflers of 
 her vanity and inordinate belief in herself, was very sharjosighted, 
 saw that Society, when it has strained itself to swallow a good 
 deal that is as much against its laws as wine against the Koran's, 
 will, by the natural law of expansion and recoil, require to be 
 equally severe in refusing to swallow something else if only in 
 justification of its principles. Because Society always adheres 
 to its principles ; just as a Moslem subscribes none the less to 
 the Koran because he may just have been blowing the froth oflf 
 his bumper of Mumm's before he goes to his mosque. 
 
 The Duchess of Bridgewater was the highest and mightiest 
 of gentlewomen, and her mere nod was honour, and if Lord 
 Dauntless paid her bills, nobody could know it but his bankers, 
 and all the great world stayed with her at her Castle of Indolence, 
 in the heart of a county that crawled on its koees to her beck 
 and her call. The Princess Gregarine was the mirror of fashion, 
 and the privileged vixen of courts ; if common soldiers in their 
 guard-rooms toasted her as a common wanton as they drank 
 their rum, a polite society knows nothing of what common 
 soldiers say in their horrid guard-rooms. Lady Eyebright 
 cheated at cards, and had her ears boxed, but she was always 
 Lady Eyebright, because she never ran off with any one of her 
 lovers, and had a host of great relatives making everything 
 smooth as fast as she rufBed it. Mrs. Henry V. Clams k?pt 
 open house all the year long, a pleasant hotel, where no bill was 
 brought; with fresh pleasure for every shining hour, ard no 
 demands made on either brains or decency; a little ten, pie of 
 Fortune with Pactolus flowing through it, so that any who 
 pleased could dip his glass and drink and come again. And 
 Lady Joan — Lady Joan was a precious precedent set en high 
 like a lamp to lighten the darkness of all those ill-matchtd wives 
 who fain would be consoled, yet fain would be both pitied and 
 respected, as martyrs to a crooked circumstance. Society would 
 not quarrel with any of these, nor any of the thousands of whom 
 they were the types. 
 
 Quarrel, indeed ! Nothing was further from its dreams. 
 There was that " Salve ! " on the thresholds of these ladies' 
 houses, and their lilce, that Society entering therein, and finding 
 Vice seated by the hearth, would, on coming out, declare Vice 
 quite a changed creatiire ; nay, not Vice at all, but fair Friend- 
 
218 FRIENDSEIP. 
 
 ship, gentle Generosity, mere Mirth, sweet gaiele du coeur, or 
 what you will, something so innocent that saints might call her 
 sister. 
 
 But nature has an inevitable law of expansion and recoil : a 
 society so elastic is of necessity equally tightly drawn at times. 
 
 It will adore the Duchess of Bridgewater and Princess 
 Gregarine; it will apologise for Mrs. Henry V. Clams and 
 Fiordelisa, and say with virtuous mien that it hates uncharitable 
 judgment. 
 
 But, still after doing so much, it must for principle's sake 
 condemn somebody, as the Turk, after his dry champagne, will 
 order the stick to a Christian. 
 
 It always must have some criminal to garotte with the iron 
 collar of its conscientious censure. 
 
 It had taken Dorotea Coronis. 
 
 Lady Joan saw no reason why it should not take Etoile too. 
 
 " Nothing against her ? " she muttered, thinking over what 
 she had heard. " How sick one gets of their saying so ! Nothing 
 against her ? There must be heaps, if one could only find it out ! 
 And if there isn't " 
 
 The Lady Joan knew herself a woman of rare invention and 
 resources ; she could prove her cheap bargains to be priceless 
 treasures, and fill princes' cabinets with her cupboard sweepings, 
 she could make Staffordshire Saxe, and Eaffaelles to order, call 
 Titians from the nether world, and summon all antiquity : it 
 would be odd indeed, she thought, if she could not do such a 
 little thing as smirch a character and blast a life. 
 
 " You make buttons out of Dante's skull ! " cries Giusti in 
 reproach to the world ; Lady Joan saw no reason why she should 
 not sharpen poison-arrows from her enemy's brain ; for into an 
 enemy her irritable, suspicious and self-conscious temper had 
 already in her own thoughts raised Etoile. 
 
 " I don't know anything about her," she would say with fine 
 frankness to her society. " My father knows her a little — yes— 
 but then he's so good to all the world, and he always tries to 
 believe the best of everybody. Of course she has wonderful 
 talent, but she must have had a very strange life — all alone, and 
 amongst men so much, and hating women; where could sho 
 learn all she has done too, and get all that passion of the verses, 
 and the other things? One wonders — that couldn't a?^ be got 
 out of a breviary. Oh, I dare say what she says is true ; it may 
 be, no doubt it is. Still, there must be a good deal more sho 
 doesn't say — there must be. Oh, it matters so little to me, you 
 know. If I can be of use to her, I don't mind what people like 
 to chatter about me. My friends know me and won't misjudge 
 me. As for the world, you know / never care a fig for it ! " 
 
 This fiction, delivered as she could deliver her fictions, with 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 219 
 
 a steadfast plance and an honest blunlness of tone, that carried 
 conviction to her most sceptical listeners, was a seed which, 
 falling on congenial soil, was certain to take root and bear its 
 fitting fruit and flower. 
 
 She never said anj'thing direct; oh, never anything direct in 
 the least. On the contrary, she told every one that she Avas 
 herself most tolerant, and was not bound to be the judge of 
 anybody, and had for her part seen so much of people of genius 
 in her mother's house when she was quite a girl that she saw no 
 harm at all in any of their eccentricities. Still here and there 
 she would coniide to her associates her distress that other people 
 had not her tolerance and were offended at meeting Etoile. 
 
 Society, which was always vaguely averse to Etoile, because 
 she did not conciliate it, was very willing to receive such hints. 
 There were high spheres of it, indeed, where the fumes of such 
 fictions could not reach, but tjirough all the lower strata of it 
 these fumes spread insidiously, like sulphur-smoke. 
 
 Mrs. Phidias Pratt shook her head, not willing to do more 
 till she was quite sure not to offend Princess Vera by doing it ; 
 Mrs. Macscrip and Mrs. Henry V. Clams, and the colonies they 
 represented, said that all the dear Embassy people were now-a- 
 days so far too good-natured; and the Scrope-Stair sisters began 
 to sigh, and hum and ha, and look sorrowful and mysterious, and 
 murmur, "Oh, don't be afraid — don't \ She never comes to us 
 on our day, she doesn't indeed ; and, of course, if ever she did 
 we would take care there should be no risk of your speaking." 
 
 And Mr. Silverly Bell, with his softest voice and most purring 
 manner, carried his gentle countenance into many a decorous 
 drawing-room, and dropped a hint— just a hint — dear Lady Joan 
 was too good-natured, dear Lord Archie was a trifle imprudent ; 
 out of kindness, oh yes, purest kindness, but a mistake ; no, — he 
 didn't wish to say anything, he never said anything ; he was not 
 a gossip, like dear Lady Cardiff; nothing he abhorred more than 
 gossip; still, when he loved and valued any one as he did — 
 whoever it was he was calling on — he thought it right to warn 
 them from making any acquaintance they might hereafter regret. 
 
 In a word, be earned his luncheons and dinners and petting 
 in the Casa Challoner. All the Lady Joan's pets had to work 
 hard for her. 
 
 This however did not, of course, prevent Mr. Silverly Bell 
 from calling, himself, eagerly on Etoile, and drinking her tea 
 with a slice of lemon in it, and feeling very comfortable by her 
 fire, and pretending to adore her and Tsar. 
 
 " A man may go anywhere ! " he would say with a pretty 
 deprecating little smile, when Mrs. Macscrip or Mrs. Middleway 
 would tax him with going very often to the Montecavallo to see 
 " that " woman. 
 
220 FBIENDSEIK 
 
 " A man may go anywhere, and an old man, too ! " he would 
 say charmingly, and look a little guilty, as if lie saw and heard 
 things in the rooms by the Eospigliosi gardens that were sadly 
 tempting to the old Adam, old though it was in him. 
 
 The spy of Society is an institution quite as useful to private 
 ends as to political ones. As his reward, Lady Joan asked him 
 to a dinner given for the Hebrides, and told Lady Hebrides he 
 was her dear old Saint Paul. 
 
 " Dear, dear ! " thought Lady Cardiff, when she saw these 
 sulphur fumes rising, " why didn't she take a caprice for a 
 married man, have a fancy for a drunken sculptor, go to nasty 
 museums in men's clothes, or anything of that kind. They 
 would have said nothing about her the^i. When a person is famous 
 the world will have stories of some sort. It's better to give it 
 something tangible, it talks much less ; Heavens ! if she'd only 
 had a caprice for an attic and an artist, or spent six months 
 with the married "man, as I say, we should all be swearing her 
 innocence till we were hoarse — ^just as the dear Scrope-Stairs 
 swear to Lady Joan's. You ought never to disappoint the world. 
 It is a pieuvre, and has a million mouths; you can't shut them 
 all ; you can only give them something to suck." 
 
 Etoile, meanwhile, was serenely unconscious of all these 
 threads netting, and mouths opening about her feet, and had 
 she been conscious, would have been as serenely indifferent. 
 
 She passed her days in great dreams and great studies ; the 
 world was beautiful about her, and its past full of all the terrible 
 and tender mysteries of the human soul ; every hour had for 
 her some art to be j)ursued, some aim to be kept sight of; she 
 believed in a god — 
 
 Qui puisse donner un astre a un ame innocent. 
 
 All the little conspiracies and petty cruelties of a world of 
 women were noticed no more by her than were the gnats in the 
 air, or the dust on the stones, any day that she mounted the Scala 
 Ecgia to gaze at the Sistina Sibyls, 
 
 Lady Cardiff, who did not care much for the Sistina Sibyls, 
 and who had said correctly that a grain of dust may blind you, 
 ventured on a word of warning. 
 
 " You do not conciliate women," she said one day. " You do 
 not think about them ; oh no ; of course not ; but believe me, a 
 woman who does not is socially lost. Her sex will wait — wait 
 years maybe — but will fall on her like Destiny at last, and rend 
 her in pieces, some way or another. To please our own sex we 
 must either confer benefits or crave them; we must be either 
 patron or toady." 
 
 " What a noble choice of parts you offer us ! " 
 
 Lady Cardiff was invulnerable to rebuke. 
 
FRIENDSniP. 221 
 
 " Of course, to patronise is more agree.ible," she pursued 
 impertiirbably. "But I am not sure but what the toady in tlio 
 long run gets most cakes and ale. Believe me, women hold the 
 keys of the world for a woman ; but to get the keys you must 
 crawl to their goodwill upon your knees, as the true believers 
 up the Scala Sancta. To a fearless temper that respects itself this 
 is impossible, you say ? Yes, my dear, and that is just why frank 
 and fearless spirits have generally such a very bad time of it in 
 this world. There is only one way to deal with women : be very 
 civil to their faces, and do them all the harm you can, especially 
 behind their backs in a drawing-room ; never offend one and 
 never trust one; kiss them as if they were your salvation, and 
 watch them as if they were your assassins. ' Live with your 
 friends, remembering they will one day be your enemies.' 
 Talleyrand's advice is sound for our sex at all events. If you 
 want a thing made public, tell it to three women separately in 
 private; cry; say it will be ruin to you if it ever get known; 
 and by seven o'clock next day all the town will have heard of it. 
 You may be quite satisfied of that. Women never like one 
 another, except now and then an old woman and a young 
 woman like you and me. They are good to one another amongst 
 the poor, you say? Oh, that I don't know anything about. 
 They may be. Barbarians always retain the savage virtues. In 
 society women hate one another. All the more because in 
 society they have to smile in each other's faces every night of 
 their lives. Only think what that is, my dear! — to grudge eacli 
 other's conquests, to grudge each other's diamonds, to study 
 each other's dress, to watch each other's wrinkles, to outshine 
 each other always on every possible occasion, big or little, and 
 yet always to be obliged to give pet names to each other, and 
 visit each other with elaborate ceremonial — why women must 
 hate each other ! Society makes them. Your poor folks, I dare 
 say, in the midst of their toiling and moiling, and scrubbing 
 and scraping, and starving and begging, do do each other kindly 
 turns, and put bread in each other's mouths now and then, 
 because they can scratch each other's eyes out, and call each 
 other hussies in the streets, any minute they like, in the most 
 open manner. But in society women's entire life is a struggle 
 for precedence, precedence in everything — beauty, money, rank, 
 success, dress, everything. We have to smother hate under 
 smiles, and envy under compliment, and while we are dying to 
 say " you hussy," like the women in the street, we are obliged, 
 instead of boxing her ears, to kiss her on both cheeks, and cry, 
 'Oh, my dearest — how charming of you — so kind!' Only 
 think what all that repression means. You laugh ? Oh, you 
 very clever people always do laugh at these things. JBut you 
 must study Society, or suffer from it, sooner or Ijvter. If you 
 
222 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 don't always strive to go out before everybody, life will end iii' 
 everybody going out before you ; everybody — down to the shoe- 
 black ! Study Society, my love, or else do not come into it at 
 all. To live like De Quincey or Wordsworth is comprehensible, 
 though I should fancy it very uncomfortable. But a middle 
 way is idiotcy. You only please neither the Hermits nor Vanity 
 Fair." 
 
 " Is it so very necessary to please anybody ? " 
 
 Lady Cardiff shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 " That depends, my dear, on one's own desires. I should say 
 it was very necessary; Mrs. Henry V. Clams would say so, Lady 
 Joan would say so, all Society would say so. But I'm sure I 
 daren't say it is for you. You don't seem to care for all we care 
 for ; I believe Society seems to you no better than a Flemish 
 kermesse." 
 
 " Not half so good ! At a kermesse the children at least are 
 genuine, with their gilded cakes and their merry go-rounds. In 
 our society the very children are liases before they are in their 
 teens. Little Nadine Apraxine was invited to luncheon when I 
 was with her the other day; she is eight years old. She came 
 up to her mother and whispered, 'Make an excuse for me; I 
 don't wish to go ; their cook is not good.' " 
 
 "A discerning child," said Lady Cardiff with approval. 
 " An admirable child ; I wish she was my grand-daugliter. She 
 will have a future, that child ; as for the rest of us, I am sure 
 our cakes are gilt, my dear, we won't touch them if they aren't ; 
 and we go round and round on the same wooden horse, God 
 knows, every year of our lives ; we are very like the kermesse 
 after all. And we do enjoy ourselves, you are mistaken if you 
 think we don't ; perhaps things look blue in the morning, that 
 comes of the champagne and the chloral ; but by the time we get 
 * done up ' and begin our visits, we are really enjoying ourselves, 
 and go on doing it till the small hours. Blase, of course, every- 
 body is in a sense, but there's always some ammonia to smell of, 
 that wakes us up : when we're young the ammonia is coquetry, 
 when we're old it's scandal. When we've got our eyebrows 
 neatly drawn, and our eyes nicely washed with kohl, and arc 
 ready for the kermesse, we jump on one or other of the wooden 
 horses, and away we go to a ' rosy time,' as the racing men say. 
 I don't think people get tired ; not in your sense : bless you, 
 little Nadine Apraxine will never tire of finding that her friends' 
 cooks are bad, till she hasn't a tooth left that isn't a false one 
 to mumble her dinner. The joy of disparagement ever dies 
 till we die. There are two things that nobody never tires of, 
 they are the pleasures of excelling and of depreciating." 
 
 " Excelling ! — it is rather a Dead Sea apple, I fear. The effort 
 is happiness, but the fruit always seems poor." 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 223 
 
 Lady Cardiff could not patiently hear sticli nonsense. 
 
 " There you are again, my dear feminine Alccste," she i?aid, 
 irritably, looking at things from your solitary standpoint on 
 that rock of yours in the middle of the sea. You are thinking 
 of the excelling of genius, of the possessor of an ideal fame, of 
 the ' Huntress mightier tlian the moon,' and I am thinking of 
 the woman who excels in Society — who has the biggest diamonds, 
 the best ch'f, the most lovers, the most chic and chien, who leads 
 the fashion, and condescends when she takes tea with an 
 empress. Biit even from your point of view on your rock, I 
 can't quite believe it. Accomplished ambition must be agree- 
 able. To look back and say, ' I have achieved ! ' — what leagues 
 of sunlight sever that proud boast from the weary sigh, ' I have 
 failed ! ' Fame must console." 
 
 " Perhaps ; but the world, at least, does its best that it 
 should not. Its glory discs are of thorns." 
 
 " You mean that superiority has its attendant shadow, which 
 is calumny? Always has had, since Apelles painted. What 
 does it matter if everybody looks after you when you pass down 
 a street, what they say when you pass ? " 
 
 " A malefactor may obtain that sort of flattery. I do not see 
 the charm of it." 
 
 " You are very perverse. Of course I talk of an unsullied 
 fame, not of an infamous notoriety." 
 
 " Fame now-a-days is little else but notoriety," said Etoile, 
 with a certain scorn, " and it is dearly bought, perhaps too 
 dearly, by the sacrfice of the serenity of obscurity, the loss of 
 the peace of private life. Art is great and precious, but the 
 pursuit of it is sadly embittered when we have become so the 
 plaything of the public, through it, that the simplest actions of 
 our lives are chronicled and misconstrued. You do not believe 
 it, perhaps, but I often envy the women sitting at their cottage 
 doors, with their little children on their kness : no one talks of 
 them ! " 
 
 " J'ai tant de gloire, 6 roi, que j 'aspire au fumier ! " 
 
 said Lady Cardiff. " Y''ou are very thankless to Fate, my dear, 
 but I suppose it is always so." 
 
 And Lady Cardiff took refuge in her cigar case, being a 
 woman of too much experience not to know that it is quite 
 useless to try and make converts to your opinions; and 
 especially impossible to convince people dissatisfied with their 
 good fortune that they ought to be charmed with it. 
 
 " It is very curious," she thought when she got into her own 
 carriage, " really it makes one believe in that odd doctrine of, 
 what is it, Compensations ; but, certainly, people of great talent 
 always are a little mad. If they're not flightily mad with 
 
224 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 eccentricity and brandy, they are morbidly mad witli solitude 
 and sentiment. Now, she is a great creature, really a great 
 creature ; might have the world at her feet if she liked ; and all 
 she cares for is a big dog, a bunch of roses, and some artist or 
 poet dead and gone three hundred or three thousand years ! It 
 is very queer. It is just like that extraordinary possession of 
 Victor Hugo's; with powers that might have sufficed to make 
 ten men brilliant and comfortable, he must vex and worry about 
 politics that didn't concern him in the least, and go and live 
 under a skyhght in the middle of the sea. It is very odd. They 
 are never happy but when they are unhappy; and if you tell 
 them that Addison could be a great writer, and yet live comfort- 
 ably and enjoy the things of this world, they only tell you con- 
 temptuously that Addison had no genius, he had only a Style. 
 I suppose he hadn't. I think if I were one of them and had to 
 choose, I would rather have only a Style, too." 
 
 That night Lady Cardiff went to a very big dinner at Mrs. 
 Henry V Clams' ; the dinner which Etoile had declined. Fonte- 
 branda had arranged it as he arranged everything, from the ball 
 she once gave an Imperial. Prince to the tisane she took when 
 she caught a chill; and on this night it was an unspeakably 
 grand affair, all ablaze with princes and ministers. 
 
 " We married women have a good time out here," Mrs. 
 Henry V. Clams, in her dressing-room a few hours before, wrote 
 to a sister in the States. " If I'd stayed at home I'd have been 
 set away among the old folks long ago ; girls are all the go in 
 New York ; in Europe, girls aren't nowhere ; it's right down 
 horrid to see 'em, batches and batches of 'em, and not a man to 
 waltz with 'em if there's a married woman got a clean place on 
 lier ticket. You should see Heloise B. Dobbs, you remember 
 her shooting that fine young man in St. Louis : she's fifty, as 
 you know, if she's an hour ; my dearest dear, she wears lower 
 dresses than any of us, half a foot below the shoulder blades, and 
 you'll leave her sjnnning like a steam-wheel in the cotillon if 
 you slope off any minute before day-dawn." 
 
 And Mrs. Henry V. Clams, having poured so much truth 
 into the bosom of her sister in New York, had herself arrayed in 
 white taffetas, embroidered in silver with rosebuds and humming- 
 birds, and with humming-birds on her shoulders, humming-birds 
 in her hair, and humming-birds on her shoes, went down to her 
 big dinner, and met Mrs. Heloise B. Dobbs, who with a narrow 
 strap about her waist, and an infinitesimal strap over each 
 shoulder, made up in diamonds what she lacked in dress, and 
 each cried to the other, " My dearest dear ! How lovely you 
 look ! " and each thought of the other — " The Jezebel ! the girls 
 would lynch her down home ! " 
 
 The dinner was a great success ; all that Mrs. Henry V. Clams 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 225 
 
 did was a success, thanks to Fontebranda. Comet clarets, 
 Highland sahnon, pines from Covent Garden, and everytUing 
 else from Paris, was Alberto Fontebranda's recipe for making 
 Society smile, and Society always smiled very sweetly. Mr. 
 Henry V. Clams sometimes, jxayiug the bills, did not smile ; but 
 then nobody minded what he did or did not. 
 
 "What 'd you bring me to Europe for if I aren't to make a 
 figger in it ? " said his wife very sensibly. " It's puffectly daft 
 to cry out as you do ; you can't make a figger for nothing, and 
 your pile's as big as the Catskills!" 
 
 And Mr. Henry V. Clams was silenced, because it was sweet 
 to him also to make a figure, if only vicariously, and to entertain 
 princes, even if they never distinguished him from his footmen. 
 
 He made a struggle once to sit at the bottom of his own 
 table, but resigned even that because Fontebranda told him 
 contemptuously, " Tout cela, c'est change maintenant, passe de 
 mode tout a fait!" 
 
 Mr. Henry V. Clams felt that in New York he would have 
 tried a playful six-shooter on his familiar friend Fontebranda. 
 
 But he was in Europe, and wished to make a figure. So, 
 without disputing, he sat at the side, and felt incongruous and 
 jostled, and could never be brought to understand that his wife 
 being opposite to him, the sides were the top and the bottom ; 
 but he had to sit there, and supposed it was Fashion. She had 
 always Fontebranda on her left hand, and some illustrious being 
 on her right ; that was Fashion too. 
 
 Mr. fieury V. Clams would have been happier eating devilled 
 tomatoes in Delmouico's. 
 
 When the great dinner was over and the big bow-wow folks 
 (as Mrs. Henry V. Clams would call them sometimes when her 
 spirits were high and her Fashion forgot) were all departed, 
 Mr. Henry V. Clams, bowing on the top of his stairs, and being 
 supposed by most to be a groom of the chamber too nervous for 
 his place, the inner life of the Palazzo Clams came coyly from 
 its hiding-place out on to the hearth, that is to say, whisky, rum, 
 and "pick-me-ups" were rolled in with card- tables; cigar-boxes 
 were oi^ened, and a little roulette-wheel began to turn for those 
 who liked it. 
 
 A dozen people, intimate friends, remained, and the host and 
 hostess were always willing to lose their money for those who 
 helped them to make a figure. Mr. Henry V. Clams rattled the 
 napoleons in his trousers pocket, spat furtively into a Swiss 
 jardiniere, drank a choice drink called " wake-the-dead," and 
 began to feel once more an independent citizen. 
 
 " Alberto," said his wife. 
 
 " Ma tres-chere ? " responded Fontebranda. 
 
 " That's been a big thing! " 
 
 Q 
 
226 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Bien reitssi, cJtere, mats oui.'" 
 
 " Bnt there's one thiug riles me, right do'W'n riles me," said 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams, also sipping the " wake-the-dead." 
 
 " I know," said the voice of her husband solemnly. " The 
 canvas-backs wanted green ginger. I guess you don't get 
 ginger green in this country ? " 
 
 The idiotcy of this remark passed unnoticed, because no one 
 ever noticed his remarks unless it was absolutely necessary to 
 reprove or instruct him. 
 
 " Eiles ! " echoed Fontebranda. " Cela veut dire — riles ? " 
 
 " Qui m'agace" explained Mrs. Henry V. Clams, pronouncing 
 it with a fine breadth of tone as "mag-ass." " Qui m'enrage ! 
 There was a German serene, a Kussian own cousin-to-the-throne, 
 a French marshal, an English peeress, two embassies, and the 
 Lord knows how many of your own dukes and princes, Alberto, 
 and yet with all those that woman wouldn't come ? " 
 
 " Woman ? woman ? 3Iais qui done ? " said the Count Alberto, 
 staring hard over his halo of smoke. 
 
 " Etoile ! " 
 
 " Bah ! " said Fontebranda, with scorn. 
 
 " Oh, you may ' bah ! ' " retorted his sovereign mistress as 
 she threw her own cigarette fiercely into a cluster of azaleas. 
 " It riles me ; it makes me downright mad ! Are those first- 
 class prize-trotters to dine here, and that one-horse concern, an 
 artist, to say no ? " 
 
 Lady Joan Challoner, who was lying back in an aiTa-ehair 
 smoking, with loris on one side of her, and Eccelino di Sestri 
 and Douglas Graeme on the other, took her cigar out of her teeth, 
 and smiled pleasantly. 
 
 " Dear Mrs. Clams, what can it matter ? I think she showed 
 good feeling for once. I wish she'd showed as much for us, and 
 never brought her letters to me ! " 
 
 The face of loris grew paler even than was its wont, and his 
 brows contracted, as he sat on the arm of her chair. 
 
 He was silent, and was ashamed of his silence. 
 
 He felt false to his fairest faith ; he felt a coward and untrue, 
 yet his lips remained closed. 
 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams, whose spirits were high, owing to the 
 success of her " big thing," and the draught of the " wake-the- 
 dead," threw one knee over the other comfortably as she leaned 
 back in her chair, and smoked her cigarette, 
 
 "Dear Lady Joan, now, do tell!" she said confidentially. 
 " Come now, do tell ; we're all ong intini here, and nobody '11 go 
 and say anything. Who was she ? do tell ! I'll bet you know." 
 
 Lady Joan looked sorrowful, and settled the spilla in her 
 Lair. 
 
 " N— no, I don't," she said slowly. "At least, you know, not 
 
FBIENDSUIP. 227 
 
 ]")Ositivcly, and I don't want to do her any harm, why should I ? 
 Of course I've heard a good many stories, who hasn't? but 
 artists arc always like that, you know, and of course she could 
 not be the anatomist she is without — well, without very queer 
 studies. Look how she must have &tudied the nude ! Been in 
 the most horrible anatomical museums and academies. No 
 doubt must have been ! " she said in conclusion, with a touching 
 modesty, though on some occasions she vowed she desi^ised all 
 Prudes, and had hung up behind her seat at her dinner table a 
 most unblushing and colossal Nudity, which she called Titian's 
 " Choice of Paris." But then these trifling incongruities never 
 disturbed her : she knew that Mrs. Grundy does not mind a few 
 incongruities. 
 
 Besides, Titian lived ever so long ago : nobody can help what 
 he painted. 
 
 And then (which made such a difference also) the nudity was 
 the joint property of herself and Mimo and Trillo — a gigantic 
 speculation bought between them, just when the Inspecteur des 
 Beaux-Arts was expected from St. Petersburg. The Inspecteur 
 des Beaux- Arts was not impressed with the nudity, and would 
 not buy it for the Hermitage, so it still hung behind the Lady 
 Joan at dinner, waiting some more enlightened Inspecteur, or 
 some billionuaire, come out of a foundry, or a lead mine, with a 
 love of the arts. 
 
 " Oh, my ! that's real shocking ! " said Mrs. Henry V. Clams, 
 awed by the word "anatomical." She was not sure what it 
 meant; it was vaguely associated in her mind with a travelling 
 showman in the Far West, who had gone about with a skull, 
 and some monstrosities in glass bottles, and a dried alligator 
 out of the swamps. 
 
 "But that don't tell us who she was," she pursued, her 
 thirst of curiosity stimulated by a second draught of the 
 " wake-the-dead." 
 
 " Oh, as for that," said the Lady Joan, with a fine carelessness, 
 " it wouldn't matter who she was, if she'd always lived decently. 
 I can tell you who she was, if you care about it so much. She 
 was a little girl picked off the streets by old Istrion — you know, 
 the French painter — her mother was an ' unfortunate,' and Istrion 
 tumbled over the child on the sill of a wine-shop. That's the 
 simple truth. But of course that wouldn't matter, if when she'd 
 grown up she'd kept straight." 
 
 Lady Joan blew some smoke into the air after this perform- 
 ance of her imagination. She had invented it quite on the spur 
 of the moment, and felt that hours of reflection could not have 
 enabled her to hit on anything better. She saw the face of loris 
 pale, eager, and almost stern, as he strove to listen, but she spoke 
 in her own tongue, rapidly, and he failed to follow her. 
 
228 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " That is the real truth/' she added, " because a great friend 
 of old Istrion's told me he'd seen the child, a dirty little brat, 
 tumbling about in the old man's atelier when Istrion first took 
 her home." 
 
 " Oh, my ! " said Mrs. Henry V. Clams again, almost gasping 
 from the effects of her surprise and the " wake-the-dead." " Oh, 
 my ! And yet she gives herself such highfalutin' airs ! Well, 
 I do like that ! My word, I'd like to tell her ! " 
 
 Lady Joan looked at her hostess and at all her other listeners 
 with an honest, frank light in her steadfast eyes. 
 
 " Well, you know, I, for one, would never reproach her with 
 that. Could she help what she was born ? What I do dislike 
 knowing her for is, that though certainly she has a certain 
 amount of talent, she never would have been heard of if she 
 hadn't been much too indulgent to certain great persons who 
 can give fame with their nod ; and I know that half — nore than 
 half — of the accuracy and the beauty of her pictures, and in 
 consequence all their celebrity, are due to the talent of an 
 obscure lover of hers, a certain Pierre Gerarde, a great colourist, 
 who works them up and lets them go out in her name. It 
 is so vilely dishonest, you know ; it really hurts one to think 
 of it." 
 
 " Lord ! then even her pictures aren't her own ! " gasped 
 Mrs, Henry V. Clams, in the extremity of her stupefaction 
 resorting once more to the " wake-the-dead." 
 
 Mr. Henry V. Clams, listening on the hearth, spit softly once 
 more into the azaleas. 
 
 " Uncommon kind of that young man," he said drily. " That 
 young man must be a real Christian. Where was he riz, that 
 very liberal young man, my lady ? " 
 
 Lady Joan coloured a little. 
 
 " He is a Belgian, I believe," she said liurriedly. " But 
 everybody knows it pefectly well in Paris." 
 
 " Then they must be darned fools in Paris to make a fuss 
 over the wrong critter," said Mr. Henry V. Clams. " I believe 
 they've a prize for Virtue : they oughter crown that most un- 
 common young man." 
 
 " Hold your tongue, Mr. Clams, and don't be so vulgar," said 
 liis wife, whilst Fontebranda, weary of a conversation in a tongue 
 be could not comprehend, effected a diversion by rolling up the 
 roulette-table a little nearer. 
 
 Lady Joan, who never gambled — she liked nothing that was 
 uncertain — took her leave and went home with her friend. 
 
 loris never spoke. He had not very clearly understood, but 
 he had gathered the drift of her words enough to feel angered 
 with her and ashamed of himself. In silence they rolled through 
 the dark midnight towards the Casa Challoner. Lady Joan was 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 229 
 
 wondering if she had gone too far in the brilh'ant invention of 
 Pierre Gcrardo, but sho was not much afraid. She knew tliat a 
 lie makes so many friends : it is siich a common pastime, and 
 begets such a fellow-feeling in everybody. When a lie is found 
 out, nobody is so angry with the teller of it as everbody is with 
 the worrying and uncompromising truth-teller — he is a bore if 
 you like. 
 
 " A cullender in not hindered by a hole more or less," says 
 the Eastern i)roverb, and she knew that Society likes culenders 
 — if you will only pour dirty water through them. 
 
 Looking at the profile of loris in the imcertain, faint gleam 
 of the light from the lamps, she mutely debated within herself 
 whether she might translate her fiction of Pierre Gerarde and 
 try it on him. But on reiiection she desisted : he might go and 
 tell Etoile. They drove home in an unbroken silence. 
 
 " Aren't you coming up, lo ? " she said in surprise as he 
 turned away from her at the bottom of her own staircase. 
 
 " No ! " said loris curtly. " And I think — I think, ma cTicre, 
 that you might respect the names of those who are your guests 
 and take your hand in friendship — that is all. Felicissima 
 notte ! " 
 
 She, stupefied with amazement and choked with rising fury, 
 stood under the rays of her staircase lamp, gazing into the 
 vacancy of the dark entrance-hall, as the dull sound of the 
 closing door echoed through the house and woke Mr, Challouer, 
 sleeping the sleep of the just and dreaming dreams of the Share 
 List. 
 
 "My God ! does he care for her ! " she thought. In the dull 
 midnight a new light broke in upon her; but it could not pierce 
 very far thi'ough the triple folds of her own supreme vanity. 
 
230 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 CHAPTEK XXin. 
 
 The nest day was stormy and cold. 
 
 The mild and snnny weather which had graced the Carnival 
 was passing away as the Carnival drew to its close, and the bitter 
 winds were sweeping in from the ravines of Abruzzi and Apen- 
 nines, and driving the brown Tiber into sullen swell. 
 
 loris came out of his house in the teeth of the wind, and felt 
 weary and clailly. He had been sitting in his own room under 
 the watchful eyes of the portrait there, and striving to wade 
 through a mass of papers, in the vain endeavour to understand 
 his own position and responsibilities in regard to those mighty 
 international works by the Gulf of Faro to which he had been 
 persuaded to put his name. All that he could thoroughly under- 
 stand was that his money was sinking into the sands of Faro, as 
 the piles were sinking there. 
 
 That he had lost money was usually the only clear conviction 
 that remained to him as a result of all the enterprises into which 
 he was launched. That he would not let others lose money, 
 through him or by him, was the only resolve, strong enough and 
 fixed enough in his mind to resist all the influences that were 
 around him and that laboured to shake it in him. The con- 
 viction and the resolve together were not peaceful mental food. 
 He was not used to thought of this kind ; his past was full of 
 very different memories. 
 
 To lead a cotillon at the Tuileries, to fight a duel at the 
 frontier, to string a guitar in a moonlit garden, to study painting 
 in an old Academy, to woo the beau.ty of a court, to talk music 
 with the Abbe Liszt, to exchange courtly ceremonials with 
 cardinals, to rove through Alpine valleys with a hunter king — 
 these made up a life like a Boccaccio story, like a pageant-picture 
 of Carpaccio or Bordone indeed, but they were no meet prepara- 
 tion for the lore of the financial world, for the gambling of the 
 board-room and the share market. 
 
 The dizzy figures made his eyes ache, the endless letters made 
 his brain dull. He knew what ruin meant, and something that 
 was not unlike ruin looked at him from the columns of numerals, 
 from the piles of correspondence. He knew also that on his estate 
 the columns of loss and of profit were far from equal ; that iu 
 the matter of Fiordelisa, expenditure was not met by any retui-n ; 
 every pineapple cost him about fifty francs, and every pineapple 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 231 
 
 was given away to some friend — not his own. The pineapples 
 were a sample of the rest. 
 
 He sat and studied the dreary figures that filled sheet after 
 sheet, from the bills paid for the pineapple-beds to the accounts 
 for the bridge by the Gulf of Faro, and he felt bewildered and 
 wearied. With a sword, with a paint brush, with a crabbed 
 musical score, with an abstruse Italian or Latin poem, with a 
 tender woman's hand stealing into his own, he would have known 
 what to do ; but with accounts and with finance ! 
 
 loris rose, having wasted his day, and having no surer idea 
 of what he was committed to in the present, or of what he had 
 better do in the future, than if he had never wasted a morning 
 of freedom over those hateful masses of arithmetic and corre- 
 spondence. His head ached and his heart ached too. 
 
 He was free, for his tyrant was gone, on the arm of handsome 
 Douglas Graeme, with Silverly Bell as Propriety, to a classical 
 concert given for a charity by Lady Anne Monmouthshire at her 
 rooms in her hotel and, the concert ended, was to dine with the 
 Dean of St. Edmund's, at the same great hotel, in that decorous 
 attention to the decorums of the world which no passion, pleasure, 
 or naughtiness ever made the Lady Joan omit, any more than 
 passion, pleasure, or naughtiness made ladies of the Borgian era 
 neglect their fasts or fail to make their plenary confession. 
 
 By mere instinct as he left his house, fatigued and out of 
 spirits, his steps bore him down the crowded Corso to the old 
 palace on the Horses' Hill, where so much of the stifled romance 
 and resolve of his vanished youth seemed to arise for him as he 
 crossed its threshold. 
 
 In an earlier time he had always made some excuse to his 
 conscience ; some painting, some book, some flower, some gallery 
 hard of access, for which he brought admittance, some treasure 
 of art unknown to the general student, of which he brought 
 tidings ; but for some time he had now neglected to use these 
 pleas, unless interrogated by his tyrant, and he entered the 
 house of Etoile familiarly and so frequently that the servants 
 had ceased to go through any formula, and threw the doors 
 open to him without bidding. 
 
 To-day it was five o'clock. Etoile was out, but would be 
 home in a few moments so they said. He went in, and cast 
 himself on a couch and waited. 
 
 The silence, the fragrance, the soft shadows of the room 
 soothed him; the dog lying asleep, looked up and welcomed 
 him lazily, then slept again ; there were wet sketches, open books, 
 fresh flowers, countless things that spoke to him as if they had 
 voices of their absent mistress. He took up a volume that lay 
 face downwards near him. 
 
 It was tlie Neli'da of Daniel Stern. 
 
232 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 It was open at that true and eloquent passage whicli seems 
 to vibrate with the deep scorn of a courageous nature for the 
 careful egotism of a cowardly one. 
 
 " Marcher environnee des hommages que le monde prodigue aux 
 apparences hypocrites ; jouir a Vomhre d'un mensonge de laches et 
 furtifs plaisirs ; ce sont la les vidgaires sagesses de ces femmes que 
 la Nature a faites egalement ■ impuissantes pour le lien qu'elles 
 reconnaissent et pour le mal qui les seduit ; egalement incapalles 
 de soumission ou de revolte, aussi depourvues du courage qui se 
 resigne a porter des chaines que de la hardiesse qui s'efforce a les 
 hriser." 
 
 "■ It is a portrait of Joan," thought loris, and put the book 
 down impatient to be reminded of what, here, he desired to 
 forget. Yet it moved him to pleasure to think that Etoile had 
 been reading it ; a pencil line scored by the passage told him 
 that she also must have been thinking of " ces vulgaires sagesses "' 
 of the woman who claimed his allegiance, and perhaps been 
 resenting them for his sake. 
 
 It was sweet to his sense of power to know that she should 
 care thus ; it gave him a fuller consciousness of triumph to feel 
 that this woman, so long above all human envies and enmities, 
 stooped to both through his influence and for his sake. And he 
 mis-read in a measure the emotions that moved her. Though 
 in a sense, jealousy of the woman who had absorbed and charmed 
 his life, it was far more a scornful impatience of the vice that 
 cloaked itself as virtue, of the timorous time-serving that loved 
 the world better than passion or candour. The contempt of the 
 courageous temper for the coward's is seldom imderstood ; the 
 impatience of courage for the craven meanness of a lie is seldom 
 rightly measured. 
 
 loris thought she was jealous as other women were ; but he 
 was wrong. 
 
 " Dear me ! " said the voice of Lady Cardiff at that instant on 
 the threshold of the chamber. Although a person who was never 
 surprised at anything, she was so surprised to see him there 
 that the ejaculation escai^ed her. 
 
 "How very much at home he looks, more than he ever does 
 in the other place," she thought to herself, as loris rose to meet 
 her with that gay and graceful greeting which so well became 
 him. 
 
 "My dear Prince, charmed to see you. I only looked in for 
 five minutes ; they said she'd be here in a moment ; pretty rooms, 
 aren't they? and what quantities of flowers, headaching, but 
 pretty," said Lady Cardiff, as she seated herself on a couch 
 opposite to him, and took out her cigarette case. "Will you 
 have one ? Don't she let you ? She let's me. Horrid weather ; 
 isn't it ? I have just come from Lady Anne's concert : they 
 
FEIENDSUIP. 233 
 
 have been tuning their instruments two hours ; at least I thought 
 it was tiiniiip; their instruments; but they said it was Op. lOlst: 
 Motifs on B'tlat. Very beautiful, tlicy saicl. Queer thing, isn't 
 it, that all the pretty things that please ono are all irretrievably 
 wrong, and everything that set's one's teeth on edge, and 
 scratches through one's brain like a metallic tooth comb, are all 
 scientifically exquisite. I don't pi-ofess to understand it; I 
 suppose nightingales are all wrong, aren't they ? And yet one 
 likes to hear them. Myself, I prefer a nightingale to Op. 101st. 
 Your friends, the Challoners, were there ; at least the lady was ; 
 she it was who told me that it was Op. 101st." 
 
 " Lady Joan is fond of music," said loris, feeling irritated 
 beyond endurance at the bare mention of a name that in this 
 hour he had hoped peacefully to forget. 
 
 " Oh, that's being fond of music, is it ? to shoot the nightin- 
 gales and like Op. 101st. She does shoot the nightingales up at 
 your place, doesn't she ? I've heard so. But I'm sure yoii, like 
 the birds better than the metallic tooth comb, don't you ? " 
 
 "I am a countryman of the melodists," said loris, with a 
 smile. "I plead guilty to thinking the delight of the ear the 
 first charm of all music ; you know it is a rococo opinion scorned 
 by all modern science." 
 
 " Oh, I know ; I know," said Lady Cardiff. " The nightin- 
 gales are to be summoned before School Boards, I believe, and 
 educated out of their perverse trick of being harmonious ; ours 
 is a delightful age ; each of us is merely an egg, or an atom, or 
 a gas {il n'y a jms heaucoup a cJioisir. 1 think the egg's the least 
 humiliating of the three), and Thought is only a mere secretion 
 like bile, and Mind is only a greyish sort of sponge under the 
 skull, and it is only an accidental crease in the sponge that makes 
 it a Genius, a crease another way would have made it an idiot ; 
 and yet poor wretches, as we are made up of only gas and a 
 creased sponge, we are required to be capable of appreciating 
 Op. 101st ! Now that is really abstxrd, you know. Don't you 
 think so? By the way, how did the gas-and-sponge that we 
 unhappy accidents of evolution call the Count Milliadine, get on 
 at the court to-day? Is he hked ? " 
 
 The Count Milliadine was a new Russian Minister who had 
 been officially received that morning ; loris had conducted the 
 reception; (qnopos of the reception Lady Cardiff plunged into 
 politics, which she thought much more diverting than Op. 101st. 
 
 loris, who himself thought even Op. 101st less odious than 
 politics suited himself to her mood with that gracious adaptability 
 of which he had learned the trick at courts, but Lady Cardiff, to 
 her amusement, saw his eyes ever and again turning to a Louis 
 Quinze clock on its bracket. 
 
 In a quarter of an hour's time Etoile returned from her 
 
•234 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 drive, and brought a fragrance of fresh-gathered violets into the 
 chamber with her; she had been in the Dorian Woods with 
 Princess Vera and her children. 
 
 Lady Cardiff watched the silent greeting exchanged between 
 her and loris, affecting herself to be entirely engrossed with a 
 fusee that would not strike. 
 
 " Ah, ah," thought she, wise in such signs, and swift to read 
 them. " That is it, is it ? Well, why not ? Only there will be 
 the very mischief to pay in the other place. And will he be 
 strong enough to battle through rough weather ? A bully like 
 that dear woman that loves Op. lOlst wants such a bully to 
 beat her ! " 
 
 Aloud, she only said — 
 
 " Dear me, how tiresome these fusees are ! Cher Prince, have 
 you a light ? a thousand thanks. Violets ! what a quantity, but 
 how unpleasantly wet ! You can buy them at the street corner 
 — ^not the same thing as gathering them ? No ? Now I should 
 have fancied it much more agreeable. But that is one of the 
 things that are like Op. 101st to me. You didn't hear about 
 Op. 101st? I have been telling loris; I thought they hadn't 
 finished tuning the fiddles, and it seemed the concert was over 
 when I didn't know it had begun. Oh, thanks, my love — no — 
 I must go really. I only waited for you ten seconds, because I 
 wanted to hear about, etc., etc." 
 
 And she proceeded to explain some errand about a book of 
 French memoirs promised to some Eussian invalid; a mere 
 nothing. She had come, intending to have an hour's comfortable 
 chat over the fire in twilight ; but she comprehended that one at 
 least of them was wishing her absent, and Lady Cardiff was too 
 sympathetic and too well-bred not to catch a situation in a 
 glance and conform herself to its exigencies at all personal 
 sacrifice. She bowed herself out with admirable tact, just stay- 
 ing long enough to look hurried and forced to go — quite 
 naturally — and loris took her to her carriage. 
 
 "Dear mel" said Lady Cardiff, to herself, once more, when 
 alone amidst her cushions. " There will be the mischief to pay 
 with a vengeance. What a pity he is hampered hke that ! — such 
 a nice-looking man and such admirable manners, in a day when 
 manners are scarcely more than a tradition, and everybody 
 shuffles about in slippers, slippers that are down at heel too for 
 the most part. What a pity ! There is nothing in the world so 
 hard to get rid of as the nineteenth-century Guinevere, when 
 she has made a domestic animal of the marital dragon, and 
 knows that Arthur will never say anything unless Launcelot 
 seems likely to leave her on his hands. Poor Launcelot ! If he 
 ever do get into the newspapers everybody is horrified at him, 
 and full of sympathy for the dragon, but it is Launcelot that is 
 
FRIENDSniP. 235 
 
 to be pitied — fifty to one Guinevere threw herself at his head, 
 went down to his rooms, wrote to him at his club, did all kinds 
 of silly things, and when she grew theatrical threatened him 
 with Arthur. I shouldn't in the least wonder if even Mr. 
 Challoner were to grow into the ' wronged Pendragon ' if ever 
 they find out that Guinevere has to clear out of Fiordelisa." 
 
 And Lady Cardiff settled herself amongst her cushions, and 
 tried to read a Journal pour Eire, by the fading light of the day, 
 as her carriage rumbled through the streets of Eome, but failed 
 to be able to keep her mind to it, partly from want of light, 
 partly from wonder as to the sentiments she had detected. 
 
 " The * wronged Pendragon ' will be very fine," she thought 
 to herself. " It will be so very fine if only by contrast with 
 Arthur's ' boundless trust ! ' " 
 
 And the idea amused her much more than did the Journal 
 amusant. 
 
 Meantime loris had returned to the rooms that the wet 
 violets were filling with their fragrance. 
 
 Etoile had thrown aside her furs, and stood with the firelight 
 playing on her uncovered head and the straight folds of her 
 velvet sku't as she placed the violets in old shallow porcelain 
 bowls, the dog lying at her feet. 
 
 " They were the last of the year, I fear," she said to him, as 
 he returned. " The tulips are all out under the oak woods to- 
 day. I care most for the violets. I remember how bitterly I 
 used to cry when I was a little child, and our old servants threw 
 them into syrups to boil them down — to buy them at street 
 corners seems nearly as bad. Do you understand, or is it all 
 Op. 101st to you?" 
 
 " I understand," he said, with a smile and a sigh. " May I 
 stay here a little while ? I am tired. Figuratively, I have been 
 at street corners all the day, buying and selling. I feel dull, 
 chilly, and jaded. May I stay ? " 
 
 " Of course," the colour flushed her face a little. She went 
 on putting the violets in their shallow bowls beside the hearth. 
 His eyes dwelt on her with musing tenderness, and followed 
 the movements of her hands under their old lace ruffles amongst 
 the forest flowers with the water drops sparkling on her fingers 
 like diamonds. 
 
 " Why do you wear no rings? " he asked, abruptly. 
 
 She laughed a little. 
 
 " Vanity ! They spoil the hand ; they disguise it." 
 
 " That is a sculptor's idea; I think it is a right one. Your 
 hands are too beautiful to need ornament " 
 
 " Or compliment." 
 
 "Truth is not compliment. I never use the language of 
 compliment to you ; you know that very well. Tell me — you 
 have been reading that book of Daniel Stern's ? — Nelida ? " 
 
236 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Yes. It is not a very cleyer book, tlioiigli ■wi'itten by a 
 clever woman. But " 
 
 " It lias one passage that is eloquent. Did you think of me 
 when you marked it ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 He stretched his hand out to the l^ook and read the passage 
 again, in silence. Then with a sigh he tossed it away. 
 
 "She might have sat for the picture/' he said, with con- 
 tempt. 
 
 " It is not right of you to say that ! " Etoile said quickly, 
 with a sense of pleasiire in his wrong-doing that she blamed, for 
 which she was impatient and scornful of herself. " It is like her, 
 no doubt ; it is like ten thousand other women probably ; it is 
 like all the feeble passions of the world which wear the cloak of 
 convenience and the mask of a vulgar wisdom ; but it is not for 
 you to say so, since you bear with her as she is." 
 
 " Why ? since we are speaking with our hands in the Bocca 
 della Veritd to-night ? " said loris, his voice hissing a little 
 between his teeth. " And, even if cowardly it be, you know very 
 well slaves are always cowards ; their tyrants make them so, and 
 cannot complain. No ! " he said quickly, changing his tone to a 
 soft supplication, "Do not say cruel things to me. I cannot 
 bear them from you. Perhaps I am ignoble and unmanly. 
 Before you I feel so." 
 
 " It is not before me. It is before yourself," she said in a low 
 voice, as she returned to the hearth, and stood in the flickering 
 light from the burning logs. " Your name is noble ; not only 
 with the mere nobility of rank, but with all the inherited nobility 
 of kuightly actions and of chivalrous tempers; because the 
 material greatness of your house may have vanished, that is but 
 a reason the more to sustaiii it high in the resjDcct of the world 
 and the honour of men ; you are not free to be ridiculed, you 
 are not free to be despised ; you represent the honour of a thou- 
 sand years of knighthood that stands or falls with you. It is 
 not before me that you should feel your self-surrender to an 
 ignoble passion shameful ; it is before yourself and before the 
 memory of your forefathers 1 " 
 
 loris listened, with his head bent and his eyes drooped. 
 " No other woman ever spoke to me like that," he said under 
 his breath ; and was silent, leaning his arm on the old yellow 
 marble of the mantel-piece. 
 
 " It should not be what women say ; it should be what your 
 own heart tells you. You have so much heritage of greatness in 
 you old race, so many memories to incite and ennoble you ; your 
 country people love you and you love them ; there are so many 
 beautiful possibilities in your own future ; your life on your own 
 lands might be " 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 237 
 
 " When my future is her prey, as the present is, and every 
 rood of my land is blighted by her!" he muttered wearily. 
 " Ah, you do not understand — once I too tliouglit as you think, 
 and dreamed of great things, or at least of a life not unworthy 
 great memories ; but Society eats away all nobility, and makes 
 us shiftless, vacuous, worthless, and insincere as itself. What 
 are women ? Only delicate pretty triflers or mere beasts of prey, 
 that excite our baser desires and teach us to stifle our higher 
 natures, lest we should make them yawn. You will say it is 
 unmanly to lay blame upon your sex. Perhaps it is. But before 
 suQh a woman as you are, one learns to feel what men might be 
 if women were more like you. You tell me it is cowardly to say 
 that those words of that book describe the one woman who more 
 than any other has dragged my life down to a low level, and laid 
 it waste and barren of all hope. It is not her fault : she cannot 
 help being what nature made her ; no one can give more than 
 they have in them. Yet it is the truth, the merest, coldest 
 truth. What is her love for me beyond such passion as a tigress 
 knows, and even so, for ever second to her worldly interests and 
 worship of herself " 
 
 " Hush, hush ! It is not loyal " 
 
 He laughed aloud. 
 
 " Loyal ! I am as loyal to her as she to me. Believe me, in 
 a guilty passion that dares the world there may be loyalty, 
 because there may be strength ; but in such an intrigue as hers 
 and mine, public as marriage, yet steeped in hypocrisies of social 
 lies, there can be no faithfulness, because to each other, to our- 
 selves, and to Society, we are false : false in every caress, in every 
 word, in every thought — a very hell of falsehood!" 
 
 " Hush ! " 
 
 " Why ? Let me speak the truth to you at least. No woman 
 ever influenced me as you do. I think you could make me what 
 you would if I were always near you. You are like the flowers 
 you love ; you speak to men of the God they have forgotten. 
 The flowers do not know what they do, neither do you. Are you 
 offended ? Forgive me." 
 
 Etoile was silent for a moment. 
 
 " Offended ? No ; not that. But it is not just to her. 
 Besides, you do not mean it." 
 
 " Let her take care of herself; she is well able. Do I not 
 mean what I say of you ? Look at me and see." 
 
 She did look at him with the calm, frank, candid regard with 
 which she had looked always in the face of men. Their passions 
 had never moved her, and she had controlled them or dismissed 
 them without effort. Before the deep dreamy gaze of his eyes, 
 caressing, ardent, mysterious with the veiled story of a passion 
 he dared not avow, her own eyes fell ; something in his look 
 startled, troubled, hurt her. 
 
238 FBIENDSHIF. 
 
 " Prince loris," she said coldly, " it is half-past seven o'clock. 
 They will be waiting for you at the Casa Challoner. You forget 
 your duties." 
 
 loris recovered himself and controlled his gaze. 
 
 " I do not return there to-night ; I shall go home and dine 
 alone." 
 
 But he did not move to go ; silence fell between them ; he 
 leaned against the old yellow marble by the hearth; the lids 
 drooped over his tell-tale eyes. 
 
 A servant entered with the lamps. Her heart beat quickly ; 
 she feared she had been harsh to him. 
 
 The light seemed to fall on them as from a world they had 
 forgotten. 
 
 " Will you dine here ? " she said a little hurriedly. " In half 
 an hour I expect my old friend Voightel ; he arrives from Paris. 
 Yes? Stay then, and re-read Nelida while I go away and 
 change my gown." 
 
 He kissed her hands ; left alone, it was not Nelida that he 
 read, but the troubled story of his own heart. 
 
 Meawhile he hoped that the snow on the Alps might detain 
 "Baron Voightel. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXIV. 
 
 The snow did not detain Baron Voightel ; at ten minutes past 
 eight o'clock he took his green spectacles, his grey beard, and 
 his caustic wit into the rooms of Etoile, and seeing loris there, 
 who looked very much at home, and had one of her tea-roses in 
 his coat, thought to himself with a chuckle, " A la honne heure ! 
 It always comes at last. What sort of man is he, I wonder, that 
 can charm our Indiflferentia ? " 
 
 They had a very pleasant dinner that evening, and pleasant 
 hours after it by the great wood fire, and Voightel could not 
 have told that loris was wishing him deep in a snow-drift, for 
 loris was at his gentlest, brightest, and most graceful, and when 
 at midnight they both took leave, accompanied Voightel to his 
 hotel, and pressing both his hands, declared the gratification and 
 honour that he felt in becoming acquainted with the mighty 
 traveller. 
 
 "A charming person — beautiful manners and an historic 
 face," thought Voightel ; nevertheless he shook his head as ho 
 went up the stairs of his hoteL 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 23& 
 
 Voightel was bound for Brindisi, and had only some thirty- 
 six hours to pass in Eome ; far away, in those wild untrodden 
 lands which he loved, men, armed to the teeth, were waiting his 
 leadership, and many a problem of unexplored tracks and un- 
 navigated lakes were awaiting his eiforts to master them. A 
 great expedition that the governments of three countries had 
 combined to organise, had been put under his command, and ho 
 had no time to loiter and read a romance. 
 
 Voightel was a scholar, a savant, an explorer and a dweller 
 in deserts, but he was an observer of men, a citizen of the world ; 
 he was old and tough, and shrewd and learned, and could be 
 very fierce; his alternate studies of civilised and barbaric life 
 had disposed him to rate simi^le courage as high as a Lacedse- 
 monian, and to be somewhat deaf and blind to the vast increase 
 in excellencies of all sorts which modern manners claim. 
 
 On this subject he was whimsical, and to some hearers, ex- 
 tremely irritating. The more so as no one could deny that he 
 had the amplest experiences of both extremes, which lent to his 
 arguments that authoritative exactitude which exasperates the 
 most patient opponent. 
 
 He was exasperating also in many other ways. He had an 
 inconveniently long memory for all kinds of minuti?e ; no lie 
 imposed on him ; and no hypocrisies succeeded with him. What 
 was still more exasperating, he had a stout belief in innocence 
 when he found it, and a profound contempt for the world's 
 general ideas as to vice and virtue. 
 
 When Voightel went to bed that night he found a honeyed 
 little note saying that, his impending arrival having been 
 anounced in the journals, Mr. and Lady Joan Challoner besought 
 him not to forget the sincerest and most devoted of his friends. 
 Voightel, who was an ungrateful man, or at least everybody said 
 so except those savage tribes whom he adored, twisted the note 
 up, and lit his good-night pij^e with it. But in the morning 
 when Voightel had seen the king, a few ministers, and half a 
 hundred archaeologists and men of science, he found time to look 
 in at the Casa Challoner, and was met with the most rapturous 
 and cordial welcome, and many heart-rending regrets that he had 
 only half an hour to bestow there. 
 
 It was five o'clock, and it chanced to be a Wednesday, and 
 Lady Joan was surrounded by ladies ; Voightel was terrible to 
 Mrs. Grundy, because he had horrible ideas as to polygamy, and 
 was also said to have eaten his own cabin-boy in cutlets in the 
 Caribbean Isles. 
 
 But the Lady Joan, for once regardless of her Bona Dea, 
 received him with an absolute adoration and ecstacy, insisted on 
 his smoking, and pressed on him all the liqueurs ever made 
 upon earth. Such a dear, dear old friend ! Could she ever 
 
240 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 forget his kindness in tliose delightful old days in darling 
 Damascus ! 
 
 Voightel took the petting, sipped the liqueurs, smoked in a 
 circle of dowagers and damsels, and said with genuine good 
 humour, " We don't forget anything about Damascus, do we ? 
 What good tres-sec you used to have, Joan, and how clever 
 Horace Vere was in knocking the heads off the bottles. We used 
 to shoot cats from the roofs, and crows too. You never missed 
 aim in those days. Is your wrist steady now ? Pleasant days 
 they were ; too pleasant ! Poor Jack Seville ! " 
 
 Lady Joan felt as if some one had poured ice water down her 
 back, and was very effusive and ardent in pressing the liqueurs 
 upon him. 
 
 "Just the same woman," thought Voightel, eyeing her ; "just 
 the same, only older ; of course she's just the same ; there are 
 cats and crows here, and champagne ; and I suppose dear Eobert 
 has a counting-house to be put away in somewhere." 
 
 At that moment loris entered. 
 
 "lo, come and let me present you to the very dearest friend 
 I have in the world— a second father! " cried the Lady Joan. 
 
 _" We met last night," was on Voightel's lips, but he saw that 
 Ions bent gravely before him with the ceremonious grace of a 
 perfect stranger. Voightel was old and shrewd ; he could see a 
 situation at a glance and guess a great deal in an instant ; he 
 seemed not to remember loris and felt that loris was grateful to 
 him. 
 
 "Is he a great friend of yours? " Voightel said aside to Lady 
 Joan. "Ah! as great a friend as Jack Seville? Poor Jack! 
 This man is handsomer ; but then you have come into the land 
 of living pictures. Jack only painted 'em." 
 
 Lady Joan coloured and winced. 
 
 " Mr. Challoner farms loris's land," she answered hurriedly. 
 " The Prince is very poor, you know, and Mr. Challoner is very 
 fond of him." 
 
 /' Challoner was fond of poor Jack and of Horace too," said 
 Voightel, with an innocent meditation. " Good creature your 
 husband always was. So you farm, do you ? Does it pay here ? 
 Nice country, but not remunerative, is it ? " 
 
 " We don't do it for profit ! " said Lady Joan almost sharply, 
 she felt so sorely tried. 
 
 " What it is to live in a poetic country," said Voightel ; " but 
 the force of association is everything ; when I ate that cabin-boy, 
 whom I hear that admirable lady in a shabby purple gown over 
 there talking about to her neighbour, he was just as agreeable to 
 me as tender veal. It was all the force of association ; my hosts 
 hked him as well as veal ; better even ; so did I. No doubt in 
 Pali-Mall I should hold fried cabin-boy in abhorrence. We are 
 all the puppets of custom ; don't you think so, madam ? " 
 
FBIENDSHIP, 241 
 
 The lady in a shabby purple gown, who was Lady George 
 Scrope-Stair, thus suddenly addressed, was too horrified to be 
 able to answer him. ("I have heard him confess the fact 
 myself," said Lady George for ever afterwards.) 
 
 " Ah ! he was a pretty boy, madam, and we ate him with nut- 
 meg and caper sauce," said Voightel, and rose and took himself 
 away, his hostess following him on to the stairs. 
 
 loris, under pretext to her of offering him an umbrella, fol- 
 lowed him into the street where it was raining a little. 
 
 " I did not seem to recognise you just now, my dear Baron," 
 he said, with his sweetest smile, " because the Lady Joan had so 
 often spoken of presenting me to you, that I did not like to 
 deprive her of the pleasure by telling her she had been fore- 
 stalled. She honours you so greatly." 
 
 Voightel looked in his face through his green spectacles. 
 
 "I understand," he said drily; they parted with elaborate 
 courtesy on the pavement before the Casa Challoner. 
 
 Voightel felt that there was danger impending, and if his 
 caravan had not been chartered, and his Arabs armed to the 
 teeth, and his escort all waiting far away in the sand plains 
 already, he would have stayed in Eome to see the romance un- 
 wind itself, and guide its threads if need be. 
 
 " A very handsome man, and charming, but weak, I fear," 
 thought Voightel. "Not the man to have the courage of his 
 opinions, I am afraid. I wish he did not act so prettily. I 
 do not like pretty lies. Ugly ones are bad enough. A pretty 
 lie is like poison in a rose; you die in perfume, but you 
 die." 
 
 Thereupon he betook himself to the house of Etoile. He had 
 never in his life wished for any tie of the affections, but at that 
 moment he wished that he had been her father, that he might 
 have said — " Beware ! " 
 
 As it was he dined with her, and felt his way very prudently, 
 being sure of nothing. 
 
 " I saw your guest of last night, to-day," he said carelessly, 
 after dinner. 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " Handsome man, very. I saw him at Joan Challoner's." 
 
 Etoile was silent. 
 
 " He's her friend, isn't he ? " 
 
 " They are great friends — yes." 
 
 Voightel eyeing her sharply, chuckled. 
 
 " Ah ! In a catalogue of their old masters, our beloved Forty 
 Prudes of the London E.A. the other day put down " Portrait of 
 Lady Hamilton, noted for her friendship with Nelson." Friend- 
 ship is such an elastic word. There never was an age when it 
 stood for so many things in private, and was yet so absolutely 
 
 B 
 
242 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 non-existent in fact. Our dear Joan has had many such friends, 
 though I don't think one ever let her farm for him before. What 
 are his estates like ? " 
 
 " They are large, but I should think not very profitable." 
 
 " With Joan on them ? Probably not." 
 
 " Why did you go and see her if you don't like her ? " 
 
 " My dear, she loves me." 
 
 " Then you are very thankless." 
 
 Voightel laughed. 
 
 " She seems to have grown very proper ; admirably proper ; 
 she had got muffins and tea. In Damascus days it was champagne 
 and caviare. I reminded her of Damascus days. Eetrospection is 
 always so delightful. I think she did not wish the Prince she 
 farms for, to see too much of me. I wonder she lets you give 
 him tea-roses. Oh, a thousand pardons ; I meant nothing ! Only 
 
 I fancy my Lady Joan does not love you, and she is nasty when 
 she is crossed. ' G'est un joueur contre qui ne risn 2^erdre c'est 
 leaucoup gagner.' What was said of Tilly is as true of her. Oh, 
 you need not look so tranquilly scornful, and indeed I suppose 
 you wiU leave Eome very shortly, will you not ? Embittered, is 
 she ? Yes, I dare say she may be. It is not nice to marry a Mr. 
 Challoner, and sell teacups, and black Mrs. Grundy's shoes ; not 
 nice at all when one was born to better things, and it must 
 naturally sour one. Why do I go and see her ? It's the greatest 
 service I can ever do her. It's just the same with her as it is 
 with poor Tartar. Tartar can't say he's traced the Lost Waters 
 and lived in the middle of Africa, with a pat of butter on his 
 head for all his clothing, before mp, when I left him funking at 
 the coast, and have worn a pat of butter ten years myself. But 
 for tbat very reason I dine with Tartar in any city I meet him 
 in, out of pure Christian charity. ' Sharp old Voightel _ been 
 dining with me,' says Tartar ; and people believe then in his pat 
 of butter. ' Dear old Voightel's been dining with me,' says Lady 
 Joan : and then people believe in hers. Besides, if one cut all the 
 good-looking women that one knows something about, one would 
 never go out to dinner at all. It's just because I do know that 
 she's so thankful to have a chance of being civil to me. And 
 dining out is agreeable after the desert. Though I can live on 
 pulse I have a i^alate for oysters. Know all about her ? To be 
 sure I know all about her. Knew her in short frocks, and used 
 to give her sugar-plums : she spit at me when they weren't big 
 enough. Dear, dear ! Archie's daughter ought to havs married 
 a duke. How does she stand here? She's only scotched her 
 early mistakes, not killed 'em. No woman ever can kill 'em. 
 
 II n'y a que Us morts qui ne reviennenf pas, and ugly stories never 
 die. There's always somebody to keep them alive. Oh, of 
 course she knows that I know every one of her little slips," ho 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 243 
 
 said in conclusion, with that chuckle of grim satisfaction. " Slio 
 is always delighted to see me, fills my pipe, and brings me tlio 
 best Chartreuse, and don't lie more than once in ten minutes 
 about her doings in the East and dear old Palmerston. She is 
 talking Platonics and selling pictures now, they tell me : and 
 gets people to believe in both. Dear me ! well, the credulity of 
 human nature always was an unknown quantity. She's an artful 
 dodger, our dear Joan, but there — there — one should never say 
 anything." 
 
 With which he stretched his legs and^sipped his claret com- 
 fortably. 
 
 " Platonics and pictures," he echoed, with a chuckle. " A 
 charming combination; very popular, I dare say. Bless my 
 soul ! I saw loris to-day again, as I told you ; he did not seem 
 to me to go well with the tea and the tea-cakes. He would have 
 suited our moonlit roofs in Damascus much better. Ah! he'll 
 never get away from her, you know. I can see his fat^ in his 
 face. Jack Seville never would have got away if he hadn't died. 
 The only man to have a chance with her would be a thorough- 
 going bully — a bigger bully than she is. The only law she knows 
 is ' Faustrecht.' But this man's a gentleman, and weak. There's 
 no hope for him. He won't use the fist to her actually, or alle- 
 gorically. Isn't that a sketch of him over there? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Etoile was angered to feel herself colour. 
 
 Voightel walked over to the easel, and stood thera silently ; 
 then walked back again. 
 
 " Very like a Giorgione or a Titian ; very historic face ; you 
 ought to paint him in a coat of mail. Lord ! if he knew all 
 I could tell him ! " Voightel chuckled wickedly in his chair. 
 
 " Biit one should never say anything," he repeated cautiously, 
 hoping that his companion would ask him everything. 
 
 But Etoile made no sign: she tried, indeed, to change the 
 conversation. The loyalty of her temperament made her averse 
 to hearing any evil of a woman who still was — at least in Society's 
 sense of the much-tried word — her friend. 
 
 Voightel, however, who loved to hear his own tongue, as was 
 natural in a man who spent years in silence amidst unpeopled 
 deserts, and then came back to Europe to have his speech listened 
 to as an oracle's at princes' dinners and in public lecture-rooms 
 — Voightel would not leave the subject, and cheerily puffed out 
 with his smoke all he knew. 
 
 Voightel, who declared it was always best to say nothing, said 
 everything, in the usual contrast between theory and practice^ 
 said everything, with that chuckle of grim satisfaction with 
 which human nature surveys human frailty; an echo of the 
 laugh that Satan laughed behind the tree, and that Eve heard 
 
244 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 and never could forget, and so transmitted to her posterity ; tlie 
 laugh which Gounod has caught in the serenade of the Dio 
 delV Or. 
 
 Voightel laughed, with that laugh, as he told his Damascene 
 recollections. 
 
 "Why do you take her pipe and her Chartreuse and tell 
 me those things of her? It is unfair and ungenerous," said 
 Etoile, with some disgust and some impatience. To sit still 
 and hear an enemy unjustly dealt with seemed to her an un- 
 generous meanness. Etoile had the old-fashioned idea that one 
 should be even more scrupulous with a foe than with a friend. 
 The whole theme, too, annoyed her, and made her ill at ease and 
 dissatisfied with herself. 
 
 He rose to leave for his night-train for Brindisi ; but his eyes 
 were gloomy and troubled through his green spectacles. 
 
 " What are you so chivalrous for ? The woman is your foe, 
 or will be. My dear, the days of Fontenoy are gone out ; every- 
 body nowadays only tries to get the first fire, by hook or by 
 crook. Ours is an age of cowardice and cuirassed cannon: 
 chivalry is out of place in it." 
 
 " There can be no reason why she should be ever anything 
 except my friend," said Etoile, with a certain defiance ; but she 
 felt that her voice was weak, and her colour changed as Voightel 
 looked at the sketch on the easel. 
 
 " Of course, no reason in life," he said drily. " Only Archie 
 and I were fools to send you to her. Well, she is an agreeable 
 woman when she likes. Treat her as such; but keep her at 
 arm's length. If you can buy a thousand francs' worth of lace 
 of her, that will do to trim your maid's nightcaps, do. It will 
 not be dear at the price. You will not be able to sell it again 
 for more than a thousand pence, but it will be cheap at the price. 
 A bowl of milk to a cobra is the better part of valour. It enables 
 you to retreat unmolested. Mefiez-vous toujours. But indeed I 
 suppose you and she can never have any quarrel, you are so far 
 apart ; you are in the clouds, and she is busy among the steam 
 mills. Mefiez-vous: that is all. And remember that she is a 
 handsome woman, and a charming creature, and a dear soul ; 
 and, above all, she is Archie's daughter. Ah! that goes so 
 far with so many of us 1 She is Archie's daughter ; but all the 
 same the less seen of her the better. Still, buy the lace — oh, yes 
 — buy the lace ; and if you can bring your mind to details, let it 
 be some cotton rubbish off a village priest's surplice, and let her 
 think you think it Doge's point of fifteen hundred. My dear, 
 there is no money better laid out than what is spent in bowls of 
 milk. You don't see it — no, you will never charm snakes, then : 
 you will only get stung by them." 
 
 And Voightel rose to go on his way to the lands of the sun ; 
 
FBIENDSIIIP. 245 
 
 but as he left her he turned back and held out his hand once 
 more to Etoile with trouble in his keen old eyes. 
 
 " Mefiez-vous I — remember that— remember that. Eut I wish 
 I and Archie had not told you to come to her. And I wish you 
 were safe out of Eome. If you vjUI stay, buy laco enough, and 
 let her think you could get the French Government to purchase 
 an early master for the Louvi-e. Oh, my dear, if you are so 
 obstinate that you will not leave the swamp, and so foolhardy 
 that you will not set a bowl of milk, bitten you must be. It is 
 written." 
 
 When he left her the tears stood in his old resolute eyes, that 
 would have looked unwinking down the iron tubes of a line of 
 muskets levelled against him. 
 
 He felt a vague fear of her future. 
 
 She, who had been her own destiny, and never believed in any 
 force of fate or doom of destiny other than lies in the nature we 
 are born with, felt also a dim shapeless apprehension. She sat 
 long, thinking, beside her dying fire. 
 
 There are times when even on the bravest temper, the ironical 
 mockery, the cruel despotism of trifling circumstances, that have 
 made themelves the masters of our lives, the hewers of our fate, 
 must weigh with a sense of involuntary bondage, against which 
 to strive is useless. 
 
 The weird sisters were forms of awe and magnitude propor- 
 tionate to the woes they dealt out, to the destiny they wove. 
 But the very littleness of the daily chances that actually shape 
 fate is, in its discordance and its mockery, more truly terrible 
 and more hideously solemn — it is the little child's laugh at a 
 frisking kitten which brings down the avalanche and lays waste 
 the mountain side, or it is the cackle of the startled geese that 
 saves the Capitol. 
 
 To be the prey of Atropos was something at the least ; and 
 the grim Deus vult perdere, uttered in the delirium of pain, at the 
 least made the maddened soul feel of some slender account in 
 the sight of the gods and in the will of heaven. But we, who are 
 the children of mere accident and the sport of idlest opportunity, 
 have no siich consolation. 
 
 All that Voightel had told her of this woman, whose friend- 
 ship, as the world calls friendship, she had accepted, weighed on 
 her with oppression and disgust. 
 
 " What is it to me ? " she thought ; and in vain told her- 
 self so. 
 
 It was much to her, because loris had gTOwn to be much. 
 She scarcely knew it, but the pity she felt for him, the sympathy 
 that he had appealed for, drew her heart towards him as it had 
 never been drawn to any mortal creatui-e. The passion of other 
 men had annoyed, revolted, or wearied her, but his, speaking only 
 
246 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 as yet in his eyes and his voice, approaching her with soft 
 hesitation, with a tender and almost timid grace, stole on her 
 Tinawares and did not alarm her. 
 
 loris, swift to read all women, and incredulous of good faith 
 in them, was perplexed, and yet impressed by the possibilities of 
 passion, and the absolute absence of it, which he detected in 
 her. Something of the exultation and the pride of an tin- 
 paralleled conquest could, he felt, be the boast of the man who 
 should become her lover. 
 
 " He was the first that ever burst into that silent sea." 
 
 It would be like that Norse king's triumphant joy when the 
 sharp prow cut through untraversed waters, and his sight 
 ranged over untrodden shores. 
 
 He had made her first grow used to him and to his presence 
 near her. 
 
 With the noonday chimes of the churches and convents of 
 Eome she had been almost sure from the first days of their 
 acquaintance to hear the door nnclose and his voice ask, 
 " Peut-on ejitrer ? " with the soft gladness in it of one who is 
 sure that he is welcome. 
 
 Those sunny winter mornings; the dreamy smell of the burning 
 pines; the blue sky .beyond the window panes ; the clusters of hot- 
 house bloom full of soft colour ; the vague sense of exhilaration 
 and of languor which the Eoman air carries in it — she rose to 
 them all every day with the sweetest sense of happiness that had 
 ever touched her life. They were all blent together confusedly 
 and fragrantly, like her flowers in their baskets of moss. The 
 days were soft and radiant, and she awoke to each with a new 
 joy in her heart, that she thought was born of the new air and 
 the new light, and of the immemorial earth around. 
 
 The first awakening of the artist in Italy is like the sudden 
 blowing of a flower. All previous life seems but as a trance, 
 sad-coloured and heavy with monotony. All that were hueless 
 dreams before, take form and colour, and the vaguest ideals all 
 at once grow real. The hunger of the desire of the mind ceases, 
 and a dreamy, ethereal content steals like music on a south wind 
 over the intelligence, which ceases to question and accepts and 
 enjoys. 
 
 Man never seems so great nor God so near, nor mortal life so 
 infinite, as here. 
 
 The immensity of the past serves to heighten the charm of 
 the present. The very flower of human achievement has 
 blossomed here from the tree of life. Beside the Sun God un- 
 scathed through two thousand years, Art ceases to seem vain. 
 Beside the eternal well-spring of Egeria's fountain, passion may 
 cheat itself into faith that it is immortal. 
 
FBIENDSIIIP. 247 
 
 Art is strewn broadcast in the common ways, as tlio red 
 tulips, as the purple-capped anemones strew the common 
 pastures; and passion is in the air, in the light, in the wind; 
 it is in every burden of song down the still dark ways of the 
 city, and in every shadow that falls on the lustrous white sheen 
 of the fruit-scented fields. In other lands love may bo an 
 accident of life : in Italy it is life itself. 
 
 Now the breath of passing love-fancies which dulls the mirror 
 of most women's souls had never passed over her. She had lived, 
 so far as all love went, as untouched as any mountain flower that 
 blows where no steps of men have ever wandered. Her heart 
 was like a deep unruffled lake. 
 
 Passion must be remembered to be known, as the sun must 
 bo seen. 
 
 Men had wooed her with passion, sparing no pains. But a 
 thousand lovers whom she rejects will teach a woman nothing. 
 If they cannot waken her soul, or her senses, she will escape 
 from them as ignorant and as emotionless as though she had 
 dwelt all her days in a desert isle. One day there will come a 
 touch which will tell her all ; but till that comes she remains 
 ignorant, because unmoved. The woman who has a hundred 
 lovers, but who has not loved, is like a child that is blind. They 
 tell her the sun is there, and she thinks she knows what manner 
 of glory the sun's is. But, in truth, she knows nothing. She 
 sits in the dark, and plays with vain imaginings, like the sight- 
 less child. She may pity the pain of a wasted passion, that is 
 all. The pity which is not born from experience is always cold. 
 It cannot help being so. It does not understand. 
 
 " You know nothing of love," Voightel had said to her one 
 day years before in Paris. " It is very strange, you, whom all 
 the world thinks have had such a j'eimesse orageuse, andwhom so 
 many men are willing to adore — you know no more of it than 
 that white gardenia flower in your girdle." 
 
 "Except in theory," she answered him. "I have read so 
 much of it. It is the theme of the world " 
 
 "Bead ! " echoed the old wise man with scorn. " Oh, child, 
 what use is that? Eead! — the inland dweller reads of tho 
 sea, and thinks he knows it, and believes it to be as a magnified 
 duck-pond, and no more. Can he tell anything of the light and 
 the shade ; of the wave and the foam ; of the green that is near, 
 of the blue that is far; of the opaline changes, now pure as a dove's 
 throat, now warm as aflame ; of the great purple depths and the 
 fierce blinding storm; and the delight and the fear, and the 
 hurricane rising like a horse snorting for war, and all that is 
 known to the man who goes down to the great deep in ships 1 
 Passion and the sea are like one anotlier. "Words shall not 
 tell them, nor colour pourtray them. The kiss that bm-us, and 
 
248 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 the salt spray that stings — let the poet excel and the painter 
 endeavour, yet the best they can do shall say nothing to the 
 woman without a lover, and the landsman who knows not the 
 sea. If you would live — love. You willlive in an hour a lifetime ; 
 and you will wonder how you bore your life before. But as an 
 artist all will be over with you — that I think." 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 As Etoile sat by her fire, and the train bore Yoightel southward 
 and eastward through the snow, loris ascended the stairs of his 
 prison-house. 
 
 It was ten o'clock ; there was a ball for which his escort was 
 commanded ; he was dressed for the evening, some Orders hung 
 at his button-hole. His own sentiments were disregarded as to 
 his orders. 
 
 "Decorations are out of place at private houses," he had 
 constantly urged; "they should only be worn at courts and 
 embassies. I assure you, ma chire, that anywhere else they are 
 vulgar." 
 
 " Put them on when you go with me" said the Lady Joan 
 sharply. She knew her own spheres and orbits better than ho 
 did : the bankers and consuls' wives, the small gentilities, and 
 the freeborn republicans, and all Shoddy in general, are very 
 much impressed by any decorations. 
 
 The Lady Joan was alone when he entered, and was lying on 
 her sofa. Mr. Challoner was sleeping the sleep of the just in an 
 after-dinner doze in his own little room. 
 
 "How late you are, lo!" she cried, and lifted herself, and 
 threw her arm about his throat. 
 
 He yielded, and felt ashamed. 
 
 His heart smote him for a sort of unfaithfulness. But it was 
 not to her that he felt faithless. 
 
 "Why didn't you come to dinner?" she asked him, caressing 
 his silky dark hair. " Eobert was as cross as a bear. You get 
 very uncertain now. What do you do with yourself ? " 
 
 " I have to be much oftener at the Court, and I spend so 
 much time in that weary Messina Bureau," said loris, and he 
 sank down on a low stool, and leaned his forehead on her knee. 
 He felt weary, out of tune, impatient of himself and her. He 
 felt a coward, and untrue. 
 
FEIENDSEIP. 249 
 
 Nevertheless, she was alone; the lamps burned low; the 
 instincts of long habit were strong with him. 
 
 This iDassion had become a habit, and when passion and habit 
 long lie in company it is only slowly and with incredulity that 
 habit awakes to find its companion fled, itself alone. 
 
 The clock ticked on, the hours went by ; she was happy, and 
 he did not care to realise that he was false. 
 
 Midnight came. She left him to go to her room and change 
 her attire, and came back radiant with black-and-gold woven 
 Eastern stui3fs and a train of amber silk, and bade him clasp her 
 bracelets, and bade him see if the diamond spilla were set right 
 in her braids. 
 
 " It's one o'clock. Let's be off, dear ! " she said as she thrust 
 her hand into a glove; and he brought her satin cloak, and 
 wrapped her up in it. 
 
 They went together through the quiet house and down the 
 dusky stairs. Mr. Challoner was still sleeping the sleep of the 
 just, but by this time he was not in his den, but on his bed. 
 
 The jar of the closing house-door woke him ; he turned com- 
 fortably, and thought how glad he was he had not to go out in 
 the snow to a ball. 
 
 Their cab joined the long string of slowly-creeping carriages, 
 and in due time they were set down, and went together into the 
 palace, with its modern upholstery all ablaze with wax lights, 
 and very much like a transformation scene in a pantomime, with 
 its pink-tinted lamps and its paradise of palms. 
 
 This great ball was being given at the Anglo-American 
 bankers', the Macscrips, who were very rich people, and always 
 spent ten thousand francs on the flowers, and said aloud that 
 they did so. 
 
 It was not the highest society that went to the Macscrips, but 
 it was a kind of society that Lady Joan enjoyed very much better 
 than the highest ; a society that was reverential to her because 
 she was a Perth-Douglas, that believed all she said about dear 
 old Palmerston or anybody else, and did not call in question her 
 knowledge of the Arts — a society in which she could waltz all 
 night, and talk about " lo," and feel that she was Somebody — as 
 she never could feel with Princess Vera's contemptuous gaze on 
 her, or under the inquisition of Lady Cardiff's eye-glasses. 
 
 She went up the crowded stairs and into the reception-room 
 with loris behind her, and Mrs. Macscrip, who was a very cen- 
 sorious and particular little person, received her with delight. 
 
 " So kind of you ! But where's dear Mr. Challoner? Is he 
 not coming ? " 
 
 "He's not very' well to-night, but I've brought lo," said the 
 Lady Joan, nodding to a dozen acquaintances. 
 
 " Delighted — too kind of joix—charmee de vous voir, Prince ! " 
 
250 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 said Mrs, Macscrip, amidst a tide of incoming people that surged 
 about her like sea-waves. 
 
 " Toujours voire serviteur ! " murmured loris, witli his perfect 
 bow, that had been admired at Frohsdorff, at Vienna, and at the 
 Court of Petersburg ; and then followed the Lady Joan's black- 
 and-amber fan-shaped skirts, which were as a beacon from whose 
 rays he must not stray. 
 
 She plunged into the delights of the evening, and he bore the 
 weariness of it as well as he could. 
 
 He never danced. She danced all night. It was very tire- 
 some to him to wade through the crush and heat of the thronged 
 rooms, with the noise of the band or the tongues of the chatterers, 
 always dinning in his ear. He had been to so many of these 
 things ; alone, he would not have been amused amidst this mixed 
 and second-rate society, but alone, he could at least have gone 
 after leaning in a doorway twenty minutes. With her no such 
 escape was possible. 
 
 To hold her fan, to offer his arm, to bow five hundred times, 
 to murmur " Comme vous etes helle I " to women he though hideous, 
 to say " Enchante de vous trouver ! " to bores he met every day ; 
 to be always at hand if she wanted to go and get an ice, or to see 
 the lamjHlit garden, or to cross the room to a friend's sofa — these 
 were his alternate diversions for six mortal hours. It was a 
 tedious martyrdom. He envied Mr. Challoner at home and 
 asleep. 
 
 The sun was up when at last it pleased her to get into a cab 
 and bid him light her a cigarette. 
 
 " You've been as dull as ditchwater all night, lo," she said 
 as she took it; "and how pale you are ! Now look at 7ne. I'm 
 as fresh as paint." 
 
 He went home once more to his own house by the break of 
 day and threw himself on his bed, to court in vain the heavy 
 slumber of morning. He was unhappy, and his conscience was 
 ill at ease, and he could not lull it to rest with sophisms. 
 
 "Avoir menti, c'est avoir souffert. N'etre Jamais soi, /aire 
 illusion toujours, c'est une fatigue. Eire caressant, se retenir, se 
 reprimer, toujours etre sur le qui-vive, se gueiter sans cesse, 
 chatouiller le poignard, sucrer le poison, veiUer sur la rondeur 
 de son geste et la musique de savoix, ne pas avoir un regardr—^efn 
 n'est plus difficile, rien n'est plus douloureux." 
 
 So wrote a great master ; and so suffered loris. 
 
 In the early days of an illicit passion concealment is charming ; 
 every secret stairway of intrigue has a sweet surprise at its 
 close ; to be in conspiracy with one alone against all the rest of 
 humanity is the most seductive of seductions. Love lives best 
 in this soft twilight, where it only hears its own heart and one 
 other's beat in the solitude. 
 
FBIENDSUIP. 251 
 
 Btit wlicn the reverse of the medal is tnruecl; when every 
 step on the stairs has been traversed and tired of, when, instead 
 of the heart's beat, there is but an upbraiding voice, when it is 
 no longer with one but from one that concealment is needed, then 
 the illicit passion is its own Nemesis, then nothing were ever 
 drearier, wearier, more anxious, or more fatiguing than its 
 devious paths become, and they seem to hold the sated wanderer 
 in a labyrinth of which he knows, and knowing hates, every 
 wind, and curve, and coil, yet out of which it seems to him he 
 will never make his way back again into the Lght of whole- 
 some day. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXYI. 
 
 That same night that the Lady Joan drew her yellow skirts 
 though the ballroom crowds, and drew her lover behind it, to 
 the admiration and approbation of all who beheld her, a sledge, 
 furiously driven, was crossing one of the vast level tracks of 
 Kussia in the teeth of a storm of snow and wind. 
 
 For hour after hour there was no break in the wide white 
 track save when, at some wretched group of hovels or some 
 small walled hamlet, the steaming and half-frantic horses were 
 changed. The frozen plains stretched all around, dotted here 
 and there by the black stems of stunted pines. The snow fell 
 ceaselessly. Now and then through the roar of the wind there 
 came as the wind lulled for a moment the sound of a wolf-pack 
 baying afar off. The sledge went on, the horses tore their way 
 through drift and hurricane. 
 
 Every now and then a voice from within cried into the bitter 
 air, " Faster ! faster ! for the love of heaven ! " The voice was 
 feeble and feverish. 
 
 "We had better stop, Fedorivanovitch," urged a stronger 
 voice tenderly; but the other always answered, "No, no — on! 
 on!" 
 
 And the voice was obeyed, for it had the sound of death 
 in it. 
 
 The road was lost sight of; all tracks were obliterated; even 
 the burning oil in the lamps was frozen ; the snow fell always. 
 The horses were urged onwards in the dark, for the night was 
 black, though the world was white, Verst upon verst was 
 covered of that horrible, silent highway. The baying of wolves 
 
252 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 was heard nearer. The wind whirled the faUing snow round 
 and round in endless gyrations. It was a night when men die 
 like frozen sheep. 
 
 Still the feeble voice within cried always, " No, no — on ! on ! " 
 and it was obeyed. The glimmer of dull lights at length grew 
 near, and showed where one more posting station was. 
 
 " It is time," muttered the driver, for he knew that in another 
 half-hour his good beasts would fall to rise no more. He iiogged 
 them onward towards that faint light; the snow ceased for a 
 little while to fall; the bay of the pack behind them grew 
 distant once more. 
 
 " The Father be praised ! " said the driver as he pulled his 
 horses up half-dead before the cluster of miserable dwellings. 
 
 It was in the middle of the night, but there were people 
 awake. The postmaster came out with a lantern into the cold, 
 which was enough to freeze every living thing. Through the 
 open door, from which the snow was cleared, the light of a lamp 
 streamed. A servant got down from the sleigh. 
 
 " Hold the light here," he said, with an ashen face. 
 
 " Is he worse ? " said the driver, leaving his quivering beasts 
 for a moment. The man snatched the lantern and held it so that 
 he could see into the interior of the tarantass. 
 
 " Dear God ! " he cried, with a great shout. 
 
 Then, trembling with another tremor than that of cold, he 
 tore away the furs and wraps. The post people saw the form 
 of a young man. The head was sunk upon the breast; from 
 the breast blood had oozed out over the costly furs and frozen 
 there. 
 
 " He has but swooned, he has but swooned ! "^the people 
 cried. The driver added, " Only half an hour ago he was crying 
 to me to go faster." 
 
 " The night is death ! " cried the servant, beside] himself. 
 " It is Fedorivanovitch Souroff. Help me carry him within — 
 quick ! quick ! quick ! " 
 
 A dozen stout arms aided him to lift his master from the 
 sleigh. He was quite a young man, of singular beauty, and he 
 wore the uniform of the Cuirassiers of the Guard ; his face was 
 without colour, his lips scarcely breathed ; blood still oozed from 
 his chest and froze as the outer air reached it. 
 
 " His wound has broken out afresh ! " cried the servant, and 
 "wept as children weep. 
 
 They carried his master within the posting-house and laid 
 him down on the skins and rugs of his sledge on the floor by the 
 warmth of the stove. 
 
 It was a poor, miserable place; but the people were kind 
 from pity and sorrow, not merely from respect for the sword, 
 and for a great noble's name. Women were crying; they 
 
FRIENDSniP. 253 
 
 brewed hot tea quickly ; they prayed to their saints ; they did 
 what they knew. 
 
 " But on such a night to be out," they cried, " with a wound ! 
 it is death." 
 
 " It is death," said his servant. " But he was in such haste 
 to reach Petersburg be would have no delay. What can we do 
 — what can we do? Is there a surgeon ? " 
 
 There was none nearer than at a town they named lying 
 many versts away. 
 
 The officer meanwhile was dying. He had never moved since 
 they had laid him there upon the black bearskins from his 
 sleigh ; his head had fallen back, his eyes were closed ; the drops 
 of tea they tried to force through his teeth only wetted his lips ; 
 they had torn his linen open and his shirt, but they could not 
 staunch the blood. It flowed sluggishly, feebly, but it flowed 
 always, and looked dark and clotted. It came from the lungs. 
 
 He had been wounded, by a spear, six weeks before, in the 
 chest. 
 
 The people stood round him appalled, silent, helpless ; the 
 women sobbed ; his servant kneeled beside him. Without, the 
 snow fell and the winds howled and the wolves. The dull 
 yeUow rays of the lamp fell on the pallid and delicate beauty of 
 his face. 
 
 Suddenly his eyes opened wide, he stretched his arms out, he 
 gazed with heartsick yearning into the circle of strange faces 
 that were about his death-bed. 
 
 " Dorotea ! " he cried aloud, and his hands felt the empty air 
 feebly as for some beloved thing they sought to touch. 
 
 " Dorotea ! " he cried once more. 
 
 Then he fell back exhausted ; the blood gushed with a 
 quicker current from his breast ; he sighed once — wearily — and 
 then was dead. 
 
 if i^ * ie * * 
 
 " That is the name of the woman he loved," said the soldier 
 that was both his servant and his foster-brother. " I have a 
 written packet to take to her, his cross for his mother, his sword 
 for the Tzar. It is a singing woman that he loved. Perhaps 
 she is singing now, and he lies dead." 
 
 ^L m * it * * 
 
 She was singing — in the Romeo and Oiulietta of Gounod, in 
 the Opera House of St. Petersburg. It was a great night, by 
 Imperial command. The Court was present in all its brilliancy, 
 and not even the presence of the Tzar could restrain the 
 delirium of the overflowing house. Never before, so they vowed, 
 had the beauty of Dorotea Coronis been so great or her marvel- 
 lous voice so divine. In her white robes, in the balcony scene, 
 
254 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 ■with the diamonds in her hair and on her breast, her supreme 
 loveliness vanquished even the magic of her voice. She was so 
 beautiful that for some moments the volleys of applause 
 welcomed only her beauty, and would not let her voice be heard. 
 They adored the scene, and forgot the sieger. She was the rival 
 of herself. 
 
 Then, when at last silence came and let her voice be heard, 
 that seemed like a lark's to lose itself in the very heights of 
 heaven, the hushed and breathless crowds forgot her beauty and 
 believed that they listened to the angels. 
 
 She had had many a night of triumph ; many a night when 
 great theatres had rung with the thunders of a people's homage, 
 and a multitude beside itself with rapture had thrust her horses 
 from the shafts and drawn her to her home. But no night had 
 perhaps ever equalled this one. 
 
 When the opera was ended Imperial gifts were brought to 
 her in the choicest shapes that jewels could be found to take, 
 and crowns and wreaths and clusters of flowers, all holding some 
 gem of price, covered her dressing-chamber with their costly 
 lumber. 
 
 When she left the Opera House the'whole city'seemed in com- 
 motion. It was a white city, for it was still midwinter ; but a 
 million lights sparkled everywhere [above the snow. A brilliant 
 guard was escorting the Imperial carriages ; there was a guard 
 also for herself — a volunteer guard of many of the highest 
 gentlemen of the land, bearing torches and shouting vivats in 
 her honour. They ran with her to her house, a brilliant medley 
 of fantastic figures, wrapped in furs and waving torches. The 
 thunder of their plaudits rang up to the clear steel-hued sky of 
 the North, where the stars were shining, so intense in their 
 brilliancy that they seemed to pierce the frozen air with spears 
 of light. Across one-half the heavens, also, there was outspread 
 in all its wonder the rose-red rays and golden flames of the 
 aurora borealis. 
 
 "Oh, the night of nights! " cried in ecstasy the old Spanish 
 woman who had never left her since she first had sung in 
 Seville. 
 
 Dorotea Coronis did not answer ; she sat before her mirror, 
 with her hands listlessly clasped, weary and silent. What was 
 triumph to her ? A story stale and without power to charm. 
 What use were all the voices of earth adoring her ? She only 
 longed to hear one that was never now upon her ear. 
 
 " Oh, my love, my love ! oh, my soul ! " she had said in her 
 heart all the while that the flood of song had poured from her 
 lips, and she had seen nothing of the great throngs that listened 
 to her, nothing of the deluge of light and the sea of faces ; she 
 had only seen in memory the eyes of Fedor. 
 
FRIENDSniP. 255 
 
 A great supper waited for her, where princes were the hosts, 
 in a very bower of camellias and roses that gold had made bloom 
 whilst the Neva was ice and the whole land was snow ; but she 
 sent word that she was unwell, and sat alone in her chamber, 
 disrobed, with her loose hair hanging over her, whilst the 
 aurora burned in the midnight skies, and the old Spaniard, 
 crouching in the threshold, told her beads. 
 
 There was a little open casket before her ; there were letters 
 in it — nothing but letters, and one lock of a man's fine fair 
 kair. 
 
 She read all the letters one by one from first to last, as she 
 had read them a thousand times. The first were a mere few 
 formal lines of such coui-tesy as strangers pay; the others, 
 eloquent utterances of an absorbing passion, now alive with 
 hope, now desolate with despair ; the last, words that made light 
 of a spear-wound received in a mountain skirmish, and that 
 burned with a love that made all physical pain indifferent, nay, 
 unfelt. 
 
 " You call me cold," she thought as she read. " Oh, my love ! 
 oh, my soul ! you do not know. What were the world's scorn, 
 the world's shame to me — the vile world that harbours the 
 prostitute and the pander in its high places, and hugs a lie and 
 all that speak one? The world! that stones innocence like a 
 poor dog called mad, and kisses the clay foot of any gilded sin ! 
 What were the world to me ? Think you I would not welcome 
 the worst that it could do to me to buy one hour with you ? But, 
 my love, my soul, I want to save you from myself. Oh, God ! 
 give me strength to be strong, to ' be cold,' to bear your reproach, 
 to bear your pain ! Mother of Christ, give me strength to keep 
 you free— it is for you— for you — for you ! " 
 
 Then she warmed the letters in her breast as if they were 
 the pale cheeks of some little ailing child, and clasped them to 
 her, and rocked herself to and fro wearily, as one whose burden 
 was greater than her force. 
 
 The door of her chamber unclosed without the sound reach- 
 ing her ear; with a noiseless step her husband entered and 
 approached her, seeing in the mirror before her the letters 
 clasped to her bosom, the white grief of her bowed face, the 
 great tears that stole one by one from under her closed eyelids. 
 
 He stretched his hand over her shoulder and, with a clutch 
 as chill and hard as though his hand was in a glove of ateel, ho 
 grasped the letters that lay in her bare breast. 
 
 Then the Due de Santorin smiled. 
 
 " We have wanted these a long time, my lawyers and I," he 
 said slowly. "You will have no more like them, madame. 
 Your lover is dead ! " 
 
256 FBIENDSHIP 
 
 CHAPTEE XX^Tl. 
 
 lOKiS awoke very weaiy in the morning. 
 
 He had slept but little, and that feverishly. _ 
 
 The shrill shrieks, and yells, and whooping cries of the maskers 
 scare sleep from all eyes on the last Bights of Carnival in Rome. 
 
 With sunrise the maskers had gone to their homes, worn out 
 with noisy riot and rapture, the sun came tenderly in through 
 the orange boughs by his casement; some robins were singing on 
 the window-sill ; but he awoke feverish and depressed, and turned 
 from the waking smile of the day. 
 
 " N'es-tu pas mien, 
 Ah ! Je vois que tu m'aimes bien, 
 Tu rougis quand je te regarde," 
 
 he murmured, as he closed his eyes against the light, as the old 
 words of the poet, dead nearly three centuries ago, drifted through 
 his misty thoughts. It was not the woman whose yellow skirts 
 he had followed through the close crowds of the ball-room that 
 recalled these tender old words to his memory as he awoke. 
 
 Then he remembered with a shudder that it was Fat Tuesday, 
 last day of carnival, last night of masquerade. 
 
 His friend loved the roar and the riot of carnival ; she was 
 at the height of her happiness, throned in a break, disguised, 
 and with wire vizor, flinging the showers of chalk over the crowd, 
 and sustaining the duel of the sweetmeats with the balconies. 
 There was a robust vigour of insatiable enjoyment in her through- 
 out the mad pranks of those headlong frolics, which once had 
 attracted, which now disgusted him. She herself paid little heed 
 whether he were disgusted or attracted ; he was hers, as much as 
 the live bird tied to her bouquet. 
 
 She donned her wire mask and her costume, Turkish, Chinese, 
 Moyen-age, or what not, and amused herself with that zest in 
 the masquerade which made her as boisterous and gleeful as any 
 lad of fifteen summers. The noisy, dusty, riotous, shrieking 
 pandemonium was paradise to her, and woe betide him if he had 
 not his carriage ready at her door, with its steeds pranked out in 
 fooling guise and its cushions laden with confetti and flowers. 
 
 He rose to this weary duty with a sigh. In days of boyhood 
 he had loved well enough the merriment and graceful mum- 
 meries of carnival, which then had been full of a colour and a 
 light which have now passed for ever away from the carnival as 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 257 
 
 from tlio world ; now it seemed to him, both he and the world 
 had grown grave and fatigued^ and could never any more shake 
 their joy-bells without effort. 
 
 Lady Joan did not care what he felt or did not feel ; she sent 
 him word to mind and be ready at three o'clock. 
 
 Ho bade his servant see that the break and the horses were 
 ready, and then went out of the house to the house of Etoile. 
 
 She was so used to see him there by noonday that she only 
 looked up with a smile as he entered, and went on with a study 
 she was painting. 
 
 He looked at it quickly : it was his own portrait. 
 
 " Go in the light, yonder," she said to him, without answering 
 his glad rapid words of surprise. " I made this study from 
 memory ; I want to finish it. I shall call it Hamlet." 
 
 " Hamlet ! And why ? " 
 
 " Because you are very like Hamlet ; you will never be sure of 
 what you wish " 
 
 " I am only too sure of what I wish," said loris, almost in- 
 audibly, and his eyes dwelt on her with a sombre j^assion in 
 them that, like a magnetism, drew up her own regard to his. 
 
 She looked a moment, then shuddered a little, and grew 
 pale. 
 
 He kissed her left hand as it hung by her side, and kept it in 
 his own. 
 
 In the silence they could hear the beating of each other's 
 hearts. 
 
 The servant threw open the door, and they started as if they 
 were guilty. He left her side quickly, and went and stood by 
 the hearth. An old German musician had entered, a little feeble 
 old man, unknown to fame, but who had all the music of his 
 country at his fingers' ends, and in his heart and soul. 
 
 " You bade me bring you the Passion Musik of the sublime 
 Bach," he said, with the humble fond look at her as of a dog to 
 the only creature kind to him. The old man knew, heard, saw 
 nothing but his music. 
 
 With a timid salutation to loris, whom he did not know, he 
 shambled to the grand piano standing in the shadow, and ran 
 his hands over it and began to play unbidden. The solemn, 
 tender, mystic melodies filled the room with their power. 
 
 She motioned to loris to stay where he was, and continued 
 her painting. The light fell on his delicate features, thoughtful 
 and mysterious, like the heads of Bronzino's and the old Flo- 
 rentine painters' portraits : the odours of the jonquils and 
 hyacinths were in the air, sweet and tranquil as peace ; the 
 music stole softly from the distant shadows, where the musician 
 played on unseen, unwitting of the flight of time. 
 
 loris was unhappy, yet content ; unquiet, yet lulled to a 
 
 s 
 
258 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 dreamy repose. Etoile was very pale, and her hand, as it 
 moved, had lost its firm, ■unerring mastery, and trembled ever so 
 little. Yet, when their eyes met across the sunlight and the 
 heads of the flowers, they were both happy. 
 
 They did not need words; the music was the fittest inter- 
 preter of both their hearts. 
 
 Tv/o o'clock rang from the bells without. 
 
 Both started to think that time had flown thus by them 
 unnoted. They had scarcely s^Doken, yet the hoiir was, perhaps, 
 the sweetest of both their lives and the purest of his. Never 
 afterwards could one of them, at least, hear the music of those 
 themes without the hot tears rushing to her eyes, and that short 
 sweet serene hour returning to her like "remembered kisses 
 after death." 
 
 Two o'clock rang, and struck from clock, and bells, and 
 Princess Vera sent a message begging that she would not forget 
 to come to her balcony in an hour's time. 
 
 " The Corso ! " said Etoile, in impatience, and turned the wet 
 panel with his portrait on it to the Avail. 
 
 The Corso ! 
 
 loris remembered his tyrant. 
 
 " I, too, must go to the Corso," he said, with a restless sigh. 
 
 She did not ask with whom; she did not even look at him. 
 He took his leave whilst the old German still played on through 
 the sad intricate melodies of Schumann and Chopin. 
 
 He went out of her presence serener, happier, with the 
 melodies about him like the very breath of religion, and the 
 fragrance of the flowers seeming to follow him in symbol of a 
 pure soul opened to his gaze and touch. 
 
 He went, and drove the horses to the Casa Challoner; and 
 down the stairs came his mistress, masked, and with a spangled 
 domino. Behind her were Guido Serravalle as a trovatore, with 
 his guitar, and Douglas Gra3me as a Louis Treize mousquetaire, 
 and all with tin shovels in their hands to bespatter the crowd 
 with their chalk. 
 
 " You look as dull as a grave-digger, lo. "Why didn't you 
 dress up in something? " said the Lady Joan, as she tossed him 
 a mask on her doorstep; she gave a piercing carnival yell, 
 and jumped into the break ; young Guido strummed his guitar, 
 Mimo ran up puffing and breathless, fat and absurd, clad as a 
 Condottiere, and banging the stejD with his sword; the Count di 
 Sestri, stately and elegant, dressed as Cesare Borgia in azure and 
 white, came also. 
 
 " En route ! " cried the Lady Joan, with rapture, and they 
 rolled away, soon mixed with the jostling press of carriages and 
 cars, maskers and mummers, under the white clouds of the 
 flying chalk. 
 
FItlENDSHIP. 259 
 
 loris, all tlic dreary hours through, looked up at the brilliant 
 balcony of the ^Princess Vera, but ho did not see Etoile there. 
 He was glad. 
 
 The Corso over, ending with its fairy war of the Moccoletti, 
 till a sea of fire sparkled from the Porta del Popolo to the 
 Eeprisa dei Barberi, they went to dinner in a private room at 
 Spillmann's, a very gay, noisy, and costly dinner, that lasted 
 long, and thence, at midnight, the Lady Joan slipping into a 
 black domino instead of a spangled one, as a snake slips its skin, 
 passed to the Veglione. 
 
 He was not relieved from his attendance on her until four 
 o'clock on the following morning, when, tired for once, and 
 ho3Jse from screaming in falsetto through her mask, she con- 
 sented to leave the crowded foyer and go home. 
 
 loris did not go home. He walked about the quiet streets in 
 the clear crisp air, as the grey in the sky showed the breaking 
 day, and went far out of his way to pass the old palace on the 
 Montecavallo. 
 
 "She has been asleep all these hours," he thought, and 
 looked up at the dark grated casements which shut in the sleep 
 of Etoile. 
 
 How horrible it seemed to him that a woman could grin and 
 pcream and riot through the day and night, and give and take 
 the veiled indecencies and salacious jests of that masked motley 
 mob of the masquerade at the Apollo ! 
 
 Some gardeners were entering the Colonna gardens. He 
 entered with them, and dropped down on the bench where he 
 had found Etoile sitting a few days before. 
 
 Day was breaking over the vastness of Rome, outspread in its 
 grevness and calm beneath. 
 
 He looked at it till the tears rose in his eyes and dimmed his 
 sight, as the light of dawn trembled over the city. 
 
 " Oh, the things that I dreamt in my youth ! " he thought : 
 and his heart was sick ; for he felt that his youth and his dreams 
 might all have resurrection, but at the gates of the grave where 
 they were buried a dread shape stood, and barred the way; and 
 the spectre was the ghost of a dead passion. 
 
260 FRIENDSniP. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVin. 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. Challoner, who was a virtuous man and did not 
 go to masked balls, and was a wise man and let no spectres rise 
 to him, was having a cup of tea comfortably in bed ; after that 
 he had a cold bath, the morning papers, an interview with his 
 little girl and the governess, and then proceeded at a leisurely 
 pace through the streets, across the water, to a certain grim old 
 mansion in the centre of the Trastevere, and towards one of the 
 many doors that opened on its grimy wide staircase of stone, a 
 door that had been made out of keeping with its surroundings 
 by modern additions of plate glass and brass plates, and bore on 
 it in conspicuous letters: — "Societa Italiana-Inglese del Ponte 
 Calabrese-Siciliano," and had underneath this inscription : — 
 " Bureau della Direzione." 
 
 When Mr. Challoner had mounted the grimy staircase and 
 had passed the modernised door, he was generally very happy, 
 even happier than when with his little girl and her governess. 
 
 To begin with, he was a director, a thing which he always 
 liked being. The word director had an important, responsible, 
 pompous kind of sound that was balm to him ; he had been a 
 singularly unlucky man, but the word director always blinded 
 him to this fact — it has a successful sound about it ; in spite of 
 the innumerable bubbles and awful earthquakes that it too 
 often heralds, the word director always sounds like wealth and 
 public esteem. But sweeter, even than for this, was his oflfice 
 desk to Mr. Challoner, because it symbolised all his substitutes 
 for that more vulgar vengeance which ignorant men wondered 
 he had never taken on loris. 
 
 loris was wearied and impatient of this speculation into 
 which he had been beguiled. 
 
 Things were going wrong ; all these dreary and complicated 
 troubles into which he had been drawn were each day knitting 
 themselves tighter and more intricately. 
 
 Mr. Challoner had a knack of making things go wrong quite 
 unintentionally: on the banks of Orontes and Euphrates they 
 had gone so wrong that hundreds and thousands and even 
 millions of pounds, and the whole name and fame of a very fine 
 business, had tumbled into those historic rivers and been seen 
 no more. 
 
 "A mauuais jeu bonne raine" said Mi'. Challoner, and the 
 more unfortunate he was, the more impcrtnrbabjy did he set his 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 261 
 
 unchangeable countenance in a stern and blank repose, off •which 
 it was impossible for anybody to take any diagnosis of any of his 
 feelings, and begin to play again with shares for his cards, and 
 the round world for his roulette wheel. It was in a very small 
 way indeed, but it was as sweet to him as if he had been a 
 Eothschild. His wife enjoyed selling a cracked tea-cup, and ho 
 enjoyed floating an obscure company. He had not succeeded in 
 anything, and in all probabiUty never would, but that did not 
 interfere with his enjoyment. 
 
 If he had gone out in a wintry dawn, and shot at lor is, it 
 would have been uncomfortable and unsatisfactory : even if ho 
 had seen loris lying dead on the turf it would not have pleased 
 him particularly ; he was a slow-blooded and humane person ; 
 but to seo the money of loris drojiped down into bottomless 
 abysses of speculation, and the honour of loris imperilled in 
 hastily and ignorantly assumed responsibilities, did please him a 
 little in a sluggish sort of way, and made him smile when he was 
 safely shut up alone, examining loris's signatures, in the Bureau 
 of the Messina Bridge. It was a vengeance much more appro- 
 priate to his era than the shot in the wintry dawn would have 
 been. 
 
 Mr. Challoner was essentially a man of his time. He could 
 pocket all affronts, and conceal all resentments ; he could turn 
 pompous placid phrases when his veins were turning cold in 
 wrath ; he could enter a drawing-room behind his wife and 
 loris, and endure imperturbably the smile of the drawing-room 
 crowd ; but he was human, nevertheless, and when he saw the 
 fortunes of his wife's friend dropping — dropping — dropping into 
 the Sicilian sands and seas, he smiled. Mr. Challoner knew by 
 experience that curses may come home again, but money never 
 does. Mr. Challoner would sit at his desk in this large and 
 ancient palace that held the Messina oflQces, and count up 
 columns of iigures, and feel content — so content that when his 
 wife would call for him in the twilight, as she did sometimes, he 
 would say quite good-humouredly, and ho was not a good- 
 humoured man — " And loris — is loris with you, my love ? " 
 
 Yet in this, the fourth season of its commercial existence, the 
 bridge at the Straits of Messina could not be said to be a 
 success ; indeed, it had stoj^ped short at its very commencement. 
 The piles were there in the sand for anybody who liked to look 
 at them, but they could not be said to advance traffic, and they 
 did not satisfy the shareholders. 
 
 It costs a good deal of money to drive piles into sand, and a 
 good many millions of francs were driven in with them, and the 
 crabs ran in and out the piles, and the waves washed them, but 
 there was no bridge to be seen in the soft ambient air spanning 
 the waters. To be sure there was always the bridge upon paper. 
 
262 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 in the clearest and most colossal designs that could delight the 
 soul of any engineer ; and the engineers said that the piles in 
 the sand were all that could be reasonably expected from the 
 number of years and the number of millions. But everybody is 
 not an engineer to understand this, and the shareholders were 
 not satisfied ; indeed, whenever are shareholders satisfied ? 
 
 If you give them ten per cent, and a bonus, they are 
 frightened : they think you are going too fast ; if you give them 
 nothing at all, and make them pay up, they are equally 
 frightened, and rush and sell out and ruin you and themselves. 
 
 There are only the swine at Gadara that ever could equal 
 shareholders in silliness, so the Lady Joan said ; but she was 
 not herself very angry when the shares of the Messina Bridge 
 dropped from zenith to zero ; she was quite good-tempered 
 about it ; she was only a promoter, not a shareholder, and 
 sensibly said that you cannot expect colossal works to be rattled 
 off in a day. 
 
 Into the sand and the sea, with the piles, however, had gone 
 a good deal of money, not of hers. " I'm too poor to put money 
 in ; I can only give 'em my brains," she always said pleasantly in 
 all affairs of the kind. But loris had put his money in, allured 
 by those fair white parchment designs with all the engineers' 
 lines and dots and figures; and when he went down to the Gulf 
 of Faro, and looked over the blue serene sea where the bridge 
 should have been, and was not, his heart sank as lead would 
 have sunk in the sea. And his heart smote him too, thinking of 
 those shareholders whom in all innocence and good faith he hail 
 so unhapi^ily helped to mislead ; and he could not laugh when 
 the Lady Joan called them his Gadarene swine. 
 
 Mr. Challoner did smile, as far as the rigidity of his counte- 
 nance could ever be said to do so. 
 
 He had been a shepherd of the sheep that were as silly as 
 swine, and had been well-paid to be a shepherd, and could sit 
 at his handsome desk in the old palace where the bureau was, 
 serenely and without responsibility. 
 
 It was only loris that was responsible. 
 
 The bridge by the Gulf of Faro was one of those doomed 
 enterprises which open like a blaze of fireworks on a king's 
 birthday, and in a little while leave but some charred sticks and 
 some burnt fingers to the darkness of the night. Its fate was 
 written, and its name was ruin. 
 
 Even if ever it were to get built, no commerce could ever for 
 centuries to come be enough to repay its gigantic cost. And it 
 never would get built: the seas and the winds forbude it. 
 
 "Who ever said it would be built?" cried Lady Joan, in 
 irritation at the simplicity of loris when he was surprised and 
 pained at this. " Who ever said it would be built ? We proiiosed 
 to try and build it. That is quite another thing." 
 
FPJENDsnir. 2nn 
 
 When ho did not see the difference, she told him lie was a fool. 
 To propose is lucrative : to build is not so. 
 
 loris, whose imagination had been taken captive with brilliant 
 fancies of reviving the old commerce between Africa and Italy, 
 of opening up the old highways of the seas and bringing withfu 
 easy reach the vast iintouched riches of the great isles — loris was 
 inconsolable, and full of bitter anxieties as the months and the 
 years slipped by and brought no nearer the realisation of those 
 splendid schemes that had glittered so brilliantly on paper and 
 parchment. 
 
 He saAv no return for his money nor for that of all the tens 
 of thousands of shareholders embarked in it. lie saw continual 
 expenditure : that was all. The public history of the bridge of 
 Faro was like the private history of the land at Fiordelisa. 
 
 Meantime, to Mr. Challoner both the public and the private 
 history were matters of grim and tranquil diversion. 
 
 "Wrath is a terrible impiety, quite an impiety," said Mr. 
 Challoner, furling his umbrella in the offices that afternoon when 
 his day's labours were done, for on his road thither that morning, 
 meeting an acquaintance in the street, he had heard with regret 
 that Baron Chemnitz and the Marquis Cardello had met in a fatal 
 encounter on the dreary lands of a Flemish frontier town, and that 
 Cardello was dead, and his adversary dying. Mr. Challoner, furl- 
 ing his umbrella, felt a compassion tinged with contempt fur both 
 the combatants. 
 
 What good did dying do ? 
 
 Mr. Challoner looked at loris's signatures lying on his desk, 
 and having made his umbrella quite smooth, went out into the 
 street again contentedly. 
 
 " So the Baron has killed Cardello, and is shot through tlio 
 lungs himself? " said another acquaintance that he met, and then 
 stopped embarrassed, fearing Mr. Challoner might have some 
 fellow-feeling; but Mr. Challoner had none. 
 
 He was very sorry for both, he said, very ; and more sorry 
 still for Society. 
 
 And he undid the beantifullj'-neat umbrella as a few drops 
 fell from the clouds, and went onwards. All the world was 
 talking of the tragedy that had closed the great Chemnitz scandal 
 in the darkness of death. 
 
 Mr. Challoner pursued his tranquil way home to the Temple 
 of All the Virtues, and as the sounds of his wife's guitar struck 
 on his car, put his umbrella in the rack, and looked at the sables 
 of loris hanging on the coat-stand of the anteroom, then he shook 
 his head and smiled grimly. He shook his head for Baron 
 Chemnitz, he smiled for himself. 
 
 On the other side of the oriental silk curtains his wife and 
 loris were speaking of the tragedy. 
 
204 FEIENDSEIP. 
 
 "Alas! that poor woman!" said loris, absently, thinking 
 of the lost and lonely creature for whose sake these men had 
 perished. 
 
 Lady Joan, who was tired after the masking of the day and 
 night, struck a chord of her chitarra and laughed, as she lay full 
 length on her sofa. 
 
 " How could she be such a fool 1 " 
 
 Mr. Challoner entered the room and went up to the sofa, 
 staring hard through his eyeglasses, not seeing, or not willing 
 to see, the heavy frown on his wife's brows. 
 
 " There is bad news from the Straits, loris," he said without 
 preface, and began to extract letters, papers, and telegraphic 
 despatches from his pocket. 
 
 The face of loris, pale and weary already, grew paler. 
 
 Mr. Challoner thought of Baron Chemnitz lying dying with 
 the air whistling through his pierced lungs, thought of hira 
 certainly with regret and pity, because he had been so great a 
 headstone of the commercial world ; but still with contempt — ■ 
 the contempt of a superior person. 
 
 " Very bad news," he said with a sigh. " I fear we shall lose ; 
 — well, I dare not say how much we shall lose — read these 
 letters." 
 
 Now, " we" was a figure of speech; the vague, metaphorical, 
 much-beloved pronoun hourly in use at the Casa Challoner and 
 at Fiordelisa ; a mere figure of speech, because though Mr. Chal- 
 loner was a shepherd, the gold of loris had gathered together this 
 flock that was more silly than the Gadarene swine. 
 
 loris stretched his hand for the letters— his dark cheek grew 
 very white ; but the Lady Joan snatched, before he could touch, 
 them. 
 
 " Oh, bother ! What do you come pulling a long face for, 
 Eobert? The letters will keep till to-morrow. Bad news 
 always keeps and never evaporates — worse luck! Of course 
 everything's going wrong, you wouldn't listen to me either of 
 you." 
 
 And she read the letters disdainfully, tossing a page here 
 and there to loris. She was not very anxious herself — the con- 
 cession had been got ages ago, and had been taken discreetly 
 and advantageously to the English market, where everybody 
 that knows anything takes their golden eggs at all times to be 
 hatched ; nothing could undo the fact of the concession, or tako 
 away its profits. As for the sheep that were silly as the Gadarene 
 swine, if they liked to run down the slope, let 'em. 
 
 That was the Lady Joan's opinion. 
 
 The letters were indeed of very ominous import ; Mr. Chal- 
 loner had not exaggerated, he neyer did exaggerate — he was a 
 very exact man. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 265 
 
 All the letters were bad, aud could scarcely have been worse ; 
 they told of riotous work-people clamouring for wages, of labour 
 nt a standstill for want of funds, of ill-conducted tides that sucked 
 under every bit of timber or stone deposited near them, of many 
 millions that had produced nothing except some rotten piles, 
 convenient resting-place for barnacles ; and finally, very dis- 
 agreeable hints that shareholders were dissatisfied and clamoured, 
 and began to talk of a commission of inquirj'. 
 
 loris's changeful face altered from its pallor to an angry and 
 nervous flush. 
 
 " But it is abominable ! " he said, rising in an indignant 
 surprise and pain, "Why should they write in that manner? 
 They can surely know that I have done my best. Is not my 
 own money gone in the sand and the sea with theirs ? I do not 
 comprehend. Would they insult me ? " 
 
 " Nobody talks of insult in business, lo," said the Lady 
 Joan, drily. "In business you pocket your fine feelings. 
 Don't look like that. What does it matter? They are a set 
 of idiots," 
 
 "I do not understand," said loris, unheeding, crushing in 
 his hand one of the letters he had read. " Can any man give 
 better guarantee of his good faith than to risk all he has ? Yon 
 said it was an enterprise that was good ; all these men said it 
 was good, I have done my best; I have imperilled myself; I 
 will pay those labourers that cry for their wages out of my own 
 means single-handed; if I am penniless to-morrow I will pay 
 them all. Yes, to-day. But how is it my fault? Can I govern 
 the waters ? Can I say to the sea. Peace ? Could I tell that 
 the sands would sink and the storms arise? They have no 
 patience, those people, and no pity." 
 
 He was strongly agitated; his face had gi'own very white 
 again and the nerves of his brow were swollen. He paced up 
 and douTi the room. He did not understand. 
 
 Mr. Challoner leaned back in his chair, and trimmed his nails 
 thoughtfully. He liked being a shepherd, and knew that he 
 would probably have to cease being a shepherd, if those silly 
 flocks screamed so loudly ; yet he enjoyed the moment. 
 
 He felt more compassionate contempt than ever for Baron 
 Chemnitz, who could think of nothing better than those uncom- 
 fortable and discreditable pistol shots in a field in Flanders. 
 
 Lady Joan picked up the crumpled letter and smoothed it. 
 
 " Don't look so awfully put out, lo," she said, with a rough 
 eflFort at consolation. " It'll all come right, and don't for Heaven's 
 sake talk of going paying the navvies and shipwrights yourself. 
 Y''ou always will come to grief in business, because you always 
 will bring such fine sentiments into it with you. Remember the 
 china pot that would go swimming down stream with the iron 
 pots— that's you to the life " 
 
266 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " I shall pay them," said loris, between his teeth. 
 
 In all these bitter and angry letters nothing had stung him so 
 much as the statement that the foreign workmen on the Gulf of 
 Faro were clamouring against the direction for their unf)aid 
 wages. 
 
 " Oh, Heavens ! what a fool you are ! " she cried with utter 
 impatience. " You've no more right or need to pay them than 
 the Duke of Oban ! Do you think because his name's on the 
 prospectus, he'll go and empty his pockets for all those yelling 
 brutes? The works are at a stand-still for a little time for want 
 of funds ; the men must take the rough with the smooth, the fat 
 with the lean ; they know'that well enough. They can't complain ; 
 let 'em look to the contractors who brought 'em over to the work ! 
 We're not the contractors." 
 
 " I shall pay them," said loris. " I shall pay them as long as 
 I can, if I sell Fiordelisa." 
 
 " Sell Fiordelisa ! " 
 
 She sprang erect on to her feet. No tigress bereft of her 
 young ever darted into more vivid fury, more instantaneous 
 ferocity of attack and defence. 
 
 " Sell Fiordelisa ! " was he mad ? was she ? was the world in 
 its orbit ? were the heavens shining around and above ? " Sell 
 Fiordelisa!" 
 
 Mr. Challoner, having pared the remaining nail on his little 
 finger with scrupulous attention, lifted his eyes and saw his wife 
 transformed, her eyes blazing, her lips quivering, her head flung 
 back, her voice ringing shrill as a clarion, her breath hissing 
 fierce as a storm wind. 
 
 " My love, you forget yourself," said Mi*. Challoner, with dig- 
 nity, draping his toga and adusting his countenance, though no 
 one was there to behold it. " You forget yourself, Joan. If our 
 friend wish to part with his estate, what is it to us ? " 
 
 And Mr. Challoner having said this solemnly, only to relievo 
 his conscience, for neither of his companions heard a syllable 
 that he said, picked up the fallen letters, and went to his own 
 small study. 
 
 He always withdrew from a scene. 
 
 From the study, though afar off, he still heard the echo of 
 his wife's furious voice, as when shut in a mountain cavern you 
 hear the roll of the storm in the valley. 
 
 Mr. Challoner lit a comfortable pipe of oriental tobacco, and 
 unfolded his Pull Mall Ouzette. 
 
 " She will end with hysterics," be thought, and looked at his 
 watch. It still wanted three hours of dinner-time. The hysterics 
 would have time to come and pass away before the hour should 
 strike at which they were to go and dine with Lord and Lady 
 Norwich— a fish dinner for Ash Wednesday, at which his wife 
 
FBIENDSIIir. 267 
 
 would wear a different mask to the wire one of tlio Corso and tho 
 satin one of the Apollo. 
 
 Mr. Glial loner smoked on serenely. 
 
 Ho felt regret, as he smoked, that Baron Chemnitz, a pillar of 
 the temple of commerce, had not been able to think of anything 
 better than those pistols in the damp Flemish field. 
 
 He threw fuel on his stove and slipped his feet in slippers. 
 From the distant apartment there still came dully through 
 the closed doors the furious echo of his wife's outcries. Mr. 
 Challoner felt how thoroughly well Lucretius had nnderstood 
 liuman nature when he had penned that now hackneyed stiitc- 
 ment about the placid enjoyment of a tempest when one is safely 
 housed one's self. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 A FEW nights later there was a dinner at the Casa Challoner, to 
 which Etoile had been engaged three weeks before, that she might 
 meet some expected friends of absent Lord Archie's. He had 
 begged them to see her, and had -written to his daughter to that 
 effect. They were called Denysons of Kingsclere, people passing 
 but a few days in Eome, learned, agreeable, and high-bred, wlio 
 loved art and Lord Archie, and from the latter cause visited at 
 the Casa Challoner, and for the former reason laughed very mucli 
 at its artistic pretensions. 
 
 "When the evening came, Etoile felt reluctant to go ; she got 
 into her dress listlessly and hesitated as to whether she would 
 not send word she was too fatigued and unwell; it would have 
 been partially true; a feverish depression weighed on her, and 
 seemed to undo all the good the calm and mild winter had done 
 her. 
 
 " You have been staying out of doors too much at sunset," 
 said her friends; but she felt guilty as tliey said it ; it was not 
 the sunset; it was rather that "the trouble of another's life was 
 entering her own, and the agitation and unreality of it were 
 moving her own, which had so long been serenely fixed in the 
 deep tranquillities and truths of art. From the moment that 
 another life has any empire on ours, peace is gone. 
 
 Art spreads around us a profound and noble repose, but 
 passion enters it and then art grows restless and troubled as tiio 
 deep sea at the call of the whirlwind. 
 
268 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 " I will not go," slie said to herself; she felt to shudder from 
 the touch of the hand "which locked the fetters of loris on 
 him. 
 
 She leaned against the grating of her great casement, watch- 
 ing that sunset which is so oft maligned as the cause of those 
 fevers that men and women's follies, faults, and indiscretions, 
 bring upon themselves. It was burning beyond the dark lines 
 of Monte Mario across the city ; she could see the radiance through 
 the bars ; the rosy warmth fell across the wide square and made 
 the pavement flush till it looked like porphyry. The piazza was 
 empty, except for a brown-frocked monk and a little child 
 dragging a quantity of arbute boughs, doomed to the dyers, and 
 cut down ere spring came. She watched the sunset and did not 
 see loris passing from the palace until he was beneath the case- 
 ment ; it was not his nearest way home from the Quiiiual, but 
 he made it so very often. He uncovered his head and looked up 
 with a smile ; the window was not much above him. He had 
 been to see her early that morning. 
 
 " Are you dressed already ? " he said, in a little alarm. " Am 
 I so late then ? " 
 
 " My clock was fast ; yes, I am dressed, but — if it were not 
 rude, I would so willingly not go. I was thinking of excusing 
 myself even now." 
 
 A quick fear leapt into his eyes. 
 
 " Oh, do not do that ! she would never forgive it." 
 
 " Do you think I care either for what she forgives or revenges ! " 
 
 Etoile spoke with a sudden petulance new to her, leaning 
 against the iron grating of the great embrasure. 
 
 " No, no," he m.urmured, "of course not ; but she is a bitter 
 foe, it is not worth while. Come, pray come, for my sake ! " 
 
 Her eyes softened at the last words. 
 
 " It is for that I would stay away," she said, a little im- 
 petuously. " I mean — speaking to me as you do of her — it is 
 not possible to feel at ease either with myself or her." 
 
 " We must all wear masks in the w^orld," said loris, with a 
 little smile and a brilliant joy lighting his uplifted eyes, for her 
 words had said to him more than she thought lay in them. 
 
 " I have never worn one," she said, quickly. " Where I could 
 not feel frank friendship, or at least honest indifference, I have 
 never gone ; it makes me ashamed, remembering all that you and 
 I have said, to take her hand, to sit at her table. If she knew, 
 what would she say ? " 
 
 A flush, that was not from the sunset, passed over his face. 
 
 " I will never ask you to do it again. But this once pray 
 come — for my sake ! " 
 
 He raised himself on the stone coping of the wall and passed 
 his hand inside the grating and touched hers. 
 
FlilENDSniP. 269 
 
 "I will not go if you do not," lie said wilfully. "Promise 
 me." 
 
 " This once — no more." 
 
 " No more tlicn. Give me a rose to wear in my coat— just 
 one." 
 
 She smiled, and broke a half-blown rose "off the plants in 
 the jardin fere and passed it through the bars to him — a creamy 
 tea-scented Niphetos. 
 
 He kissed her fingers, and then the rose, uncovered his head 
 once more and went on quickly across the brightness of the 
 square. 
 
 She remained motionless, leaning against the casement. 
 
 A sense of oppression and of want of frankness and of faith 
 weighed on her. Her creeds were not of the world. 
 
 When she passed up the stairs of the Casa Challoner she felt 
 cold, though the night was warm. The Turkish room was full 
 when she entered, but all she saw in the blaze of lights was the 
 face of loris ; he had a Niphetos rose in his coat. 
 
 He came forward, when all others had saluted her, with his 
 gi'ave ceremonious grace of greeting. " Trcs-honore de vous voir, 
 Comtesse. La sante va hien ? " 
 
 " How distant he is with her," thought his hostess, with glee. 
 " Marjory must make a mistake. I am sure he never sees her 
 — except here." 
 
 The dinner passed off well. 
 
 For the first time Etoile saw Lady Joan in her court-mantle 
 of stiff and irreproachable propriety. The Denysons of Kingsclere 
 were not people to be trifled with ; and though they had had the 
 bad taste to wish to meet a Parisian artist, and had discomfited 
 her a good deal by bringing that request from her father, still 
 they were persons so irreproachably placed and so highly ciil- 
 tured, that she dared jDlay no antics with them. She had asked 
 some fashionable Eussians and some aristocratic Italians to meet 
 them, had a Monsignore, and a very learned German Professor ; 
 had put on the Genoa velvet, Irish point, and English propriety, 
 set loris far away from herself at table, and discoursed with 
 seriousness, decorousness, and amiability. 
 
 Etoile sat near her, and, herself very silent, listened and 
 watched the scene, set and rehearsed for the Denysons of 
 Kingsclere. 
 
 Every word seemed to her as if it should bring down some 
 such swift judgment of heaven as smote Ananias and Sapphira's 
 lie. She, who knew the truth, seemed to look down into this 
 woman's soul, and see all its shifts and sophistries, all its 
 nakedness and meanness, until her own heart grew sick. Her 
 own cheeks grew hot with shame, her own eyes grew dark with 
 scorn; she was absent, and scarcely heard what was said to 
 
270 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 herself ; she was thinking all the while, " Oh, well may the world 
 be sick, since all its food is falsehood ! " 
 
 And on the other side, far down across the lights and the 
 flowers and the glass, she saw the Niphetos rose in loris's 
 breast. 
 
 " Your Muse is a very silent one," said Sir Walter Denyson 
 to his hostess, having watched Etoile some time. 
 
 " She would talk if lo were near her," said Lady Joan, with 
 a short laugh. 
 
 " Does she favour your friend then ? " 
 
 " I believe so, but he's only bored by it at present. Perhaps 
 he will be entangled later on ; he is rather weak, you know," said 
 his hostess in a whisper, with another laugh. 
 
 Sir Walter, who knew his friend Archie's daughter pretty 
 well, was mystified, and said afterwards to his wife, that he did 
 not fancy Joan cared much about that good-looking Italian, 
 though she did live in his house; she did not seem to think 
 much of him. 
 
 The dinner over and the guests gathered once more in the 
 Turkish room, which looked very pretty with flowers in the old 
 blue and ■white bowls, and coffee served in little jewel-like Persian 
 cups, Lady Joan went to the piano, and her watch-dog came in 
 in time to accompany her. It was not a night for the guitar; 
 the guitar in all its forms, viol, lyre, chitarra, or mandoline, is a 
 melodious and romantic instrument, suggestive of love-trysts 
 and moonlight ; the i^iano is an unpleasant piece of mechanism, 
 invented to spoil the human voice, and domestic and respectable 
 in proportion to its unpleasantness. On propriety nights, Lady 
 Joan always sang to the piano. 
 
 loris at the moment that his hostess was singing, passed 
 across the chamber to where Etoile was resting on one of the 
 divans. 
 
 " What beautiful lace, Madame ; point d'Argenton, is it 
 not ? " he said, touching the lace of her dress ; then added very 
 low — 
 
 ''How can I thank you for coming! but you seem out of 
 spirits, grave, constrained. What is it ? " 
 
 "I feel treacherous and untrue! " murmured Etoile wearily, 
 all the scoin and pain she felt glancing for one instant from her 
 eyes to his. 
 
 " It is not you that are so." he said with a sad tenderness. 
 " But you are quite right. This is no atmosphere for you. I 
 will not ask you to come again " 
 
 " No. I will never come again." 
 
 And she kept her word. 
 
 " What a charming fan ! " said loris for the benefit of Sir 
 Walter, who was hovering near,, longing to approach her, and 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 271 
 
 Ion's took the fan ai;d talked of its epoch, Louis Seize, and of 
 fan-painters, and of i\io genre rocaiUe, on all of which ho could 
 speak with judgment, knowledge, and that infinite grace which 
 characterised the least thing that he did or said, and Sir Walter, 
 watching his occasion, joined in the conversation, and found the 
 Muse still silent. 
 
 When Etoile left, which was early, loris could not take her 
 to her carriage, for the host himself performed that office ; but 
 loris, giving her back her fan, found means to murmur in her 
 car — 
 
 " I shall go away with the others, the night is over for me ; 
 I have my talisman with me — my rose." 
 
 " Cuqiiin ! you play the police for your wife ! " he muttered 
 between his teeth, as standing above in the vestibule lie watclied 
 the form of Mr. Challoner pass down the staircase ; and his heart 
 beat angrily within him under the Niphetos rose. 
 
 " lo ! come here ! " cried the Lady Joan, as he returned to 
 lier Turkish room. " Here is Sir Walter raving with jealousy of 
 you ; he says Etoile would hardly look at him, she seems so 
 much in love with you." 
 
 " But, indeed, I never " began Sir Walter, in protest. 
 
 "Monsieur, lam not so happy," said loris with his coldest 
 smile and airiest grace. " No Muse will stoop to earth for me, 
 and as for the tender passions — fe siiis un Iwinme morl I " 
 
 " You do not look it," said Sir Walter, with a smile. 
 
 Lady Joan frowned heavily. 
 
272 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXX. 
 
 Lent had come, and Lady Joan had her black doniiuo and lonp 
 hung up in a closet, and put on the meeting-house clothes very 
 demurely, and devoted herself in this pious and dreary period 
 of social life to those especial patron saints of hers, the " jieople 
 passing through." The " people passing through " were rather 
 bored in Lent, and were glad to be taken about by her to Mimo's 
 and Trillo's to fill up the dull mornings ; and in the evening to 
 dine with her — "just by ourselves, you know — nothing but fish " 
 — or ask her to dinner at their various hotels. In Lent, Lady 
 Joan was always as hard at work as the chiming bells and the 
 swinging censers; it was her harvest-time when she looked 
 forward to gathering in the fruits of all the seeds of good-nature, 
 hospitality, attention, and love of the fine arts, which she had 
 been sowing so broadcast ever since early winter. " The people 
 passing through " were always beginning by that time to think 
 of passing out ; and it was not her fault if they did not bear 
 with them, as " homing " birds are said to bear foreign seeds, 
 innumerable praises of the Casa Chal loner and also numerous 
 articles out of it. 
 
 She had borne with the burden of the Lady Blanks all winter ; 
 she had endured like the staunchest of martyrs their i^omposity 
 or prolixity, their coldness or their curiosity; she had toiled 
 early and late to smile on them and their heavy connubial moiety 
 — magistrate, member of parliament, or peerage nonentity; their 
 pink, long-limbed, long-lipped daughters ; their straw-coloured 
 monosyllabic sons ; their general infinite pouderousness, weari- 
 ness, and pre-eminent respectability. She had borne them all 
 with patience inexhaustible, with fortitude unsurpassable. 
 
 It was in Lent that she looked for her rewards ; it was in 
 Lent that the Lady Blanks asked her to mornings of classical 
 music and teas for colonial bishops ; that the pink-cheeked 
 daughters and the straw-coloured sons rode over and lunched at 
 Fiordelisa; that the connubial moieties became of the sheep 
 that the crook of Mr. Challoner guarded ; or, if less obliging than 
 that, at least bought a Parmeggianino or a Tabernacle, a fine bit 
 of buhl, or a nice piece of old Modena tapestry. 
 
 Lent was her harvest, when the narcissi and the tulips were 
 all out in the Campagna, and the Nortlierners began to feel hot 
 and to get in a fright aboiit fever, and the famihes M'ere pleased 
 to breathe the hill-air of Fiordelisa; and the Ladv Blanks: would 
 
FlilENDSniP. 273 
 
 say, "Sco you in town this season? — yes? — oh! — yes? Do- 
 h'ghted ; " and resolved that, after all her civility, they must 
 certainly know her in London. 
 
 In Lent the Lady Blanks kept her busy, and Fiordclisa was 
 better seen without its lord, so that in Lent loris was freer than 
 at any other season of the year. 
 
 In the long, still, sunny mornings, when sho was escorting 
 the Lady Blanks to Mirao's and Trillo's, or riding out with the 
 straw-coloured sons to Fiordelisa, ho found his way to the flower- 
 filled chamber of Etoile, and passed the hours in that sweet- 
 atmosphere of sympathy, that vague ecstatic trouble which fills 
 the daybreak of love with a light that is only the lovelier for its 
 clouds. 
 
 He found a repose with her that was even sweeter than 
 passion. He was true with her, and before her ; here was her 
 essential charm to him. Whoever has to wear a mask is in a 
 sense ill at ease. In the presence of Etoile ho threw his mask 
 away. His real nature — impulsive, generous, erring, repentant, 
 tender, contemptuous, sensitive, ironical, by turns — was laid 
 bare to her. He did not speak all the truth to her, but he spoke 
 nothing that was not the truth. 
 
 It was a sort of bond with him to her to feel that lie did not 
 deceive her. The perpetual strain of the comedy in which he 
 had always to play his part in the Casa Challoner became weari- 
 some ; and as his mistress never suspected that he wore a mask 
 he never dared to unloosen it. With this other woman, who 
 understood him and stripped the velvet off his mask and saw 
 the pasteboard underneath, he could toss it aside without 
 disguise, and laugh at the use of it or sigh at the use of it, 
 whichever his mood might be. 
 
 It may be doubted if a man is ever really happy with a 
 woman with whom he cannot be candid. The charm of 
 intimacy lies in perfect ease. To need a lie is to endure a 
 restraint. 
 
 When tired and perplexed with the chaos in which his 
 fortunes were whirling, in the darkness of disasters that he 
 scarcely understood and still less knew how to confront, he 
 escaped from them as into i^aradise to the quiet painted cham- 
 ber, with the mellow sunlight sleeping on the whiteness of the 
 Lenten lilies. 
 
 Now and then he asked himself, "Where am I drifting?" 
 but he waited for no answer, and drifted on with closed eyes. 
 
 With his mistress he had never been happy. His heart for a 
 while had been " burned in the poisonous solvent " which tens 
 of thousands take for love, knowing no better or loftier thing all 
 their lives long ; but the poison had burned itself away and left 
 as its dregs disquietude and satiety. With Etoile he was happy 
 
 T 
 
274 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 as a man can only be when the better natui'e in him is satisfied 
 and not ashamed. 
 
 -- Yet, partly because it was a natural instinct 'with him to 
 conceal what most he felt, partly from the same sense that makes 
 a man shy of his religion being touched or his emotions laughed 
 at, chiefly because he was always afraid of the ruthless ven- 
 geance of his tyrant on any thought of his that wandered from 
 herself, he began to deny as Hamlet denied, forgetful that such 
 denials fall lightly as rain, but, like a raindrop on the trusty 
 steel, may turn to rust and eat a cruel road. 
 
 Marjory Scrope going to and fro to her weary labours of 
 copying the Eospigliosi Aurora for Lord Fingal, saw again once 
 — twice — thrice in one week the tall, slender form of loris pass- 
 ing across the Square of the Four Horses, and told herself, with 
 a quickly throbbing heart, that he was only going to the Quiri- 
 nal, but saw, despite her longing not to see, that he did not bear 
 towards the Quirinal, but towards the old, grey, ancient mansion 
 where Etoile lived amidst her frescoes and her flowers. 
 
 Marjory, toiling across the last stones of the square in the 
 blast of the stormy Lenten wind, grew sick and pale, grew faint 
 with fear ; and as she sat at her work saw the faces of Aurora 
 and the Hours through a mist, and sketched the horses of the 
 chariot out of drawing. 
 
 As much as her work'would let her have liberty to do— for 
 Lord Fingal was in haste for his copy, and she in haste to see 
 the cheque for it — she kept a spy's watch upon the old palace by 
 the Colonna gardens : she talked with its porter, she went past 
 it in daybreak and dusk ; she longed to find something, she 
 hardly knew W'hat, something, anything, against the woman that 
 dwelt there. It was so bitterly hard to her : she had to copy all 
 day and get a pittance at the end of her labours ; or if she got 
 more, knew that more was only given out of charity and sjtq- 
 pathy, because she was a marquis's grand-daughter and thought 
 praiseworthy so to work for her living. And Etoile — half an 
 hour's rough sketch in charcoal from the hand of Etoile would 
 fttch two hundred guineas in any city of Europe ! 
 
 As she went to and fro across the square, in sunlight or 
 showers, the horses of Etoile would bespatter her with dust or 
 with mud, or she fancied they did, if they passed by twenty 
 yards off. Watching the door, she would see loris pass through 
 with the easy and accustomed air of one who goes where he is 
 expected and is certain of his reception. Sometimes as she went 
 home, with her portfolio under her arm, as evening fell she 
 would see Etoile come out to go to some dinner at Princess 
 Vera's, or some informal " at home " at the Palazzo Farnese. 
 She watched and watched, and hated and hated. 
 
 She was a prudent creature under all her bitterness ; other- 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 275 
 
 wise she could have torn her copy of the Aurora into shreds 
 with hatred of herself for having to sit copying there whilst this 
 woman, who could make her hundreds in an hour, sat doing 
 nothing amidst her palms and hyacinths and smiling in the face 
 of loris ! 
 
 " I see you often in the Montevallo, lo," she was imprudent 
 enough to say once, biting her lip, and relying on their long 
 intimacy. 
 
 loris looked surprised and unconscious. 
 
 " But certainly — I go often to the Quirinal." 
 
 "It is not the Quirinal that I meant," she said sharply. 
 " You go to Etoile." 
 
 loris, who was smoking, looked at his cigarette and shrugged 
 his shoulders. 
 
 " But seldom. One cannot always refuse ; she does me the 
 honour to ask me things about Rome — she is composing a 
 Eoman picture. She has been spoilt by her world — she is used 
 to rule, and is easily put out." 
 
 He said it very tranquilly : it was his impulse always to slip 
 on his velvet mask before interrogation. 
 
 Marjory Scrope looked at him sharply. He only partially 
 deceived her, 
 
 " What does it matter to you whether she is put out or not, 
 since you dislike her?" 
 
 loris shugged his shoulders once more. 
 
 " Mah I she is a woman ; one cannot be rude. You know I 
 never say no. Do not you and Joanna always reproach me with 
 my weakness ? " 
 
 Marjory laughed uneasily. 
 
 " I suppose she is going to paint you in the Eoman picture 
 and make you celebrated for ever ? " 
 
 " Trop d'honneur ! " said loris, with a careless smile. " No, 
 it is purely archasological details that I give her. You know I 
 like to trace the old ways under the new. I am of a little use 
 to her — not much." 
 
 " And what is this — archajological — picture? " 
 
 " The chariot of Tullia," said loris, with ready 'invention. 
 He knew the invention was safe : his questioner would not daro 
 to question the great artist as to her future works. 
 
 Marjory looked at him, and still was but half-deceived. 
 
 " I do not believe the least in this archteology. I believe 
 you are in love with her ! " she said, with a nervous and anxious 
 laugh. 
 
 " I have never even liked her," said loris, with an admirable 
 nonchalance. 
 
 " Kor have I," he thought to himself, " because I have always 
 loved her." 
 
276 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 "Why would tliey question liim ? They deserved to get a lie 
 for their pains. And indeed people Avho ask a man about a 
 ■woman do merit this punishment. 
 
 " "What's all this about an archjeological picture, lo ? " said 
 the Lady Joan fiercely a day later. "Marjory says you are 
 helping Etoile about a new painting. Is it true ? Because, if 
 it's true, I won't have it. She'll be putting your portrait in it — 
 I know she will. "What do you mean by going there? And I 
 thought she did not paint at all ; that the doctors had forbidden 
 her. What lies she tells ! " 
 
 " Calm yourself, ma chere," said loris, with a tranquillising 
 gesture. " There is no falsehood at all. She is thinking out a 
 great picture ; studying details for it, that is all. "Where is the 
 harm?" 
 
 " Oh, I suppose she wants to paint something because she 
 makes all her money by painting," said the Lady Joan, with 
 unutterable scorn : she herself sold what other people painted, 
 which is a much loftier occui>ation. "But what do you want to 
 have anything to do with it for ? " she continued, still fiercely. 
 " It's ridiculous going there, wasting your time with her. She's 
 horribly rude to me — refused my last two invitations, and 
 scarcely took the trouble to make even an excuse. I wanted her 
 to meet Victor Louche. I believe she's afraid of all he knows 
 about her." 
 
 loris, in an imprudent moment, laughed contemptuously, and 
 Lady Joan, infuriated, continued : 
 
 " I won't have you go ! If she can't paint her pictures alone, 
 let 'em go unpainted. She never did paint 'em alone ; I always 
 told you so. She always got men to help her — always. She's 
 laying a trap — I can see that. She never comes near me now ; 
 scarcely calls. After all that I've done for her ! I can see 
 through her drift well enough. Does she dare talk of me to 
 you?" 
 
 " Mais, ma chere ! — as if I should allow any one to profane 
 your name to me ! " 
 
 " Profane fiddlesticks ! " cried Lady Joan, in a fury, " I m 
 certain she knows ; I'm certain she guesses," 
 
 loris was silent. It was a delicate subject, 
 
 " You wouldn't go near her if you respected me," said Lady 
 Joan, more and more in a fury, " I knew what she thought that 
 first day up at Fiordelisa, I could see it in her eyes. I dare 
 say she's gone and written to my father. It is disgraceful. 
 You have no decency, lo, and no sense, to go and see that 
 woman, and sit with her and talk over me. Oh, it is no use 
 your saying anything. Archseology ! Kubbish ! Whenever did 
 you care about archaeology ? You care about a new face, a trick 
 of manner, a way of looking, as if the earth and everybody on it 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 217 
 
 were dust aud dirt and muck and mire ! That's new, and takes 
 your fancy, aud you forget all my sacrifices, all I have endured, 
 all I have risked, all I have " 
 
 Hysterics choked her. 
 
 loris rose and paced the chamber. 
 
 " This is absurd, intolerable ! " he muttered, half-aloud. lie 
 was tempted to fling off his mask and throw it at her feet for 
 good and aye. 
 
 " Is it absurd that you think an adventuress an angel ? " she 
 screamed, with a shrill hiss. 
 
 "I think no woman an angel — who can who has had the 
 happiness to live with you?" he interrupted her, with a chill 
 laugh that barbed the dubious compliment and sent it home 
 through the triple mantle of her vanity. 
 
 " Oh, no, I never claim to be one," she said bitterly ; " I leave 
 such pretensions for those who have more wit to paint their 
 wings than I have ; for those who fool you with childlike eyes 
 and the serioiisness of a would-be Muse, and some paltry talk of 
 the Greek gods and heroes. When it is for her you neglect me 
 —forget me — insult me " 
 
 " Who has insulted you ? When do you ever let yourself be 
 forgotten ? What is the use of my coming to you ? You only 
 receive me with reproach and reprimand," said loris, taking 
 refuge in answering anger, and letting escape him a touch of all 
 the sombre irritation of which his soul was full. " What do you 
 require that I do not give up ? Is there any moment of my time 
 my own ? You even claim to know my thoughts better than I 
 know them. Do I ever rebel ? Do I take my freedom, as other 
 men would? Ma chere, be reasonable. You treat me like a 
 spaniel : you chain me and you cuff me. Cannot you be 
 content ? I am your dog, if it be not an affront to any dog to 
 say so." 
 
 He spoke with the bitter though subdued detestation of him- 
 self, and of his bondage, that day by day was growing sterner 
 and stronger in him ; and the mere glimpse of any such passion 
 in him filled her with terror. 
 
 If he had only read her aright, he might with ease have been 
 her master. 
 
 This was not the first of such scenes that the last few weeks 
 had witnessed ; not the first muttering of that storm of revolt 
 which some day or another she felt would burst above her head 
 and wrench from her not only himself but — Fiordelisa. She 
 grew terrified ; her breath failed her before the vision that for a 
 moment flashed before her eyes. Had she wrung the galled 
 withers once too often ? Had she strained a strand too far the 
 ever-yielding rope ? 
 
 She fell at his feet in a tempest of emotion, rage, fear. 
 
278 FEIENDSEIP. 
 
 suspicion^ apprehension, all seething in her, as angry seas seethe 
 under the lightning and the hurricane of a storm. 
 
 Yast is the power of turbulence ; it will conquer when all 
 that is holy, that is tender, that is long-suffering, that is noble, 
 shrink away unheard and disregarded. 
 
 loris might have ruled her had he read her aright ; but alas ! 
 he missed the occasion to seize the mastery. He let her raye on, 
 and drooped his head to the storm. 
 
 When she was somewhat calmer he kissed her hands. 
 
 " Carissima mia, you excite yourself needlessly," he said, 
 and bent his knee beside her. " If it be as you fancy — if any one 
 divine your amiable goodness to me — the more need is it to lull 
 such suspicions by not displaying any jealousy of me : you must 
 see that, do you not? Be tranquil." 
 
 "You will never go to her, then — never?" muttered his 
 tyrant, clenching her hands on his wrist. 
 
 " Never ; or at the utmost merely as much as courtesy and 
 caution require," said loris. " Pray be tranquil, mia cara ! 
 These scenes distress me unspeakably. There is no kind of 
 ground for them." 
 
 She grew calmer and was convinced. loris as he knelt there 
 felt none of the composure that he affected so admirably. His 
 temples ached with the scream of her voice, his pulses thrilled 
 with apprehension and anger, his heart beat with a stifled 
 shame and a stifled rage. He was tempted by a great longing 
 to fling off the mask and tell the truth and bid her do her 
 worst. 
 
 But he hesitated ; the old habit of subserviency to her was 
 on him heavy and paralysing. He believed also that he was 
 vitally necessary to her, the very breath of her life ; he was 
 reluctant to strike her so dread a blow; he v. as afraid, to rise 
 and say to his tyrant, " I will be free ! " 
 
 " Another time," he said to himself : another time he would 
 confess to her that his allegiance was a lifeless thing of habit 
 and of duty. Another time he would say to her, " Love is not 
 in our command, and mine is dead." 
 
 " Another time." 
 
 And he murmured words that were false, and spent caresses 
 that were joyless and faithless, and knew that he was false to 
 his fairest faith, yet had not strength to unclasp the hands that 
 held him and put back the mouth that wooed him, and say the 
 simple truth : " Our love is dead! " 
 
 He left the house ill at ease and ashamed, conscious that he 
 had been disloyal to all the best emotions of his nature ; feeling 
 as though he had for ever lost the right to look into the clear, 
 proud eyes of Etoile. 
 
 Yet he fancied he would have done more wrong had he risen 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 27D 
 
 up boldly caiid told tho tnith to his mistress, and broken from 
 tlio unholy bonds that held him. 
 
 Tho carious honour of his world and of his sex "was about 
 him like the fetters of an encircling serpent about the living 
 flesh, paralysing action and numbing and deadening life. Tho 
 woman that was worthless in his sight was sacred. The woman 
 that was sacred in his sight was sacrificed. 
 
 He fancied this was honour : and if the men of his generation 
 could have been put to the vote they would have declared it 
 honour too. 
 
 For men of the world have set up an idol called honour 
 which is a false idol, very foolish, very clumsy, very cruel, yet to 
 which they immolate themselves with a sincerity and a stupidity 
 that are touching, and immolate oftentimes those dear to them. 
 
 According to this idol the fiat goes forth that a man may 
 blamelessly desert an innocent woman, but not a guilty one ; he 
 may break the heart of the bruised lily, and no harm done ; but 
 he must bide the brunt with perjured Guinevere, or be man- 
 sworn. It is curious reasoning and illogical, and the results 
 brutal and often tragical ; but men in adhering to it are quite 
 honest. 
 
 It is this honesty which women sharp of sight and keen of 
 execution turn with ruthless skill to their own purposes. 
 
 Men are never as clever as they think themselves, and are 
 generally much better than other people suppose them. 
 
 " loris is in love with Etoilel " said his mistress, showing her 
 white teeth in a harsh laugh, but airing her indifference as she 
 rang the changes on the same subject a little later the very next 
 day, when, as it chanced, Etoile was carelessly named in her 
 presence by Douglas Graeme after luncheon. 
 
 " What folly ! " said loris, angrily ; and his heart beat thickly, 
 for he felt once again a coward and untrue. 
 
 "I believe you are!" she cried, glad to say so, since her 
 cousin, Douglas Graeme, was by to hear, " I do believe you are ! 
 "Well, if it be so, gave a vousl I should not wish to see any 
 friend of mine in her toils." 
 
 Douglas Graeme opened his blue eyes wide. 
 
 " You mean the great painter that I have seen at your house ? 
 Oh, she is as cold as ice ; every one knows that ; she is quite in- 
 different to men. If loris " 
 
 " Has touched her, he has a marvellous conquest, I suppose 
 you mean ? " said the Lady Joan with imjiatience. " How can 
 you believe such trash ? Innocent ! So is a flower-pot innocent ; 
 but when the crickets and mice tumble into it, where it's set to 
 trap them covered over with moss, I don't fancy they think so, 
 do they ? Do you believe she made all the money she spends by 
 her pictures ? Good heavens, Douglas, where have you lived ? 
 Are you in short frocks still ? " 
 
280 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 "I do not understand," began her cousin, who looked 
 bewildered. 
 
 loris grew a shade paler. 
 
 " It would, at least, be well to respect your father's friend 
 and your own guest," he said in a low tone ; but there were a 
 sternness and a menace in his voice which were new from his 
 lips and strange to her ear. 
 
 " A woman my father's seen once or twice in a few studios ! " 
 she said, with boundless scorn. "How can you call her his 
 friend ? " 
 
 " Because she is so." 
 
 "She is nothing of the kind! She is the daughter of that 
 old beast, Voightel, and my father is a fool about anything that 
 Voightel " 
 
 " You said the other day she was found in the streets." 
 
 " So she was. Voightel never noticed her till she grew famous 
 — if you call it famous — thanks to David Istrion in his dotage." 
 
 " Is all the world in its dotage, then, also ? " 
 
 " Very likely it is. What are her i^ictures after all ? Nothing 
 but would-be Geromes; rank imitations of all his bestialities. 
 Tom Tonans says so. They wouldn't hang them even in 
 England." 
 
 " It is a pity — for England." 
 
 loris rose as he said so and lighted a cigar. 
 
 Lady Joan burst into a boisterous laugh. 
 
 " You see he's in love, don't you, Douglas ? " 
 
 " He has been so a long time, my cousin ; we all are," said 
 Douglas Graeme gallantly, being desirous of preventing a scene. 
 
 " Stuff! " said his cousin, too violently irritated in her own 
 soul to be pacified with any such mere compliment. " He is in 
 love with Etoile ; you see he is in love with Etoile. He frowns 
 if one says a syllable, and can't talk of her without turning pale 
 or red. Poor lo ! Can't you find anybody better to erect into 
 an angel than a Paris Sappho that has knocked about Bohemian 
 ateliers all her days, and gets herself ujj in intellect and innocence 
 to please you, as she drapes her lay figure in calico and calls it 
 Pudicitia? Do be more sensible, pray. Take some Vittoria 
 Colonna of your own nationality : you can know all about her." 
 
 loris shrugged his shoulders and turned his back. 
 
 " Your interest in me is most benevolent," he said, for the 
 benefit of Douglas Gramme. " But I am not in the peril you 
 imagine, /oi d'honneur. And, if you will allow me to correct you 
 —Sappho did not paint." 
 
 loris went away angered deeply and a little ashamed of 
 himself. 
 
 He felt as the faithless follower felt when the cock crew ; as 
 all feel who let a treachery pass by unpunished and condoned by 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 281 
 
 a cowardly silence. He felt disloyal •with a twofold disloyalty. 
 As for the slander, it was the mere venomous breath of a jealous 
 woman ; so he said to himself. He could have laughed aloud at 
 it, it seemed so ludicrous to him, so clumsy, so poor. Yet it 
 clung about him like a noxious vapour that hangs in the air. 
 
 You cannot strike the vapour, nor seize it, nor see it ; yet it 
 is there, spoiling all sweet genial weather and flower-scented 
 breezes, and making the glad day sickly. 
 
 The lie seemed to buzz about him like a mosquito stinging in 
 the sunshine. 
 
 Lady Joan, left alone, sat lost in thought. On calm reflection 
 she was convinced that her friend Marjory's apprehensions re- 
 sulted only from the fogs and fancies of her friend Marjory's 
 brain, whose weakness of hopeless jealousy she knew. 
 
 " Of course he cares for nobody but me," she thought. She 
 filled the universe to herself; she was convinced that she filled 
 it equally to him. She was easily lulled, easily blinded, because 
 her immeasurable vanity was for ever between her and any 
 truth. 
 
 She was envious of Etoile, she distrusted the influence of 
 Etoile, and she hated her for her glance, for her words, for her 
 modes of life, for her scarcely veiled contempt — for anything and 
 everything— as only one woman can hate another. 
 
 But Lady Joan, though Cleopatra in her idle hours, was not 
 a Cleopatra to whom Mark Antony was all. She was a Cleopatra 
 to whom her ships, her freights, her slaves, her allies, and her 
 merchandise in general were always more than her hero ; and at 
 this moment she was a Cleopatra overburdened with many prosaic 
 anxieties. 
 
 She had caught fire as easily as tow held to a match to the 
 incendiary whispers of her friend, and had flamed fiercely as 
 petroleum ; but the flame had soon died down, and only burned 
 dully among the embers of sullen fears. loris gone, and Douglas 
 Greeme also, she grew a prey to more solid and more terrestrial 
 anxieties than those of passion. Her bureau was inundated with 
 papers and her head was filled with plans ; acres of arithmetic 
 spread out before her eyes, and reams of correspondence, with 
 telegrams in cypher, aroused and tore her from the pre-occupation 
 of amorous doubts. 
 
 Beyond everything she was a woman of business. 
 
 She went across to her husband's little sanctum and opened 
 the door. 
 
 " Eobert, come out and talk over my idea." 
 
 Mr. Challoner, who was busy writing, took his eyeglasses off 
 his nose and emerged from his den. 
 
 " It is of little use to talk," he said, 'gloomily ; " it is time 
 to act." 
 
282 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Of course it is. That's just what I want to see you about. 
 One ought to go there directly." 
 
 " One ought," saidMr.Chailoner, still deep in gloom. " Besides, 
 you must not give any more dinners; really the cost " 
 
 " I'm sure we've everything from Fiordelisa, except the fish," 
 said his wife, " and the foreign wines and the sweatmeats. And 
 I shall go on giving dinners till I go — if I do go. People are 
 nasty the moment you don't stop their mouths with a dinner. 
 What do you think, by the way, Marjory told me this morn- 
 ing about Etoile? — that lo's in love with her! Did you ever 
 know such an idiotic absurdity?" 
 
 Mr. Challoner was too wrapped in gloom to smile, though the 
 ghost of what might iu happier circumstances have been a smile 
 came upon his face. 
 
 " I saw it coming on long ago ; indeed, the very night she 
 came here," he replied tranquilly ; and he did, even in his gloom, 
 rather enjoy saying that. 
 
 His wife's eyes flashed fire, 
 
 "Oh, did you?" she said, roughly. "You're always very 
 clever in seeing through a millstone, and never see an inch before 
 your own nose. lo's just told me he can't endure her." 
 
 " It does not interest me either way," said Mr. Challoner, 
 drearily. " Did you call me to tell me that? " 
 
 " Of course not," said Lady Joan, searching amongst her 
 cypher telegi'ams and her acres of arithmetic, 
 
 " I want you to read all these, and decide whether you think 
 we can do it," 
 
 Mr. Challoner grumbled, fixed his glasses, and busied himself 
 in her papers. 
 
 She was as great as that Emperor of Byzantium who ruled 
 the East and the West, j^et busied himself selling his hen's eggs 
 and bought diamonds with the proceeds. 
 
 Were it a question of five francs for a coffee-cup or five 
 millions for a concession, she was equal to either fortune. No- 
 body could say that she despised trifles. She might be marking 
 out a royal subsidy in her meditations, but if anybody came in 
 that wanted a length of lace she devoted herself to the lace. She 
 really ought to have been a greater woman than she was; but 
 then, alas ! her vanity obscured her vision : it was a myopia 
 which impeded her way to entire success. 
 
 Mr. Challoner knew this very well, and on occasions even said 
 it — flatly. Then they had a battle-royal. But they did not have 
 a battle now, as he gave all his mind to her telegrams and 
 arithmetic. 
 
 She was at this time almost too much overwhelmed with 
 business, dearly as she loved it. She was sending Titian's " Choice 
 of Paris" off to the most puissant Imperial Government of 
 
FBIENDSHIK 283 
 
 Pickclhaubc, for which au Inspector of Fino Arts, more cn- 
 liglitcncd than the Enssians are, had just imrcliascd it. Slio 
 felt that she wonhi miss the eight-feet high nudities bcliind her 
 dinner-table sadly, but she obeyed beyond anything tho injunc- 
 tion, " Put money i' thy purse, put money i' thy purse." She 
 was also shipping off several Old Masters to a loan collection ia 
 Edinburgh. Her name looked well in the catalogues, and tho 
 loan meant generally an eventual sale to some wealthy body or 
 another visiting the collection. Again, and first and foremost, 
 she had a great transaction in meditation. 
 
 Lady Joan loved transactions ; she always found them lucra- 
 tive. " Keep on turning money : some will always stick to your 
 fingers," said a capitalist once ; and she thoiight the same. 
 
 The present transaction was no less a one than the meditated 
 transfer of tbe t^.ocuta Ilalinna Inglcsedel Ponte Calahrese-Siciliano 
 from one body of shepherds to another. 
 
 The Duke of Oban had withdrawn from tbe presidency, in 
 disgust and with strong language, expressed in rough Doric; 
 the sheep that were as silly as swine were rushing down their 
 slope with such headlong haste and uproar that all the world 
 could hear them, and Mr. Challoner with his crook could do 
 nothing to stop them. The workmen down on the coast, by 
 the sunken piles and the devouring sea, had been paid for some 
 weeks at the cost of loris ; siie began to foresee that if things 
 went on at this rate Fiordelisa would be imperilled, let her 
 shriek as she would. 
 
 Lying awake at nights between her evening's cotillons and 
 her morning's bric-a-brac, she had turned it over and over all 
 carnival in her busy brain, and now that with Lent things were 
 really at a climax and could not well be worse anyhow, her busy 
 brain had cleverly hit on a transfer. 
 
 If a transfer could only be accomplished everything would 
 be saved (except the sheep that were as silly as swine), and 
 everything would be changed (except Mr. Clialloner's crook). 
 Now, in the whole length and breadth of the financial world, as 
 on the turf, there is nothing so difficult as to " raise a dead 'un 
 in the betting ; " nothing so arduous as to float once more into 
 the ambient air a bubble that has already collapsed and burst. 
 
 It is quite easy to inflate a new commercial balloon ; nothing 
 easier. A door-plate, a good name or two, and plenty of advertise- 
 ments; these are all that are necessary. There need be nothing 
 behind the door-plate, nobody behind the names ; the advertise- 
 ments will do all that is enough, if only the thing be new ; quite 
 new. Now, the Messina bridge was not new ; it was an exploded 
 rocket, a pulled cracker, a melted sorbet, an umbrella turned 
 inside out ; anything, indeed, that is limp, collapsed, exhausted, 
 and done for; but the energy of the Lady Joan was not to ba 
 
284 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 daunted by these facts. Indeed, she cared very little for facts 
 at any time. 
 
 Facts were for the odious people that carried dates at their 
 fingers' ends and a list of pottery marks in their pockets, who went 
 to museums to verify their history, and to their bankers to know 
 the wisdom of any enterprise : she was above such little trivialities 
 of common sense as facts. 
 
 So she resolved to set afloat on the markets of the world a 
 transfer. 
 
 " But, mia carissima" objected Mimo Burletta, in a simile 
 born of his trade, " the poor pot is dropped, broken, all to pieces, 
 you cannot make it whole again ! You cannot." 
 
 " Stuff ! " said the Lady Joan. " Don't you join 'em with 
 white-of-egg, and paint 'em all over when your pots break ? So 
 shall I." 
 
 Mimo was silent; he was aware of the excellence of the 
 process. Occasionally, horrid people called connoisseurs would 
 scrape with a penknife, and discover the white-of-egg, and the 
 paint that was over the glaze, instead of under it. But then 
 connoisseurs are few. He smiled at them when he met them as 
 the Eomans at death, but he never offered to sell them anything. 
 Were there financial connoisseurs on the Exchanges? Mimo 
 did not know. He felt muddled, and did not venture on any 
 more remonstrance. 
 
 "She is a great creature," he thought to himself; there were 
 always the pigs to show that, the lovely pink pigs slowly maturing 
 to succulent bacon, in the patent English galvanized iron pigsties 
 out at Fiordelisa. 
 
 And she prepared to join her broken pot and paint it. 
 
 She projected a transfer, i.e., the same plant, the sama 
 projects, the same society, but a new purchase by new pur- 
 chasers, an issue of new shares, and an entirely new prospectus. 
 
 Modern enterprises mainly consist of a prospectus, as a 
 tadpole of its head. 
 
 She also intended to have a new name. She meant to call 
 her piles in the sand, etc., " The Mediterranean Company for the 
 Facilitation of Communication in the South." 
 
 This was beautifully vague, and would also allow for the 
 driving in of other piles into many other places on the sea shores 
 of Europe and Africa. 
 
 Lady Joan had not lived in Damascus without learning a good 
 deal about speculation. In Asia and Africa sijeculators of all 
 kinds are as many as the mosquitoes. In the wasted garden of 
 the world English bankers, French financiers, Greek and Italian 
 and German ar/ents d'affaires, Jews of all sorts and sizes, fatten 
 there as fatten the locusts, and like the locusts devour everything 
 ere harvest be due. The dream-cities of the " Arabian l^ights " 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 285 
 
 are the stews in which the children of Israel gorge, and the 
 splendid and lovely lands that were once the envy of Alexander, 
 and the araazo of Herodotus, are now in their misery delivered 
 over to the oppression and the extortion of tyrants, far viler than 
 Pharaoh or Mithridates, Tamerlane or Aurungzebe, tyrants whoso 
 sceptre is a pen, whose throne is a greasy office stool, and whoso 
 symbol is a pair of shears. 
 
 Far and wide, from the Fellah of Egypt to the Arab of 
 Lebanon, from the Negro that slaves in Soudan to the Buddhist 
 that toils among the canebrakes on Irrawaddy, one and all bend 
 their backs to the rod of the European adventurer, one and all 
 are stript and cheated, and plundered and sacrificed, to put 
 money in the purses of contractor and commission agent ; one 
 and all pay by the sweat of their brow and the famine of their 
 bodies for the curse of civilization that falls across them, devas- 
 tating as drought, blighting as the close clouds of locusts when 
 the sun grows dark with them. 
 
 Prostrate the East lies, to bo strangled and sheared by tho 
 West. 
 
 How dare it complain ? The adventurers bring it in return 
 a steam-engine and a religion. 
 
 Lady Joan had not so long watched" this shearing process 
 without learning more or less how to do it, and getting a pair 
 of scissors if not a pair of shears. 
 
 Indeed, so thoroughly congenial was the East to her by reason 
 of the perpetual clipping which is i^ossible there, that it was a 
 very great pity she ever had left it. Italy, since it has enjoyed 
 freedom, has felt the shears a good deal, but it is never so possible 
 to wield them incessantly in the temperate zone. People talk, 
 and things get into the papers in Europe ; in Asia you are beyond 
 all that. 
 
 At this juncture Lady Joan sighed for Asia : on revient totij'ours 
 a ses premiers amours. In Asia the workmen never would have 
 dared to squeal for wages ; there would have been the koubash 
 on their backs, and spirited pashas to appeal to, who would 
 have known better than to give a hearing to a lot of diggers of 
 the sand. 
 
 She sighed for Asia, but she had no necromancer's wand to 
 transport Messina beyond the Dardanelles; so she turned her 
 thoughts, /aw<e de mieux, to London. 
 
 Only to carry out her intentions it was absolutely necessary 
 that she should go to London, and this at once, if her scheme 
 were to have any chance of prosperity. 
 
 There is no place like London for finding the white-of-egg that 
 will adhere, and the paint that will stick on the glaze, of financial 
 pots that are broken. 
 
 Above all, beyond all, and most odious of all, loris must know 
 
286 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 nothing of it till the mended pot was successfully painted and 
 sold. loris, on occasion, Lad odd, quixotic caprices. loris would 
 almost certainly be for leaving the shreds of the pot untouched, 
 whilst, as best he could, he would essay to save the sheep that 
 were silly as the Gadarene swine. loris, if he knew her scheme, 
 would inevitably, in one of his idiotic im]3ulses, spoil all. 
 
 This was what she had resolved as she had lain awake after 
 her carnival balls — restless, angry, and disturbed. 
 
 She knew how to paint the pot, being conversant with all the 
 ins and outs and technicalities of business, and having a passion 
 for speculation, which was the one kindred sentiment that linked 
 her and Mr. Challoner together in the one isolated harmony of 
 their lives. 
 
 She knew, or thought she knew, the kind of people to float 
 it ; she knew, or thought she knew, the puppets needful to replace 
 the Duke of Oban and the rest of the indispensable marion- 
 nettes. She took her husband into her confidence, and he, 
 otherwise willing that loris should be ruined, was very unwilling 
 to cease to be a shepherd himself, and very cordially approved 
 of all her intentions. 
 
 " Do you think we can do it ? " she said this morning, as her 
 " idea " ploughed a slow way through the heavy earth of Mr. 
 Challoner's more stolid intelligence, backed with letters from 
 trusty correspondents in various commercial dens and rows of 
 figures drilled like Prussian regiments. 
 
 Mr. Challoner gazed drearily and solemnly into vacancy, and 
 laid the mass of papers on his knee that related to the mending 
 of the broken pot. 
 
 " Yes, 1 think you can," he said with the cautious utterance 
 of a man who never committed himself. " Ye — es, I think you 
 can — it promises ; but I suppose you see very well that it will 
 necessitate your going to Loudon." 
 
 Across his wife's face fell a gloom deep as that of a moonless 
 night. 
 
 " Of course I know I must," she said sullenly, and with a 
 staunch and heroical firmness. 
 
 The obligation to go away lay on her soul like lead. It 
 harassed her night and day. It haunted her like a bad dream, 
 but she was resolved to brave everything, and go. Mended and 
 painted the pot must be, and nobody could do it but herself. 
 
 "When inclination and interest pulled diiferent ways, she was 
 far too heroic a woman not to make inclination walk the plank 
 and disappear. The Venusberg was all very well, but Capel 
 Court and Cannon Street were better. Besides, her Venusberg 
 was safe enough ; she would put a padlock on it, and leave her 
 watch-dog on guard. 
 
 She was quite of Lady Cardiff's opinion, that Love was the 
 
FllIENDSniP. 287 
 
 bonbons and olives of the banquet of life. Money was the soup 
 nnd fish and the rOti. Still, the necessity to go away harassed 
 her soul as the steam-plough harrows the wild Highland waste. 
 
 It was absolutely necessary to go to London, and go to 
 London without him. She passed feverish days and sleepless 
 nights, torn between desire and dread : desire to go and make 
 her projects realities, dread to leave him behind her near the 
 woman she hated. 
 
 If she did not go, she saw that Fiordelisa might be swamped 
 with the piles in the sands by the sea, and lor is without 
 Fiordelisa would not have been half loris, nay, no loris at all, as 
 he stood in her measure. Being forced to lose either loris or 
 Fiordelisa, she would unhesitatingly have let loris go. Passion 
 was strong with her, but never so strong as self-interest. The 
 Dame du Comptoir outbalanced the Cleopatra. 
 
 Nevertheless, the conflict of the two was tough and bitter, 
 and rent her sorely as they wrestled. She began to grow worn, 
 hectic, and haggard; in these days of indecision she became 
 nervous, restless, sullen, hysterical, by turns. loris was touched 
 with remorse at what he thought was a carking anxiety for his 
 welfare; and Mr. Challoner, who for once was honoured with 
 being in her secret, thought it advisable to make a few visits all 
 by himself in society with a sombre air, like a newly-made 
 widower's, and hint that decline had always been terribly fatal 
 to her family ; his wife would over-exert herself; alas ! yes, she 
 would; her energy was so great, and her physical strength not 
 proportionate to it. 
 
 "A most devoted husband," said Society, and thought he 
 expressed himself very nicely. 
 
 "An excellent person; most attached couple," said General 
 Desart, standing on the club steps, whilst Mrs. Desart was at 
 home having her eyebrows painted on her lovely brow by the 
 Duke of Buonretiro. 
 
288 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 Lext passed and the weather grew warm ; in after years when 
 they looked back to the Lenten time it was beautiful and em- 
 balmed, as with the scent of buried blossoms, and the sounds of 
 music for ever stilled, in the hearts of both loris and Etoile. 
 
 It was the true and perfect springtide of the year, when 
 Love walks amongst the flowers, and comes a step nearer what it 
 seeks with every dawn. 
 
 Without Love, spring is of all seasons cruel; more cruel 
 than all frost and frown of winter. 
 
 As this springtide grew, and with it grew the warmth, and 
 the mountain sides changed to a dewy greenness, and the plains 
 were all a sea of grasses and of flowers, she moved from her old 
 palace to a villa as old outside the gates, set in a grand old 
 garden, and, with the reedy Anio running by its walls. loris 
 found the place for her, persuaded her to rent it, charged him- 
 self with facilitating the transport there of her bronzes, tapes- 
 tries, and canvases, and was glad that the copyist of the Aurora 
 would no longer be able to spy upon him when he should pass 
 up on to these old grey terraces. 
 
 His mistress heard of this change with anger; it bewildered 
 and annoyed her; go away herself she fancied that she must; 
 she would fain have had the woman in whom she was vaguely 
 conscious of a rival, away also. 
 
 " Is it true that she has taken Eocaldi?" she said sharply to 
 loris. 
 
 loris looked up : " Who has taken Eocaldi ? " 
 
 " What affectation, as if you didn't know ! They say you 
 took it for her " 
 
 " Pardon me, I forgot ; yes, I believe she has taken it ; but it 
 is no doing of mine ; indeed, I told her it was not thought very 
 healthy." 
 
 He looked so indifferent, and spoke so tranquilly, that his 
 listener as usual was deceived. 
 
 " Marjory was mistaken and so was I ; he does not care," she 
 thought to herself; aloud she said with a laugh : — " It is on the 
 road to Fiordelisa. I suppose that counterbalances its unhealthi- 
 ness ; she is certainly bent on your subjugation, lo ! " 
 
 "Macherel What folly!" 
 
 He had passed all that morning in the old neglected gardens 
 of Eocaldi with Etoile, and in the stately melancholy rooms, 
 
FRIENDSIIIR 289 
 
 arranginp; her pictures, planninj? cliangcs for her, directing work- 
 men, listening to the birds that filled the ilcs thickets, and flew 
 abovit the pahns. 
 
 But lie was not afraid ; Etoilo and she seldom met, and he 
 had no longer to fear intimacy between them ; moreover, ho 
 knew that Etoile never spoke of him : it would not bo like her 
 nature or her ways. 
 
 " Vous I'avcz voulu ! " he thought to himself as ho saw how 
 completely his mistress was blinded ; she had brought it on her 
 own head ; she had kept him in a subserviency, and demanded 
 from him a surrender of his time, and of his thoughts, whichno 
 man will give without being driven into the self-compensation 
 of concealment. Time and thought, like all his other possessions, 
 were signed and sealed away into her hands, but it was only 
 human nature that he should rebel, and take his own out of both 
 time and thought unknown to her. His life had been pervaded 
 by her like a room by the smell of camphor wood. Open the 
 window, bring in flowers, burn pastilles, throw rosewater about, 
 do what you will, there is tlie smell of the camphor wood still. 
 To escape it you must go out to the fresh air. He had done so. 
 
 The fault was hers. 
 
 She had made passion into a police sergeant, and put love 
 under lock and key. Passion betrayed and Love escaped her : it 
 was only in the laws of human nature. 
 
 But she did not know it. 
 
 To loris, as to every Italian, mystery and silence were the 
 very essence of Love's life ; to steal away when the lark sings, is 
 the joy of every lover since the days of Eomeo. His mistress, 
 who had called to all the crowing cocks at dawn to see him on 
 her balcony, had thrown aside the sweetest spell of power. 
 
 The lover in him was once more awake, and he deceived his 
 gaoler as the lover ever does. 
 
 Meanwhile Etoile remained unconscious of the labyrinth she 
 entered, conscious only of the fatal paradise of an artist's 
 dreams. 
 
 Etoile thought very little about the world at any time, and 
 much of its evil was written in a dead tongue to her. 
 
 Of course nobody would have believed that. Nevertheless so 
 it was. 
 
 A woman whose chief companionship has been that of wise 
 men, will keep an absolute honesty of mind, because she will 
 have been in contact with honest minds that would not con- 
 taminate her own. Women are the chief corrupters of women. 
 Men, i;nless they are very bad, and there are not many that are 
 so, in their intercourse with a woman whom they find without 
 guile, will, when they speak of evil, bid her know it as the base 
 nettle, which has no power to sting the bold and innocent hand 
 
 u 
 
290 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 that grasps to cast it forth. Women will smile and say the 
 nettle is difficult to pluck— oh, yes, no doubt— but then there is 
 a flower inside it — only touch and see. 
 
 Passions and sins had been revealed to her. She had seen 
 the human pulses all laid bare by the anatomists of three thou- 
 sand years of human culture. She had heard the thinker muse 
 aloud, the cynic sneer, the poet sigh, over the conflict of the 
 beast and of the god which, in its various sliapcs, is yet the 
 same in all the human histories, be they under the law of Nim, 
 or Vishnu, or Aphrodite, or Christ. 
 
 She was not ignorant of evil, but innocent of it. 
 As women of religion, with the red cross on their breasts, 
 bend over the wide war-wounds of naked men, so she beheld 
 corruption, yet remained aloof from it ; knew it and yet knew it 
 not ; beheld and heard of it, yet was unsullied by it as a child 
 may walk clean through a lazaretto. 
 
 The world hardly understands this difference. 
 It cannot comprehend that the awakening of the intelligence 
 and the sleep of the senses can long be co-existent. 
 
 Shakespeare knew this truth. Goethe did not. Gretchen 
 has no middle way betwixt a stupid ignorance and an absolute 
 surrender. But Imogen knows well the perils of her path, but 
 with clear eyes and with firm feet goes onward. The women of 
 Shakespeare are all innocent, with the noblest, fairest, truest 
 faith and form of innocence, but they are not ignorant of evil. Of 
 all the poets' women they are the most perfect. But they know 
 the woe of the world that is around them, and, when the hour 
 comes, the j^assion. 
 
 But if a living woman comes, who has, like Imogen, her drawn 
 sword yet her child's heart, the world will never believe in 
 her. 
 
 She will shake the rock of its disbelief as vainly as Desdemona 
 shook Othello's. Faithful to one alone as Desdemona she may 
 be, but like Desdemona she must die, deemed to her latest breath 
 a wanton. And when she lies dead they will say so still. For 
 the world, not having Othello's love, has not his penitence. 
 
 " Aren't you going away at all, then ? " said the Lady Joan 
 sharply of Etoile, meeting her one day by chance in the Borghese 
 woods during Holy Week. 
 
 "I think not," she murmured coldly. " I have taken an old 
 villa outside the gates ; I go to remain there in a few days." 
 
 "So lo told me; Eocaldi isn't it? I am sure I am most 
 charmed," said Lady Joan, remembering herself. " You must 
 come to see us very often at Fiordelisa. We all go up to 
 Fiordelisa in a week or so for the summer. Eocaldi lies ou 
 the way to Fiordelisa; I think lo said so." 
 Then coldly they bade each other good-day. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 291 
 
 "Isn't it indecent tho way she lives? "said the Lady Joau 
 fiercely, as she passed onward. 
 
 "I don't see any indecency," said Mr. Challoner, looking 
 about liim as if it were a thing to be detected in the air. 
 
 " You never see an inch before your face," said his wife. 
 " Of course I'll never let her into Fiordclisa, if she stay hero a 
 hundred years, rude, insolent, ungrateful, abominable creature 
 tliat she is ! " 
 
 "What has she done, except fascinate loris?" said Mr. 
 Challoner, with a face of gloom, but an inward complacency. 
 
 " Fascinate a fiddlestick ! " said his wife, with consummate 
 scorn. " As if I cared whatever fool he may make of himself! — 
 besides I know he can't bear her ; she disgusts him ; he has said 
 so fifty times ; he hates notorious women." 
 
 " You cannot properly call her notorious," said Mr. Challoner, 
 who loved nothing better than to pick at straws with his wife, 
 " the word notorious means " 
 
 " I don't want to be taught out of a dictionary by you," said 
 the Lady Joan. " It's enough for me that she refuses my invita- 
 tions, and never even calls on me, except by leaving a card; 
 when you think all we did for her, all our kindness, all our 
 hospitality — a woman that really it is horrible to think has ever 
 crossed our threshold, when one knows what she is " 
 
 " It is inconsistent to be annoyed with her for crossing it no 
 more, then," said Mr. Challoner, who was in a contradictory and 
 boorish humour, having come from a melancholy perusal of tho 
 reports of the Societa Italiana-Inglese. 
 
 " Oh, you and lo think her right, of course. You'd both see 
 mo insulted and trampled on, and never get out of your chairs! 
 You're just like my father " 
 
 " H-us-sh ! " said Mr. Challoner, who thought a scene would be 
 inconvenient in the well-filled Borghese woods with the scarlet 
 royal liveries passing. "H-us-sh! What does it matter, one 
 way or the other ? Nothing easier than to say we made a mis- 
 take in receiving her. My love, here is Lady Norwich. Dear 
 Lady Norwich " 
 
 That night Etoile went to a reception at the Palazzo Farnese, 
 which was one of the many eminent houses that did not open 
 its doors to the Lady Joan. The reception was given for the 
 Emperor and Empress of Amazonia, high and Catholic sovereigns, 
 ill their travels. It was now Easter, and Eome had still a 
 fashionable foreign crowd at its command, though the crowd 
 were on the eve of dispersion to northern lands, to the glories of 
 Marlborough House and the Orleans Club, to the grand stand 
 of Chantilly and the pavilion of Trouville. 
 
 Prtsqua, though shorn of its pontifical splendours, still is 
 Pasqua in Eome ; and the fashionable crowd was waiting for its 
 final functions, and enjoying a few last farewell-fetes meanwhile. 
 
292 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 loris came late, very late; he had escaped from the Casa 
 Challoner by the plea of a Prince's command, which existed only 
 in his imagination, and had left the Lady Joan sitting, sullen 
 and worried, over cypher telegrams and arithmetic, smoking 
 strong Turkish and drinking black coffee. 
 
 He came into the beautiful gallery that has no rival in the 
 world ; himself looking in unison with the p)lace, pale, graceful, 
 pensive, proud, giving a low bow here, a charming greeting there, 
 grand seigneur in every gesture, as all his forefathers had been 
 before him. 
 
 He made his slow, courteous way through the august crowd, 
 where nearly every one was au acquaintance, and by degrees, 
 without apparent desire or design, approached a woman in a 
 cream-hued dress, made like the gowns of the Marie de Medicis 
 portraits, with pale yellow roses and japonica, and diamonds at 
 her bosom and about her throat ; it was Etoile, talking with 
 two foreign ministers. 
 
 He saw her glance wander towards him, her colour change, 
 her breath come quicker ; though he could not hear her words 
 he felt sure that they lost their lucidity and eloqi;ence, and grew 
 absent and ill connected. He smiled and murmured to himself 
 once more — 
 
 " Je vois bien que tu m'aimes ; 
 Tu rougis quand je te regarde." 
 
 Then he joined her, and spoke with her and Princess Yera on 
 the topic of the hour. 
 
 As his eyes dwelt caressingly on the long, straight folds of 
 the creamy dress and its old filmy laces, he thought with a 
 shudder of the strong hand that had just grasped his in the 
 Casa Challoner, and the stern lip)S gripping their cigarette. 
 
 After a while, without observation, he drew her away alone ; 
 he was a master in the little arts of society ; and the Palazzo 
 Faruese is so vast that five hundred people in its mighty chambers 
 look no more than a handful of leaves on a lake. 
 
 " I want to ask you something, if you will not be too harsh to 
 me," he murmured, his eyes resting tenderly on the yellow roses 
 that moved with her breath. 
 
 " Am I likely to be harsh ? Ask." 
 
 " You never go to her now," he said in a low tone. 
 
 " No. You know very well why " 
 
 He hesitated, then said, with that sort of timidity which in 
 him was a caressing and supplicating gracefulness • 
 
 "Perhaps if you would go, now and then, it might be better." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Alas ! you know her temper, her vehemence, her fancies ; if 
 she think herself slighted she may take some vengeance " 
 
FRIENDSniP. 293 
 
 " On yon ! " said EtoilCj with a glance of vague alarm. 
 
 "Ah, no! On yon !" 
 
 " On mo ! " she echoed, with an inflection of absohitc indiffer- 
 ence and scorn. " What can any woman do to mc, or man 
 cither ? Wliat idle fears ! Are you not ashamed to give them 
 any shape in words?" 
 
 " Alas !" said loris with a sigh and paused; he thought of 
 the base calumnies that his mistress sent forth as serpents dart 
 their tongues, biit he shrank from speaking of them. " I under- 
 stand that intimacy between you is impossible," he murmured ; 
 " but the mere empty courtesies of society, the mere forms of 
 friendship, might be more wisely kept up ; if you would dine 
 there again, call oftener " 
 
 " I will not." 
 
 Etoile turned suddenly, and her eyes burned for a moment 
 into his with an anger that filled him with admiration, because 
 it was so righteous and so frank. 
 
 " When I came to her I did not know what she was. Now I 
 know. I have become your friend ; more than your friend ; I 
 have your confidence. Perhaps you are wrong to give it ; perhaps 
 I am wrong to receive it ; perhaps — but so it is. Wo cannot un- 
 say all that we have said. If she come to me I will receive her, 
 through respect to her father, receive her with all courtesy, bnt 
 I will not go into her house again — never, never ! I will not affect 
 to her to hold her in esteem while in my heart I hold her in- 
 famous — I will not ! My friendship has never been the empty 
 falsehood of Society ; it has never been the secret sneer of con- 
 ventionality covered with a conventional caress ; it shall not be 
 so to her. Could I palm off the lie on her, I should merit any 
 lie that she might tell of me ! " 
 
 She spoke with force and with emotion ; her own inmost 
 sense of her antagonism to this woman made her strive the more 
 to be loyal to her, made her cling the closer to sincerity in her 
 dealings with her. 
 
 " You are siipcrb, but you are not of this world," he said, and 
 kissed her hands with tender wondering eyes. 
 
 " I try to be just," said Etoile wearily, a sense of constraint 
 and concealment began to weigh upon her. 
 
 loris sighed. 
 
 This truthfulness was beautiful to him, because it was so 
 strange, so utterly unlike all that he had ever known in the 
 women who had influenced his life, but it embarrassed him. He 
 felt — and hated himself for so feeling — that women were easier 
 lo deal with who had those instincts of intrigue, those pro- 
 ficiencies in deception, which he had been wont to think inborn 
 in all womanhood. 
 
 "Justice is very difficult and very rare," he said, with 
 hesitation. 
 
284 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Yes, more difficult, more rare than mercy. But one must 
 be just, even to an enemy, or be base." 
 
 She paused abruptly and coloured, remembering all that it 
 implied to acknowledge his mistress as her foe. 
 
 He smiled, well pleased, though troubled. 
 
 " You are half a warrior, half a child, and all a Muse," ho 
 said tenderly. " But you are not made for our base and banal 
 world." 
 
 " You have women enough around you that are. Go to them. 
 Will you not ? " 
 
 She smiled a little as she spoke. 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Then do not complain of me." 
 
 " Do I complain ? " 
 
 Their voices were very low, there was no one near them ; the 
 great room was full of the scent of roses; above-head were 
 the gorgeous yet tender hues of frescoes. 
 
 Her eyes fell beneath his. 
 
 " Why will you talk to me of her ? " she said irrelevantly, 
 with i^ain and w^ith impatience in her voice. " It is to be false 
 to both her and me. You must know that." 
 
 "1 could never be false to t/ou," he murmiired, and, as they 
 stood together, stooped till his breath was on her brow and his 
 cheek touched hers. 
 
 She grew very pale ; he watched the quick, high beating of 
 her heart. 
 
 " You are not free to speak so." 
 
 " I will be free ! " 
 
 They were both silent ; beyond the doors there were some 
 movement and subdued murmur of voices. They were no longer 
 alone with the roses ; the world, that is the enemy of passion, 
 was about them. 
 
 The great empress for whom this Pasqua fete was given, and 
 who was an amiable old lady in a knitted shawl, and her husband 
 who was driving the host almost to madness by requiring the 
 date and history of every morsel of sciili)ture and of fresco on the 
 walls and ceilings, were both approaching, with a polite little 
 throng of decorated personages about them. 
 
 They wished to see Etoile. She went to be presented to 
 them. 
 
 "Dreadful bore!" murmured Lady Cardiff to her as she 
 went. " Plowever, my dear, you are strong in dates and docu- 
 ments, so perhaps it will not plague you so much as it does his 
 poor Excellency yonder. They should not educate Eoyalties and 
 ImiDerialities; they are very much nicer when they can only say 
 How-do." 
 
 loris seeing Lady Cardiff's eyes ou him, bent down with 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 295 
 
 fti'dent devotion to a beautiful countrywoman of his own, the 
 Duchess of Ara Cceh'. 
 
 " I wonder if he is entangling Etoile or disentangling himself," 
 thonglit Lady Cardiif, following him with her glance. " There 
 will be a very great difference. Whichever way he begins, ho 
 will end. I wish I knew him well enough to talk to him, not 
 that one ever does any good in these things — they always have 
 their course like comets, and no one can change it by screaming. 
 But I am afraid — yes I am afraid. He will not bo bully enough 
 to get rid of that bully of his. It is an odd thing that men aro 
 always over-brutal or over-gentle. I wish Lady Joan had caught 
 a Sir John Brute. loris has not enough of the brute. As for 
 her, if she do care for him, he ought to be Petrarch and Mirabeau 
 blended. Our sort of love will never do for her. Our love is 
 like the moccoletti, the fun consists in setting fire to as many 
 tapers and blowing out as many as ever we can. The passions of 
 the world are only tapers, dipped in petroleum sometimes indeed, 
 but never either the sun or the stars that she dreams of : — don't 
 you think so, loris ? " she asked suddenly aloud. 
 
 " Plait-il ? " said loris, leaving his duchess. 
 
 Lady Cardiff looked at him through her eyeglass. 
 
 " I was thinking aloud ; a bad habit ; I was thinking, not one 
 man in a million can love a woman like Mirabeau ; and not one 
 in ten millions like Petrarch. Now, women like our feminine 
 liaffaelle yonder, want Mirabeaus and Petrarchs, who are not to 
 be found. Failing the suns and the stars, do you think such a 
 woman should be satisfied with the light of a taper ? " 
 
 He looked annoyed. 
 
 " I presume she would be the best judge of the light that 
 would content her ! " he said coldly ; " but I should imagine, 
 madame, that she was quite above the need of any light excej)t 
 her own." 
 
 Lady Cardiff smiled. 
 
 " I am very glad to hear you say so ; you see a good deal of 
 her, I believe — and can tell one. Of course, genius is like the 
 nautilus, all sufficient for itself in its pretty shell, quite at home 
 in the big ocean, with no fear from any storm. But if a wanton 
 stone from a boat passing by breaks the shell, where is the 
 nautilus then ? Drowned ; just like any common creature ! 
 Oh dear, no ! I was not thinking of anything in especial. Do 
 tell me who that new woman is in the black and red, with the 
 huge pearls ; never saw her before ; — a Eoumanian princess ? 
 Ah! they are all princesses in Eoumania." 
 
 Then Lady Cardiff released him ; but he did not return to 
 the duchess. 
 
 " Drowned— ^just like any common creature ! " 
 
 The words rang in his ears and haunted him. He knew the 
 
296 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 trutli that their figure conTeyed. The nautilus shell had ridden 
 on the sea of the world safe and buoyant through the winds of 
 fame and the storm of envy. Was his the hand that should cast 
 the stone from the passing boat, and make that fairy voyage end 
 in wreck and in disaster ? Forbid it. Heaven ! 
 
 He was a man thoughtful by nature, though by deliberate 
 choice he often would not think. To the dangers of the 
 course he was pursuing he was wilfully blind, because he did 
 not choose to pause and look close into its peril; but these 
 words shook him to a fuller, franker sense of the thing that he 
 was doing. He was not Petrarch, he was not Mirabeau ; but he 
 was the man she loved, and so the maker of her fate ; the light 
 that would shed eternal summer about her, or the stone that 
 would sink her in the storm. 
 
 He went slowly through the brilhant things with the Carraccio 
 and the Kaphael frescoes above his head, and the courteous smile 
 and empty phrase of society upon his lips ; but he saw very little 
 of what was around him ; he saw only the creamy hues of a far- 
 ofif dress, the shining of some diamonds amongst yellow flowers ; 
 a wistful glance now and then from eyes that, unconscious of 
 what they did, followed and sought him. 
 
 " Drowned — just like any common creature ! " 
 
 Yes ! if he chose. 
 
 His pulse beat high, his cheek grew warm ; he was victorious, 
 yet uneasy in his victory. 
 
 People began to go away ; the imperial guests had gone, and 
 others were free to go. 
 
 He went out and waited on the great stairs until the time 
 that he saw her pass by ; an old man, a minister, was conducting 
 her to her carriage. 
 
 loris drew back with a deep bow, and let her pass on down 
 into the halls below and the gardens that were illumined to the 
 edge of the Tiber. The great courts of Farnese were full of 
 flickering torches, trampling horses, gilded lackeys, the lamps 
 of many colours twinkled under the sombre arcades. Such scenes 
 are commonplace elsewhere, and pall by repetition, but in Eome 
 they are always majestic because the past is always in them : 
 through these gardeus Borgia has passed, through these arcades 
 Piaffaelle has roamed. 
 
 loris threw his furs about him, and went down into the 
 torch glare and the press of men and horses. Above the garden 
 tlie moon was hanging ; music came from the open casements on 
 the air. 
 
 A carriage was passing slowly outward into the Campo dci 
 Fiori. 
 
 At a sign from him his own followed it. 
 
 "When she descended at her door, he was there in the clear 
 moonlight. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 297 
 
 "Did yon thiuk I could bear not to say good night?" ho 
 nnTrmnrccl, and he wrapped lier cashmeres closer round her very 
 gently, and led her iip the darkened staircase under the pallid 
 sad frescoes of Overbeck. 
 
 In the great rooms the lamps were burning, the fire was low 
 on the hearth, the flowers were spreading their sweetness on 
 vacancy. 
 
 He took the cashmeres from about her, and his arms enclosed 
 her instead. 
 
 " You love me, I love you," he said softly. " Make mo what 
 you think me ; what you wish mo — I am yours ! " 
 
 CHAPTEB XXXII. 
 
 Some persons passing at that moment down the stairs and 
 corridors of the Farnese were saying to each other, " What 
 absurdity to suppose that there was anything between loris and 
 Etoile ! Did you not see him ? how coldly he bowed. Ho 
 seems hardly to know anything of her. Why will people talk 
 nonsense ? Besides, you know very well he is entirely accapare 
 by that Englishwoman ; oh, yes." 
 
 Lady Cardiff, as she overheard the remark as she also passed 
 down the staircase, smiled to herself. It was the sort of thing 
 that interested her — to watch the drama passing on the stage, 
 and hear the comments of the audience on it at the same time. 
 
 "What Vi fine mouche he is!" she thought. "Well, I will 
 keep their secret, though they don't choose to trust me with it. 
 But a day's secrecy here will be an error with his bully — he 
 should be fierce, firm, and frank — but he won't be, not he ; I 
 wish he were Petrarch or Mirabeau. My poor nautilus — how 
 long will he leave you serene in your shell, and how much will 
 he understand the harm he does when he breaks it ? " 
 
 And she went home, and for once had no pleasure in reading 
 her Figaro in bed. 
 
 " That's what comes of being interested in a creature that 
 feels things; it is catching, like diphtheria," she thought angrily 
 to herself as she read a column of Villemessant twice over with- 
 out caring about it ; and decided to take a little chloral. 
 
 "He won't even know how soon the shell will break; that 
 will be the worst of it," she thought, as she poiired out the 
 drops. " Ho has lived so long with a woman as hard as a cocoa- 
 nut." 
 
298 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 The woman who was hard as a cocoa-nut was at that hour, 
 as the carriages sped through the moonlit midnight from the 
 courts of Farnese— roUing through Eome with a dull thunder 
 that reached her ear and made her angry, because to Farnese she 
 went not herself— sitting alone before her writing table, smok- 
 ing, sorting her papers and telegrams, and issuing commands to 
 her sleepy, worn-out waiting-woman. 
 
 "Have you everything packed for Fiordelisa?" she was 
 saying in conclusion. " The oxen will be in here early for the 
 boxes ; mind that you are ready, that is all ; and tell the cook to 
 go up there by sunrise, as soon as he's been to market, because 
 I shall have some people up to luncheon, and he must have a 
 good many things cold and savoury ; see you tell him ; and let 
 these letters be posted, and give me my bath by eight o'clock, 
 and send somebody round early to the Prince loris to tell him 
 to be here by ten, not a second later, and that's all, I think. I'll 
 wear my linsey-woolsey gown to-morrow, and I come back to go 
 to the opera, you know, at night, and you will get out my amber 
 dress and the emeralds for that." 
 
 And she went to her couch and slept in peace though the 
 carriages were still rolling by from Farnese. 
 
 In the morning her messenger brought her a pencilled note 
 back ; loris regretted— apologised — but he was in his room, and 
 could not rise; he had one of his bad headaches. He would 
 endeavour to join her later. 
 
 On any other day she would have darted down to his house 
 and made his head ache ten times more severely with her fuss 
 and her remedies and her noise, but that day she was busy, she 
 could only send Mr. Challoner ; against Mr. Challoner, loris kept 
 his chamber door barred, and sent out word that he was really 
 unwell. She heard, hesitated : should she go herself? — then 
 reflected that he so often had headaches, especially now, and she 
 was overwhelmed with business, and she had promised to drive 
 out Douglas Graeme, and Guido Serravalle, and a Lady Blank 
 was to go up and lunch at Fiordelisa of whom there were great 
 hopes in regard to the purchase of a huge oaken altar screen, 
 discovered by Mimo. 
 
 She was sorry that he had his headache, because in her rough 
 way she cared for him, but perhaps it was not altogether un- 
 fortunate ; the Lady Blank who was to buy the altar screen was 
 a person of prudish and peculiar notions, and there was coming 
 up with her an English Consul, who was a family man, ancl 
 would bring his young daughters to play lawn-tennis — a bore 
 certainly, but useful when any Lady Blanks were there. Lady 
 Joan regarded the Consul with boundless contempt, as the very 
 poorest, limpest threadpaper of a man, but the threadpapcr was 
 noted for strong domestic principles and sentiments, and as ho 
 
FItlENDSlIlP. 209 
 
 played lawu-tcimis with his littlo girls on the grass of Fiordclisa, 
 was a useful pawn on her social chess-board, '' Dear Mr. 
 ])una]lan takes his children there, and ho never would, you 
 
 know, if " said the small gentilities of whom ho was chief, 
 
 whenever the small gentilities had qualms. 
 
 When the ponies came to the door and the oxen camo to bear 
 these household gods of the Casa Challoncr, which it was then 
 wont to carry with them, like the ancient Latins she made up 
 her mind and took her departure for Fiordelisa. 
 
 She was in love with loris, but the apple of her eye, the jewel 
 of her treasures, the idol of her heart was Fiordelisa. 
 
 Besides she could not lose the chance of selling the altar 
 screen. 
 
 So she slashed the ponies and started off, Douglas Grscmc 
 beside her, her guitar and her gun at her feet, the oxen labour- 
 ing far behind under the weight of the household gods. 
 
 To move something looked respectable, and like ownership 
 of the old grey castle on the hill. Besides some of the household 
 gods were always for sale ; a use to which the ancient Latins did 
 not put them. 
 
 " Is she gone, Gianino ? " asked loris of his servant, who had 
 been sent for to be useful for the packing of the gods. " Yes, 
 Excellence," said the man, and added under his breath, "the 
 saints be praised ! " 
 
 " You may oj^cn the blinds," said loris, who was lying on the 
 outside of his bed, and he rose at once. 
 
 There was a knot of yellow roses and jessamine in a glass by 
 his bed ; they were crushed and faded flowers, but he put them 
 to his lips, and the sweetness of the most triumphant hour of his 
 life seemed in them. 
 
 He was very happy, yet he knew himself in great peril. 
 
 The one consciousness heightened the other. 
 
 He passed the morning at Eocaldi with Etoile. 
 
 She was not yet living there, but often passed the days in the 
 lonely, balmy garden. 
 
 The terraces were moss-grown now, the statues mutilated 
 and fallen, the ivy and pimpernel ran in their innocent riot over 
 the unwceded walks, but it was beaiitiful ; walls of thick ilex 
 darkness enclosed it, and here and there tall palms soared up 
 from a wilderness of roses. The cool and lovely summer that 
 comes with April was like a caress upon the land ; under all the 
 fresh foliage birds sang, and above head was a cloudless sky. 
 
 *' Ah, how I wonder that I could ever live without " 
 
 Etoile sighed amidst it all as only the hai^py sigh, and left 
 the phrase imendcd. 
 
 loris, sitting at her feet on the marble steps of the terrace, 
 smiled, and kissed the hands he held. 
 
300 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " The nautilus sails no more by itself," he thought, and aloud 
 he said, " You were but a Muse before ; now you arc a woman. 
 I have called you down to earth." 
 
 " Is it earth ? " she said dreamily. Hardly " 
 
 To her it seemed something diviner far. 
 
 But with him love was of earth, and did not lift its wings. 
 
 " Had he seen her first 
 She might have made this and that other world another world 
 For the sick man, but now 
 The shackles of an old love straitened him ; " 
 
 and the baneful influence of long years of bondage was like a 
 sickness in him, body and soul. He was passionately proud of 
 the new power he had gained, of the new bonds that he in turn 
 had woven, of the strength he had found to usurp dominion over 
 a mind by others untameable and beyond human reach. 
 
 But triumph and passion are far off the love of which Etoilo 
 dreamed. These subtle fires, such as now enclosed her in then- 
 warmth and devouring speed, are fires that burn up the soul and 
 then die down. 
 
 But of this she was ignorant ; she only knew that all exist- 
 ence was transfigured for her, that her past seemed pale and 
 poor as a starved flower on a barren moor ; and only now — now, 
 when his hands touched her and his eyes gazed at her, did she 
 awake and live. 
 
 " It is terrible," she said, and grew pale, and was afraid of 
 these new toys that seemed like gods to rule and to destroy. 
 
 Ho only smiled with victorious consciousness. " Your 
 dreams were the enemies of men. I have made them my 
 prisoners. They will never wander from mo now." 
 
 "It is that which is terrible," she said under her breath, 
 with a vague and sudden sense of that irremediable loss which 
 Love calls gain. 
 
 Some dread, like Merlin's dread, passed over her like a chil) 
 wind. 
 
 " If I fear 
 Giving you power upon me thro' the charm 
 That you might play me falsely, having power. 
 However well j'ou think you love me now 
 (As sons of kings, loving in pupilage, 
 Have turned to tyrants wlicn they came to power), 
 I rather dread the loss of use than fame." 
 
 But to him this dread, in her, was sweetest flattery, supremo 
 attestation of his empire, that made him glad with a boy's glad- 
 ness, proud with a despot's pride. loris only smiled and kissed 
 her closed eyelids with his silent lips. 
 
 And once more she was blind — and hapi^y. 
 
FlilENDSIIIP. 301 
 
 The lovely clay Imruecl itself oi;t in fire, colour like the flush 
 of the rose-laurel flowers spreading itself oyer the ■western 
 heavens. 
 
 They had been happy. 
 
 By common tacit consent they had never spoken of the one 
 who was now the enemy of both. 
 
 She loomed in the darkness of their future like a tempest 
 cloud that darkens the fair sky with menace, sure to be fulfilled ; 
 but neither remembered her, or if her memory passed over them, 
 would dwell on it. To the woman it seemed so easy for him to 
 close the doors of the grave on the old ashes of a dead shame, 
 nnd come forth from it into the bright air of untainted joys, that 
 she thought it outrage to him to speak of such a thing as duty ; 
 to the man the effort seemed so difficult, that he would not face 
 its obligation till the sheer hour of need should strike. 
 
 To her ho had said, " I will bo free." She would have 
 thought it insult to doubt his word or urge on its fulfilment. 
 To him, its fulfilment looked so hard and hazardous that ho 
 drove it from his memory until such time as he should be forced 
 to rise and grapple with the sj^ectre. 
 
 To her, it seemed simple as the growth of a field lily, that he 
 should rise from unworthiness and be free ; to him it seemed 
 perilous as seizure of an asj), to divorce himself from the snake- 
 like folds of a guilty tie. 
 
 So the hours passed, and one name was unspoken between 
 them. 
 
 To her it seemed shameful, — to him it seemed loathsome — to 
 utter it. 
 
 At sunset he took his leave of her. She did not ask him 
 whither he went. 
 
 They loved each other ; that seemed to Etoile to shut out for 
 ever from them the baseness of suspicion, the unworthiness of 
 doubt. 
 
 But at the last moment, when his cheek vras against her in 
 his farewell, she murmured to him — 
 
 " You will tell her the truth— now ?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 He murmured back the word on her lips. 
 
 He went ; and left her to the dreams that henceforth were 
 his captives, her hands lightly clasped behind her head, her eyes 
 closed, her lips parted in a soft slight smile : nothing any more, 
 but only the woman that he loved, the woman that loved him ; 
 and gladder, prouder to be that, than of all fame, or use, or 
 praise, or jjlace on earth. 
 
 He went, and his reluctant steps and his hesitating will bore 
 him to what all the manhood in him rebelled against and for- 
 swore; bore him to the lamplight, the laughterj the smoke, and 
 the quarrels of the Turkish chamber. 
 
302 FBTENBSBIP. 
 
 He felt a coward and untrue, but habit is stronger than con- 
 science ; he said to himself, " To-morrow, not to-night." 
 
 He recoiled from seizing the asp and flinging it from him, yet 
 he submitted under the sense of its tightening folds. 
 
 " You do not look ill now," said his tyrant sharply, standing 
 under the light in yellow shining raiment, with glittering eyes, 
 fierce and curious, and menacing. "You do not look ill now. 
 What has kej^t you away ? You are coming to the opera ? " 
 
 " I am not well ; but I will come." 
 
 He grew very pale; he seemed to suffer. She bent her 
 jealous eyes on him. 
 
 " Are you ill ? I believe there is nothing the matter with 
 you, except indolence. We had a splendid day. I have sold the 
 screen; everything is gone up; we can go to stay to-morrow. 
 You do look pale; take some wine; no? Poor lo! You are 
 feverish." 
 
 She brushed the hair off his forehead and leant her hand on 
 it : he shuddered under the touch. 
 
 " There is your husband," he muttered impatiently, and 
 moved away; she stared at him; she thought he must be 
 feverish indeed to be afraid of her lord's presence. 
 
 Other men entered to acompany her to the opera. 
 
 It was a great night by royal command. The house was 
 brilliant ; the soldier-king sat with his hands resting on the hilt 
 of his sword ; the opera was " Comte Ory ; " never did loris hear 
 the graceful melodies of it ever again without a shudder of hate- 
 ful recollection. 
 
 His mistress looked well; her amber skirts swept his' feet, 
 thick gold chains were twisted around her shapely head: she 
 had a great fan of ostrich feathers ; she laughed and was gay ; he 
 sat in the chair behind her and seldom spoke. 
 
 Turning her head to him, she thought that it was true he 
 was not well, he had fever ; his face was so flushed, and his eyes 
 had so strange a look. 
 
 " May I leave you ? " he asked her early in the hateful night. 
 " May I leave you ? Y^'ou have others with you, and indeed I 
 am ill, at least too ill to bear this music and this glare." 
 
 She pitied him for once ; believed ; and let him go. 
 
 He returned to Etoile, to the cool shadowy flower-filled 
 chamber on the Montecavallo, with its windows open to the 
 Eospigliosi gardens, to the song of the nightingales, and the 
 shine of the stars. 
 
 " Have you told her ? " she asked him. 
 
 " I coiild not to-night," he answered. " She is gone to the 
 opera. Do not let us talk of her. I want peace. I have been 
 without it so long. Give it me ! " 
 
FBIENDSHIP, 303 
 
 CHAPTEE XXXIII. 
 
 On the morrow loris said to himself, "I must tell her now." 
 And his courage quailed even as quailed Launcelot's before tho 
 Queen, knowing that " at a wink the false love leaps to hate." 
 
 And he was not armed even as Launcelot was, with a crown 
 diamond, to pave the way to freedom. 
 
 He knew his tyrant well enough to know that liberty she 
 would have sold — at a high price — but he had not such purchase 
 money. All his riches, such as they were, were whirling already 
 in the maelstrom of her speculations or sunk in the sands by the 
 Syrens' sea. 
 
 He awoke with a heavy heart, even though his pulse beat 
 high with fresh and unworn joys. There was a conflict to go 
 through that he dreaded ; it had been easier to stand stript to 
 his shirt, with the bare sword in his hand, in the dawn that saw 
 a duel in his student days. Moreover, he scarcely wished to un- 
 veil this sweet secrecy, this love unguessed of the world, and 
 carry it out into the broad day that had no shadows. He was 
 so weary of i^ublicity, of bondage, of thraldom, that all the world 
 could laugh at as street crowds can jeer a galley-slave working 
 with his gang on jiublic roads; it was delightful to him once 
 more to know a passion that was shut in between his own heart 
 and one other's, like a culled flower between the closed images of 
 a poem. 
 
 When the public voice proclaims it, love has lost half its 
 mystic charm. Never to the lover is the hour of love so fair as 
 when it is stole from the rest of the covetous day, and the gentle 
 theft is hidden from the world. Troubled and feverish he was ; 
 but it is this trouble and this fever that are youth. 
 
 For a few days he was ill enough to make it natural that he 
 should let the transit to Fiordelisa be made without him ; ill 
 enough to withdraw himself with the petulance of indisposition 
 from, his mistress's presence; well enough to rise as tho cool 
 twilight came, and take his way to the quiet chambers of Etoile. 
 Once or twice he was compelled to go to Fiordelisa. He felt a 
 traitor and false : not to the woman who reigned at Fiordelisa 
 but to Etoile, to whom he did not confess that he went thither 
 to Etoile, to whom he said, " She is in the country : do not let us 
 speak of her." 
 
 The position was full of peril, but it was a peril that was 
 sweet ; as sweet as it was to Eomeo to gaze up into the moonlit 
 
804 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 balcony, knowing that naked swords might be mislieatlied, and 
 waiting for him amongst the white garden lilies. 
 
 Etoile did not dream of any peril. 
 
 He loved her : it seemed to her as natural as for the day to 
 dawn that he should put from about him the foul bonds of an 
 unlovely and loveless tyranny. The days went by, to her beaix- 
 til'ul as a child's fancy of the Hesperides. She never questioned 
 him. She never doubted him. Since he loved her, it seemed to 
 her that all the threads of those coarse and roughly woven 
 meshes, twisted round his life, must fall asunder and drop away 
 at a touch like the frail gross things they were. To doubt his 
 power to put them from about him now, would have seemed to 
 her like doubting his honour itself; like doubting the very 
 manhood in him. She asked him nothing because she feared 
 nothing. He was the maker and master of both their fates. 
 " Since he loves me " — she would think with a smile ; and think 
 that all was said, and made sure, in that. 
 
 It was one of those errors, simple, yet sublime, which cost far 
 more than many a crime. 
 
 Once she said to him with a thrill of pain and of aversion — 
 
 " Must she be there in your hoiise all the summer ? " And 
 he answered her — 
 
 " What matter, love, since I am not there ? " 
 
 He had come from Fiordelisa that day and had promised to 
 return there ; but he meant honestly to go thither no more after 
 that one evening. He said to himself every day, " To-morrow I 
 will tell the truth," and every day faded and died with the truth 
 untold. Had Etoile been more mistrustful of him, it might have 
 been better for him : it would have been less easy to deceive her, 
 less temptation to continue in the perilous path of secrecy. As 
 it was, he closed her eyes and kissed their shut lids, and knew 
 well that they would not open unless he bade them. She lived 
 in her dreams; and her dreams as he had said were his 
 captives. 
 
 One day she awoke from her dreams for a moment, and 
 looked at him with eyes whose tenderness seemed to him to 
 liold all heaven in their gaze, and said to him in a low tone, 
 " Let her stay in the house if you must — your dead mother's 
 house !— but tell her of this, tell her all the truth at once. It 
 is but just to her." 
 
 " I will." He kissed her as he promised. 
 
 She shivered a little as with a suddeu chill. " Tell her, so that 
 I may never see her again near you : it would hurt me ; I feel as 
 if it would kill me now." 
 
 loris promised her once again, and meant what he vowed. 
 " They will meet in the world ; they will be friends a few years 
 hence," he thought; "or at least any other women would but 
 these." 
 
miENDSniP. 305 
 
 His heart misgayo him ; his task was harder than he strove 
 to tliink it. He was used to tlic banal and brief passions of 
 society ; the ties so close one liour, so loose the next ; the prudent 
 shallow hatreds that kissed and jested, tlie fleet emotions that 
 seethed like boiling froth, and evaporated in mere vapour ; the 
 ]^oor base trumpery cvaaescent thing that women of the world 
 call love. These were what he had seen, and what he had 
 known, but a chill passed over him as he felt that it was not 
 with such as those that he had now to deal ; that on one side of 
 him was a passion cruel as death, and on the other side a love 
 high as the angels : that of the women who claimed his life now, 
 one was too fierce, the other too frank, for either ever to drift 
 away into the indifference, that is the world's form of forgive- 
 ness, ever to look into the other's face' and smile because Society 
 was watching. 
 
 He left her and drove across the i^lain in the radiant afternoon 
 colours, warm on the clusters of cistus, and the plains of grass; 
 tlie April light was lovely about his path, and in the thickets by 
 the ruins and the tombs the thrushes and finches were singing, 
 and the white butterflies were afloat like leaves of white roses 
 scattered on the wind. 
 
 He drove slowly though all the loveliness and lustre of the 
 fast-declining day ; he dreaded the place whither he went, the 
 voice that would there smite on his eai'. He was happy with a 
 sweet sense of youth, of triumph, of sympathy, of hope, that had 
 long been a stranger to his breast ; but he was ill at ease, and 
 his pulse beat with a dull apprehension. 
 
 This woman to whom he was faithless, was not a woman to 
 forgive. 
 
 The sun had set when he reached Fiordelisa, but day still 
 lingered golden, yet shadowy. With a strange sense of loathing 
 he threw the reins to his servant, and approached the house by 
 a side path that led by an old arched door into the cortile. 
 
 He heard the tinkle of cujis, the uproar of laughter, the 
 sounds of the mandoline, and his mistress's voice singing one of 
 the popular songs : — 
 
 " Ad ogni fenestra vo' tendere un lacio 
 A tradimento per tradir la luna, 
 A tradimento per tradir le stelle, 
 A tradimento per tradir il sole, 
 Porche restai tradito dall' Amore I " 
 
 Tradito . — his blood ran cold, as if a dagger touched him. What 
 would her vengeance be when she knew herself betrayed, be- 
 fooled, forsaken? He had felt a bare blade in a duel, and faced 
 a rain of bullets in a battle with as much calmness as other men ; 
 he had carried the dead, aud watched by the sick, in the great 
 
306 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 cholera of Eome with tranquil and dauntless devotion ; but the 
 bravest man on earth will quail before a woman that he fears. 
 
 loris as he stood a moment by the old grey door, before 
 unlatcliing it, felt a sickly sense at once of fear, and of loathing, 
 as the fierce imperious singing thrilled though his nerves. When 
 he should tell her that she must arise and depart, and let another 
 reign there, how would it be ? 
 
 Through a grating in the door he saw the court ; the tea-table, 
 the lounging chairs, the rugs and skins, the hanging creepers ; 
 he saw Mr. Challoner dozing, the child plajing with a coloured 
 balloon, the servants moving with a tray, Burletta and Serravalle 
 smoking, Douglas Grreme making tea, and on a couch that was 
 covered with a tiger skin, the Lady Joan singing her song of 
 treason, and striking the chords of her mandoline. 
 
 With a horrible blankness and suddenness, the full realisation 
 fell on him of how utterly she believed herself to be mistress 
 there until the grave should take her ! 
 
 With a shock he himself realised how bitter as death, and 
 inexorable as hatred, are those unholy unions which are a blas- 
 phemy of marriage and a parody of love, yet are passed off on a 
 world that is willing to be duped, — as friendship. 
 
 He opened the door with the reckless gesture of a man who 
 goes straight on a drawn sword : he was sick of his bonds, indif- 
 ferent to his danger, braced to the conflict, ready for the worst,— 
 the hour of fate and of freedom had struck. 
 
 Lady Joan, as the door unclosed, stopj^ed in her song, and 
 loosened her hold of her mandoline. " lo ! How late you are ! 
 I have some sad news for you, come here ! " 
 
 He went reluctanty he stood by her with a look on his face 
 new there ; she was not alone, he could say nothing. The hour 
 had passed : his courage had sunk. 
 
 " Grandmother is very ill," said the Lady Joan. " I have got 
 to go to England. How you look ! " 
 
 " It is sudden," said loris, and his voice shook a little ; his 
 heart leapt with a great relief and a great joy ; she thought the 
 emotion was sorrow and despair. 
 
 " Awfully sudden," she said, as her hand closed on his, which 
 was cold and unresponsive. " I had the telegram this afternoon. 
 They fear she cannot live." 
 
 It was true : she had had the telegram, and it had arrived 
 opportunely to give her a reason for that journey which was so 
 inevitable and imperative in tlie pursuit of her idea. 
 
 Burletta, who knew that the real cause of the journey was 
 that the poor pot was going to be mended and painted, sat and 
 smoked with the obese gravity of a fat pasha. " What a great 
 creature she is ! " he thought, " always a good little lie ready, 
 smooth as an egg, round as an apple." 
 
^BIENDSEJP. 807 
 
 ITc did not himself believe any more in tlic telegram than he 
 had done in the Pai'meggiauino, but there he wronged her. She 
 had really had it, favoured by fortune, as fortune always favours 
 the bold. 
 
 " Such a sad thing," said Douglas Grrome over the teapot. 
 " Such a bore, too, just as we were all so tremendously jolly up 
 here. Poor old Lady Archiestoune ! Why couldn't she go off 
 before ? She must be really quite antediluvian ! " 
 
 Mr. Challoner, waking from his slumbers, shook his head. 
 
 " Ninety years of a most admirable life now going to its long 
 rest ! " he said, with a tinge of poetry in his feelings and his tone. 
 " The train leaves at 7.45, I think. Joan, always impetuous, 
 wished to start to-night, but it is impossible to pack." 
 
 loris all the while stood silent. 
 
 Lady Joan got out of her tiger-skin couch, and gave her little 
 girl a box on the ear. 
 
 " You heartless little thing ! How dare you play with that 
 bladder, when poor old great grannie is dying, and you will 
 never be able to see her any more ? " 
 
 "You were singing, mamma," murmured the child. "You 
 were singing. I did not know " 
 
 " Come here, my darling ; never mind mamma," said Mr. 
 Challoner, from his rocking-chair. 
 
 Lady Joan, with a glance and a gesture that loris knew and 
 was in the habit of obeying, flung herself out of the iron gate 
 which led to the old grassy pleasaunce beyond the court, where 
 the peacocks were strutting under the boughs. 
 
 " How odd you look, lo ! " she muttered, as he followed her. 
 " What is the matter with you ? " 
 
 The truth sprang to his lips. 
 
 Had it been spoken, all his future would have been freed, and 
 have risen to a brighter and a purer light, as the loosed lark 
 rises to the sun. But the cruel mischances that mock men were 
 at work in that rosy evening air. 
 
 As he hesitated, and kept silence, Douglas Grreme came 
 through the open gate after them, throwing cake to the peacocks, 
 
 " What vrill all your beasts and your birds do without you, 
 Joan?" he said, in the easy familiarity of their cousinship, 
 seventy-seven times removed. 
 
 " lo will be here to take care of them," said the Lady Joan, 
 tartly, annoyed to be followed when she wished to be alone. 
 
 " Do you mean you are going without lo ? " cried Douglas 
 Graeme, saucily. " I should have as soon dreamt of your going 
 without — your husband 1 " 
 
 " Don't be impertinent," said his cousin, more tartly still. 
 
 loris stood pale and silent under the boughs, and turned and 
 went back to the house. 
 
308 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " You are breakiug his lieart, you cruel ■woinau ! " said Douglas 
 Grreme, witli a merry laugh. 
 
 She smiled, and bade him hold his tongue. She liked to be 
 thought cruel, — and invulnerable. 
 
 Dinner was soon after served as the moon rose, and loris was 
 not again alone "with her. He was excited, and talked and 
 laughed with more animation than was his wont ; his ej'es occa- 
 sionally had a brilliant flash of liglit in them, that Mr. Challoner, 
 who was an observant man, alone saw. 
 
 " He is glad we are going," thought Mr. Challoner, and pitied 
 the man who knew his wife so little as to imagine she would not 
 come back. Mr. Challoner himself intended to come back : he 
 liked the place ; he liked the shooting ; he liked the model pig- 
 styes ; he liked, above all, leaving his wife there, whilst he him- 
 self went to the baths. 
 
 " Not come back ? pas si hete ! " mused Mr. Challoner, as he 
 ate his olives slowly, and sipped his old lacryma with relish. 
 Memories of some of loris's careless signatures floated before 
 his mental vision. There was no knowing; things might be 
 managed. Mortgages are elastic things, but they are given to 
 sudden collapse like other elastic articles. The jjlace would be 
 a nice dower for his own little daughter, and he fancied there 
 was a title that went with the land. So Mr. Challoner dreamed 
 over loris's olives and loris's lacryma-christi. Mr. Challoner 
 was a poor man indeed, but he was a practical man. loris was 
 not practical. 
 
 The moon shone through the grated casements in on the old 
 dining-hall, on to the dinner-table with its flowers, sweetmeats, 
 and fruits, and flashed on the silver dagger that was run through 
 the Lady Joan's braided hair. 
 
 loris's feverish vivacity had changed into an absorbed silence. 
 He was thinking of another woman whom the moonbeams might 
 soon find there. 
 
 Outside the nightingales were singing. 
 
 Lady Joan looked at his averted face. 
 
 " Poor fellow," she thought, " how unhappy he is ! " 
 
 There is always something pathetic about a person who is 
 utterly and entirely deceived. Li her absolute self-deception 
 even Lady Joan became pathetic. 
 
 The dinner was long. Mr. Challoner and Burletta both liked 
 their dinners. When at last it was over, Lady Joan caught up 
 her guitar, threw its riband over her shoulders, and sauntered 
 out into the cortile, and thence into the garden once more. 
 
 " Come with me, lo ! " she called to him. 
 
 He hesitated ; then obeyed with laggard step. 
 
 Douglas Gramme this time was too discreet to follow them. He 
 stayed in the coui-t with Mr. Challoner, and smoked. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 309 
 
 It "was nine o'clock; ihc grass "n'as dewy beneath their feet; 
 the crescent moon was sinking. As loris joined her oi;tside the 
 gate in the fragrant darkness, she stretched out her hand, and 
 curled her arm about his, and leaned towards him. 
 
 She took his stillness and his irresponsiveness for grief and 
 for anger. 
 
 " Don't mind it so much," she said, tenderly. " I shall corao 
 back as soon as ever I can, and I will write every day, and you 
 might meet me in Paris, as you have done before. lo ! how pale 
 you are ! " 
 
 " It is a shock to me to lose you so suddenly," he muttered, 
 and he wound his arm about her as she leaned against his 
 shoulder. 
 
 " I cannot tell her now," ho thought. " It will be easier to 
 write it, and it will hurt her less." 
 
 So the lie passed, that for evermore he was never to undo 
 and unwind from about his life. 
 
 As he stooped his head where they stood together in the 
 twilit garden ways, and kissed her, he felt disloyal and unfaitli- 
 f ul ; but it was not the disloyalty to her that smote him — not the 
 uiifaithfulncKs lo her that stung him with its sense of shame. 
 
 lie felt disloyal to the other lijis that he had touched that 
 day; he felt unfaithful to the fairer faith that had come to him 
 with the AjH-il blossoms like a gift of God. 
 
 "Amor mio!" murmured his mistress, flinging her arms 
 about his throat in that fierce tenderness with which in her 
 strange way she loved him. 
 
 The nightingales were singing in the leaves. He could have 
 strangled them for that jarring tumult of song. 
 
 loris shuddered under the embrace ; but he submitted to it, 
 
 "I cannot tell her the truth to-night," he thought. 
 
 Alas for him ! the day was never to dawn that should hear 
 him tell it her. 
 
 The lovely deep azure of the sky was above them, with hero 
 and there the clusters of the stars ; the air was full of the fresh 
 fragrance of the spring ; near them were the glossy dark leaves of 
 an orange tree and the curling tendrils of a purple clematis that 
 covered the old grey wall of the cortile. He never again saw 
 this garden path of his old home, by evening time, in starlight, 
 without a sickly passion of regret. 
 
 If he had but put her arms from about his throat, and told 
 her the truth then ! 
 
310 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV. 
 
 The summer niglit waned and passed, and the sunrise came, and 
 a day of hurry, tui-moil, nuisance, noise, bustle, business followed 
 it, and with the fall of evening she went from Fiordelisa ; and 
 he let her go, still with the truth untold, 
 
 " It will be easier written," he said to himself, with the 
 procrastinating habit of a hesitating and indolent temperament, 
 and stood in the glare and dust and uproar of the railway ter- 
 minus, seeing the train for the north steam slowly out into the 
 golden haze, past the old broken temples and the ruined 
 aqueducts. 
 
 She had gone, believing a falsehood ; she had gone, believing 
 him broken-hearted ; she had gone, saying to him, " I shall be 
 back by harvest," and thinking to herself, " How he will miss 
 me! What will he do?" 
 
 And he let her go wrapped in the happy lie that her own 
 vanity made her accept with so simple a credulity, like the 
 merest peasant maiden that ever lent an' ear to the whispers of 
 her own amorous vanity. 
 
 He let her go, self-deluded. 
 
 As the steam drifted over the distant Campagna and the 
 train vanished in the yellow mists of the hot evening, he drew a 
 deep breath, like a man who casts from his shoulders a burden 
 borne too long. 
 
 Then he went to the woman he loved. 
 
 The sunset splendours of the falling night were streaming 
 through the glow of roses on the terrace as with glad and 
 impetuous eagerness he entered her presence, and threw him- 
 self at her feet. 
 
 " Eejoice with me! " he cried, "she is gone! " 
 
 " Gone ? " 
 
 He laughed aloud in the gaiety and gladness ol his release, 
 
 " She is gone — yes, I am a slave no more ; for your love is 
 an empire and not a bondage," 
 
 The nightingales sung in a palm-tree that a passion-flower 
 clung to and climbed, and their song was beautiful to him. 
 
 It is true she was gone, but not gone as those who leave no 
 trace — not gone as those who go for ever. All things spoke of 
 her at Fiordelisa ; her clothes hung on the pegs ; her guitar was 
 cast on a couch ; her cigars filled an old silver ostensoir ; her 
 alpenstock and her sun umbrella leaned together in the loggia ; 
 
FBIENDSIIir. 311 
 
 her legacy of orders and commands weighed on every dependant 
 and occupied every hour. When loris went up there next day, 
 and as his first act of freedom loosened the hound from his 
 chain, ho shuddered as the signs of her presence met him 
 everywhere : they were also the menaces of her return. 
 
 Imi:)crator gambolled to and fro with mad joy, having no 
 prescience of future captivity that should avenge on him his 
 present raptures. But his master could not shake off all fore- 
 boding. 
 
 As tho days wore on tho electric wires shocked him into 
 unwelcome remembrance of her with messages that he cast 
 impatiently aside, or as impatiently answered; and the post 
 brought him long close pages of amorous words, mingled in 
 odd union with a thousand directions as to vineyards, and 
 brood-mares, and old furniture and new cattle, which he threw 
 away but half read indeed, yet which served to keep ever present 
 to him tho tyrant who was absent. 
 
 Again and again he took up his pen to write the truth to 
 her, and be free. 
 
 But again and again he deferred the ungracious task that 
 was hard to word aright, and forbore to do more than reply that 
 the brood-mare had foaled, or that the rains had hurt the young 
 vines. 
 
 He was so content 'with her away, he dreaded to launch tho 
 bolt that might free him for ever indeed, but which might call 
 her back fleet and ferocious, riding the whirlwind of vengeance ; 
 who coiild be sure ? 
 
 He strove to forget her as utterly as her insistent and con- 
 tmual messages and letters would allow : he dared not risk tha 
 recall which ho feared the truth, when told, would prove to a 
 woman who, as his knowledge of her told him, would never 
 passively accept dismissal, or forgive infidelity. 
 
 To Etoile he said, " She is in trouble, death is around hex*, 
 she is not thinking of me. Before she dreams of returning I 
 will tell her — that will be time enough." 
 
 She did not insist ; she thought he would always do what 
 honour needed. But when he asked her to go with him to 
 I'iordelisa she would not — a sense of aversion and of delicacy 
 made her shrink from the thought. 
 
 " Fiordelisa is very dear to me, because it is yours. But 
 wait," she said to him. "Let her memory be exorcised ; let all 
 trace of her be gone, then I will come. To me it shall be so 
 sacred; everything shall be as it was in your mother's time. 
 You will tell me what she liked best, and wo will have it so — 
 but wait. Let all signs of tho woman who has so cruelly 
 profaned it first pass away." 
 
 He loved her for her auswer, and was half glad, though 
 
312 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 half angry, that she -would not go there ; yet the reply made 
 him ill at ease; she took for granted, as so natural and so 
 simple, that dethronement which he knew could not be com- 
 passed without tempest and revolution, perhaps not even without 
 ruin. 
 
 When Etoile said to him with a smile, not thinking to hurt 
 him, " Let your priest asperge it with holy water and strow 
 rosemary, that is the old charm to cleanse places from evil pos- 
 session—then I will come," he did not smile in answer. A 
 vague fear, dark, sullen, menacing, as the temper of the woman 
 whom lie must brave, weighed on him. Again and again he 
 thought with passionate futile regret, " Why'^did I not tell her 
 all that night, when she kissed me, and I loathed her ! " 
 
 It would have been so quickly told then ; one flash of light- 
 ning, and the storm would have broken over his head and burst 
 and rolled away. 
 
 Now, the storm lowering hung in the distant sky, and over- 
 shadowed the brightness of each rising day. Every morning 
 that he rose he tliought to himself, " If she should come back 
 to-night ! " The dread of her was always with him. When 
 Tennyson makes his Guinevere say : 
 
 "Our bond is not the bond of man and wife, 
 This good is in it, wliatso'er of ill, 
 It can be broken easier" — 
 
 he wrote of a world far away, iu which Guinevere would 
 meekly end in " holy house at Almesbury," a sorrowful weak 
 woman, sore troubled with one sin, where modern ladies lightly 
 bear a bushel such, and never feel them. But now that 
 Guinevere needs no sanctuary, finding all she needs in the 
 bosom of a tender and long-suffering societj^, and repentance 
 and remorse lie with other archaic words embalmed in the dust 
 of dictionaries whence no one takes them out — now, the bonds 
 of Guinevere are the hardest the world forges, and if Launcelot 
 dare to strike for freedom, the world will frown him back to 
 bondage and tell him that iu fealty to his traitress his duty 
 lies, and all his honour. 
 
 Meanwhile, except for this sudden fear which sometimes 
 started up and seized him, as iu a dream of the night a cold 
 hand seems to seize the sleeper and hold him in a horrid wake- 
 fulness, loris was happy as since his boyish days he never had 
 been. A woman who loved him perfectly, questioned him 
 never, and could not weary him, because of the frequent sur- 
 prises and unfathomed depths of a nature which he still but 
 vaguely understood though its strength and its simplicity were 
 alike lovely to him— such a woman awoke all the joys of his 
 youth. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 313 
 
 Ho felt young once more as ho hastened through the noon 
 warmth or the evening moonlight to dream his fresh dream as 
 he looked in the eyes of Etoile. It could not last, he knew, this 
 rose glow of sunrise, this golden hush and glory of a love that 
 was like daybreak; it could not last: it must pass into the 
 limbo of dead passions as daybreak passes into the common 
 likeness of all time, filled with the noise and trouble of the 
 world ; but whilst it lasted it was so fair ; he bade it stay as 
 Faust cried to it before him : being hapi:)y. 
 
 It was the same with her. 
 
 It was enough for her to listen for his step, to hearken for 
 his voice, to remember his touch and his look when he was 
 gone, to feel the very air grow lighter, the very earth seem 
 lovelier, because he came ; she had been but a Muse before, how 
 sweet it was to stoop and become mortal ! To love the life that 
 loves you .' None can know how deep a delight it is, save those 
 who long have dwelt alone, sufficient to themselves, in the 
 asceticism of the arts and all the cold contemptuous solitude of 
 fame. 
 
 When he was absent, she kept his memory with her as Elaine 
 kept the shield at Astolat, embroidering it with every beautiful 
 fancy and with every knightly symbol ; when he was there she 
 had but one thought, to give him the peace, the pride, the joy 
 of life so long denied him. 
 
 Being strong, she would not show her strength to him. 
 Being proiid, she would not show her pride to him. Having 
 been called by men cold, too scornful, hard to please, it pleased 
 her now to stoop and wait upon his smile and let him see how 
 weak, so far as a great love is weakness, she could be at his 
 behest. 
 
 Vain women delight to make their power felt : but Etoile, 
 who was not vain, but who had laid her strength upon the 
 world, as the driver his whip upon the ass's neck, and knew 
 her strength, and had seen men bend beneath it and before it, 
 Etoile found her joy in stooping lowly in meek obedience. 
 
 He was not wiser, greater, goodlier than many another no 
 doubt ; she had found him in his bondage, and known him in 
 his weakness; he was not lord of himself nor yet of others-; but 
 he was what she loved; the only creature that she loved; the 
 only life that was dear to her, and that taught her the mere 
 common joys of earth, and made her know the sweetness of 
 human lips and the light of human eyes ; she had dM'elt alone 
 and apart, and now she lived for him ; she fancied that for this 
 sweet surprise of human mastery no payment of her whole life 
 could be enough. 
 
 Out of the deep abundance of her pity love had arisen, and 
 she now wondered that she had lived — not knowing love. 
 
314 FEIENDSEIR 
 
 It was like a trance that fell upon her: a trance whose 
 visians are of heaven, whilst those who stand by and look on 
 say, this is death. 
 
 The conflict that was before her was one that needed to be 
 fought in mud and mire, with rough weapons, with harsh 
 thrusts, with merciless coarse blows on low and craven foes; 
 but of the conflict she thought nothing ; she only was happy, — 
 with her hand in his. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXY. 
 
 The world had grown quite empty rovind them all ; all the 
 idlers and pleasure seekers had flown away ; in Rome there 
 were no sounds but of the fall of the fountains and the tluill cf 
 the guitars at nightfall. 
 
 Lady Cardiff was the last to go. 
 
 She came to bid Etoile farewell one day at Rocaldi towards 
 the close of the day ; she guessed much, but she inquired 
 nothing, being a woman who knew the world. Only airily and 
 mdiflerently she said at the close of her visit — 
 
 "Do you mean to stay here all the summer? My dear, it 
 will try your health. These grand old gardens harbour death, 
 you know. At least you will die if you wish to Uve, and live 
 if you wish to die ; people always do : a young mother will die 
 as she gives her child its first kiss, and a hospital for incurables 
 will remain full to its roof ! Very odd ; the gods do jest with us. 
 Apropos — I conclude you know old Lady Ai'cliiestoune is dead in 
 London 1 Our dear Joan is gone over : filial piety, you know ; 
 some people do say it's the Messina Ei'idge instead. Anyhow, 
 she is gone. How comfortable loris must be, like a boy out of 
 school, I should think. I suppose you see him still sometimes ? 
 Now I wonder if he will let her come back? he ought not ; it is 
 his one chance of salvation, no one has that sort of chance twice. 
 
 * There is a tide, which, taken at the flood, 
 Leads on to fortune.' 
 
 True statement, but most involved metaphor, like most of 
 Shakespeare's. A tide cannot lead you anywhere ; it may float 
 you." 
 
 Lady Cardiff dropped her eyeglass, having seen what she 
 feared in Etuile's changing eyes, 
 
FBIENDSniP. 316 
 
 "Come find see my gi'oat palms," said Etoile, and led her 
 out to the gardens where two of the stateliest palms of Rome 
 towered in the light as they stood perchance in distant days of 
 Horace. 
 
 Lady Cardiff lifted her eyeglass to them. 
 
 "I don't care for any vegetables," she said, as she looked. 
 " I am like Dr. Johnson : I like the street posts and the people 
 that walk past them ; still they are fine trees. I can see that. 
 But only look how they are stifled under those passion-flowers ; 
 quite an allegory, isn't it ; you should write a poem on it. 
 Won't you have the passion-flowers cut down ? " 
 
 "And my poor nightingales that sing all night in the 
 passion-flowers 1 oh, no ! " 
 
 "Passion-flowers and nightingales! Most poetic!" said 
 Lady Cardift' almost crossly. " But I wish the air were better, 
 my dear ; you will excuse me if I am prosaic. A well-trapped 
 drain is the best poetry after all." 
 
 "The air is beautiful," said Etoile with a smile that made 
 her face at once tender and thoughtful, and full of that name- 
 less light, like a flame shining throiigh alabaster, which only a 
 great joy gives. 
 
 "Poison!" said Lady Cardiff', sharply. 
 
 Then on a sudden impulse she touched Etoile's forehead 
 with her lips. 
 
 "God bless you, my love! Cut the passion-flowers down; 
 they will only choke the palms, believe me, only choke them. I 
 wish you were not going to stay here with the nightingales ; 
 but you are the best judge of the air that suits you, and you 
 are your own mistress, and I am not an old friend to have the 
 right to scold you. I wish I were. Adieu ! " 
 
 "What business had he to grow his passion-flowers there ? " 
 she thought, with anger to herself, as her carriage rolled out of 
 the ilex-shadows of Rocaldi. " If he will have strength enough, 
 it will all come right ; but he will not have strength : he will 
 let that black-browed jade retiurn, and there will be nothing but 
 miseiy out of it all for the innocent one. It is always so. 
 How loyal she is to hun, too — not a word of his name ! Dear, 
 dear, what a pity she came ! She was so content, and so calm, 
 and so cold, and so wrapped in her dreams and creations, and 
 now— he will have no strength. It is she who will be sacrificed, 
 and she will live and die with a broken heart on that bare rock 
 of hers, all alone in the middle of the open sea, and our dear 
 Joan will count up her money, and grin to the end of her days 
 triumphant. Lord, what fools men are ! the pity of it, the 
 pity of it, lago ! " 
 
 Then Lady Cardiff went home with the tears in her eyes, and 
 almost could have cried with rage and vexation : so much did 
 
316 FViIENDSEIP. 
 
 slie take it to heart tliat, though the German Embassy had sent 
 her some choicest foui'-year old Joliannisberg, and "Figaro" had 
 just come in, and there was a telegram to say that Lord Cardiff 
 was punished for liis sins with the gout, she could enjoy none of 
 these good things, but sat silent and out of spirits until her 
 servants told her the hour drew nigh for the train to the north. 
 
 A watcher less merciful and as keen of sight — one who did 
 not come beneath the ilex-shadows of Rocaldi, but nevertheless 
 kept vigil on what passed there — remained down in the city 
 throughout the sultry season ; Lady Joan had left her watchdog 
 chained by the Forum Trajano. 
 
 In their grim, dusky, dusty corner the tliree sisters remained 
 to copy canvases and panels, and be cited as instances of filial 
 love, because they sent their old parents to a lodging by the 
 sea. 
 
 "Such dear, good daughters!" said Society, with its last 
 breath, flying itself away, whilst the poor old father, tormented 
 by sun and sand and fleas and gnats, tottering about on the 
 shore with his deaf wife upon his arm, felt that Regal and 
 Goneril might have been better to bear than these Cordelias 
 who kept the i^urse-strings, and measured the whisky, and 
 scolded from morn to eve, and heaped up their own devoted 
 sacrifices like coals of fire on his head. Lear after all had much 
 to be thankful for, thought Lord George : Lear at any rate was 
 left alone. 
 
 The sisters had hoped that the wide empty chambers and the 
 majestic solitudes of FiordeHsa would have been placed at theii* 
 disposal, in her absence, by their dear friend who loved them 
 A^ith a thousand loves ; part of the siunmer there had been part 
 of their perennial payment, and to stay there in her absence 
 could have been no improi^riety with their mother's knitting- 
 needles and their father's crutch in the antechamber. But their 
 dear friend had gone, kissing them aU indeed, but making 
 otherwise no sign. Lady Joan did not choose to have even so 
 harmless and faitMul a creature as her Cerberus installed ever 
 so temporarily in her throne — and loris said nothing. loris 
 did not even ask them up for a day. So then- hopes fell fruit- 
 less, as they had seen so many hopes fall, knowing well what 
 hell it is in waiting to abide, dancing attendance on the whims 
 and wills, caprices and commands, of other people ; and they 
 stayed down in their close, pent-up old palace amidst the evil 
 smells of the city with no other consolation than that they 
 would have time to finish copying frescoes of Domenicheno 
 ordered by Lord Hebrides out of good nature and clannish 
 feehng, and that they could j^crhaps be still more sure of what 
 he, whom it was their task to watch, should do in absence of 
 the one who claimed his life. 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 317 
 
 Tlie task was clifHciilt, though thoy clccincd it easy. loris, 
 knowing he was watched, turned restive and put out his wit to 
 baffle them. Tliey were no match for him in that social dii)lo- 
 macy when he chose to exercise his skill. He was as courteous, 
 as cordial, as compassionate as ever with these poor toiling 
 women wliom he really pitied ; but when they tried to spy on 
 him, he baffled them. 
 
 He met their questions with serene indifference ; he parried 
 their curiosity Avith calm evasions. 
 
 "It is what they deserve, if they persecute me," he said to 
 himself ; and he beat them with their own weapons. 
 
 What aflair was it of theirs ? 
 
 Once or twice he went and watched Marjory at work in Sta. 
 Maria degli Angeli on her Domenichino, and gave her counsel 
 Avith the delicate and unerring taste in art which characterised 
 him. Sometimes he sat with them in their own dull, dreary 
 chamber ; when he did so it was with intent to blind them. 
 
 " Etoile ? I really can tell you but little. She is shut up in 
 her villa, absorbed on some gi-eat work for next season's Salon,',' 
 he would answer them, and say it so indifferently and naturally, 
 that it almost deceived them. Almost, not quite, for Marjory, 
 whose soul was sick with haunting dread, would now and then 
 get a hired carriage to take her out of the gates along the dusty 
 highroads and the yellow grass to where the ilex thickets of 
 Rocaldi hung in the ruby glow of sunset light, a green oasis in 
 the burnt-up desert, and went about under the walls till 
 twilight fell, and once, twice, thrice she saw a form she knew, 
 and heard the ring of a horse's hoof, and loris passed her, not 
 noticing a woman's figiire low bent in the meadows, as though 
 gathering herbs. 
 
 Then Marjory went home, pressing the jagged iron of 
 hungry jealousy in her breast, and wrote a letter to her bosom 
 friend away in England, and added in a postscript, as though 
 carelessly, " lo is quite well, I believe. We really see notliing 
 of him now you are away. They say he spends all his time at 
 Etoile's villa — the archaeological picture, I suppose ! Au revoir, 
 dearest!" 
 
 Lady Joan got the letter when'she' was sitting alone in the 
 little house in Mayfair. 
 
 Her grandmother was dead, which was odious, because she 
 could not go to Prince's, and show off her skating, which was 
 admirable, nor go anjnvhere else that was amusing, and Avas 
 bored to death with her uncles and aunts and relatives generally, 
 and grew quite pale with having to do propriety so long un- 
 relieved by any touch of colour or diversion. She had sold two 
 painted coffers she had lent to a loan collection, and she had 
 sent some lace and uncut garnets to a Statibrd House charity, 
 
818 FBIENDSHiP. 
 
 and she had gone to a Westminster Service with the head of the 
 Opposition, and she had visited the Royal Academy with Tom 
 Tonans and his wife, and had altogether been so steeped in the 
 Jordan of Respectability that she felt, as soon as she could get 
 out of her mourning, she might dance the Carmagnole with 
 perfect impunity wheresoever she Hked. Still Jordan had bored 
 her. It bores most people. And though this bi-annual dip- 
 ping in it was deemed necessary by Mr. Ohalloner, she felt that 
 never — no, never again — could she go through it ; she had 
 always felt so whenever she had bathed ; yet she had always 
 returned to dip afresh, being a woman in whom after all 
 prudence was stronger than preferences. 
 
 Now, as she sat in her bedroom she read the postscript to 
 her watchdog's warning. She had had a letter by the same post 
 from loris ; she had read it first of all ; she now seized it and 
 read it again. Re-perused by the lurid light of that postscript's 
 suggestions, the letter seemed to her no lover's effusion — seemed 
 cold, brief, unsatisfactory. It told her that the mare had 
 foaled and that the vines were healthy : hardly anji;hing else. 
 The devoto ed affettuoso, Irene.o, of the signature seemed to her 
 at the end to be scrawled oft', as if the ^vriter were glad to be 
 rid of an unwelcome task. A million suspicions darted out like 
 little stings from between the lines and seemed to hiss at her. 
 
 All day long and every day as she bathed in Jordan, as she 
 went in her crape to hear the will read, uninterested because 
 there was hardly anything to leave, and what there was went 
 to her father and aunts ; as she smothered her yawns while the 
 head of the Opposition discussed a crabbed and vexed passage 
 of Dante with her ; as she toiled through the Academy, whei'e 
 nothing interested her, becaiise she only liked the old masters, 
 the dear old masters, who could be bought in a garret and sold 
 at a profit ; as she travailed over documents, reports, and 
 accounts, to persuade the recalcitrant shareholders, and fasci- 
 nate unwilling presidents, and eftect herculean transfers, all 
 day long — in everything she did there was always one wasp's 
 sting always festering in her — the fear of what might be doing 
 in Rome. 
 
 Call him she dared not. 
 
 She had just brought her transfer to boiling point. She had 
 just mended and painted her broken jar. She had just managed 
 so beautifully, that all the sheep that were silly as swine would 
 go over the steep all alone, and the shepherds be safe with their 
 fleeces. If he came, all would be ruined : he was such a fool. 
 Over the steep he would go himself ; he would break the 
 mended pot, he would throw the soup away as it boiled. He 
 would even sell Fiordelisa. Yet every hour of the day, smiling 
 on dowagers, listening to deans, and talking of Dante, every 
 
 A 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 319 
 
 day plunging at morn into finance, and wasliing in Jordan at 
 even, every lionr tlie terror thrilled through her — if he should 
 be with Etoile ! 
 
 She did not much fear it, because to be blind with a supreme 
 vanity is like being shut in a windowless room lined with look- 
 ing-glasses. Yet the vague dread was there. At the bark of 
 her watch-dog it sprang up full armed. 
 
 She was alone in her bed-room that looked over the smoke- 
 blackened roofs of Mayfair, with sooty sparrows t-\vittering on 
 the sill. With a pang of passionate longing she thought of her 
 bedroom at Fiordelisa, the roses clinging round it, the sweet 
 aziu-e sky beyond it, the old sculptirred shields above it, a thrush 
 singing on an orange bough, and the voice of her lover calling 
 from the old grey court Mia cara, che fai tu ? She was not a 
 tender-natured woman, nor one to be touched by sudden 
 memories, but at that moment the hot fierce tears rushed to her 
 ej^es and throat. At that moment, for once, she loved with love, 
 and not with self-love ; she felt that all the world and its small 
 gains, and its shallow hypocrisies, would be well lost to lean upon 
 liis breast, to look into his eyes. 
 
 "If she dare take him from me !" she said in her teeth, and 
 a bitterer oath than men can swear was smothered in the heat 
 and harshness of her soul. 
 
 Take him from her ! 
 
 Weak women would have fled to Rome, leaving the soup 
 boiling over, the pot unglazed, the sheep unsheared ; but she 
 was strong. 
 
 She washed the scorcliing tears from her eyes, she swallowed 
 the choking fury in her throat, she put on her crape gown and 
 went downstairs to where her lord perused the newspapers, 
 and her aunts sat penning letters of thanks for condolence in 
 bereavement. 
 
 "I have heard from lo," she said frankly, with that frank- 
 ness which never deserted her even on the shores of Jordon and 
 in the house in Mayfair. " I have heard from lo ; he wants to 
 come over ; do you think we could get the transfer signed this 
 week ? I should like to give him a pleasant surprise if he do 
 come." 
 
 Mr. Challoner laid down the newspaper and considered 
 gravely : 
 
 "I think we could," he said, after a pause. "I will go 
 down to Cannon Street and see if I can hurry them on : is he 
 really coming ? Well, the change might do him good ; he is not 
 very strong." 
 
 For Mr. Challoner also could read between the lines, and 
 wanted himself very much to get free to go to Germany for 
 those waters which were so vitally necessary for liis little 
 
320 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 daughter's health, and also he was fully aHve to the fact that 
 liis wife's maiden aunts, stately gentlewomen of old-fashioned 
 notions, were within hearing at their writing-table. Therefore 
 he spoke with that cordial good humour and good understand- 
 ing which he always put on when they were washing in Jordan. 
 
 " I will go with you," said his wife, and turned to her aunts. 
 " You will excuse me, won't you, dear aunties ? It is a business 
 afiair in which Robert and I are very interested for the sake of 
 some friends, a sad speculation of jDOor lo's that I am afraid Avill 
 not turn out very well, even with the very best that we can do." 
 
 "Of course we have notliing to do with the afi'airs of the 
 Prince loris, nothing," explained Mr. Challoner to tlie ladies at 
 the writing-table, as he was in the habit of explaining it to 
 Society. ' ' Nothing at all, poor fellow ; but there has been a 
 good deal of English capital put into this afiair in Sicily, and so 
 it seems one's duty, really one's duty " 
 
 And INIr. Challoner took out his handkerchief and polished 
 Ills eyeglasses, not ending his sentence, knowing all the virtue 
 that lies in the vague. 
 
 "I don't really know how loris stands," continiied Mr, 
 Challoner with an air of j^rotest. " One is always so delicate 
 on these matters witli friends ; but I am afraid his good nature has 
 
 been abused, his imagination run away with Co-directors? 
 
 Yes, we are co-directors, it is true, but he has assumed personal 
 responsibilities that I never would have done ; against my 
 advice ; quite aga,inst my advice." 
 
 Mr. Challoner sighed and gazed into vacancy. 
 
 " Is he so fond of speculation, then? " said one of the ladies 
 at the writing-table. 
 
 " It is his patriotism," said IVIr. Challoner ; in the Temple of 
 the Virtues every motive was always labelled with the very 
 highest title procurable in nomenclature. 
 
 " Oh ! " said the gentlewomen together. They had lived 
 in London and Paris all their Lives and had, before this, 
 heard patriotism used as a reason for a vai-iety of things, from 
 a minister's keeping in office against the will of the country, to 
 a newspaper's ■vvi'iting a country into bloodshed and banki'uptcy : 
 they were quite aware of the word's elasticity. 
 
 "It is lo's patriotism," echoed the Lady Joan. '"'If he thought 
 he would do the coimtry any good by it, he would jump down 
 into a pit and let it swallow him like Curtius. It is very fine, 
 you know, all that ; biit it does not j^ay. I always tell him he 
 will get no recompense, and end in the poor-house. My dear 
 Robert, get a hansom cab, quick ! " 
 
 Then she put on her crape veil, and drove with her husband 
 to the City to hurry agents and secretaries, and get her mended 
 pot baked in the muflie of Eiu'opeau exchanges, and drawn out 
 
FBIENDSEIP. 321 
 
 as new pottery by those laodem masters of destiny — the 
 brokers. 
 
 " Slie seems to think of nothing but business," said one of 
 the gentlewomen left at the writing-table. 
 
 Guinevere might in her jealousy throw the diamonds in the 
 moat. Lady Joan knew better. 
 
 Business was dear to her, dear were all its pastimes and its 
 profits, she mewed herself in close misty dens of offices through 
 the sweet summer days and condemned herself to the dusty, 
 dreary, noisy streets of London, when the roses were all in 
 bloom at Fiordelisa, that she might keep her mended pot sailing 
 bravely and unbroken down the stream of speculation with the 
 iron pots of safer and richer enterprise. To discern hausse and 
 haisse, to watch the rise and fall of gold, to correct the proofs 
 of a prospectus and see a knot of shareholders smile, to capti- 
 vate brokers and commission agents, and to be up to her eyes 
 in telegrams and despatches — this was as the very breath of life 
 to her, even in the misty, murky, sulta-y atmosphere of the City 
 in midsummer. But chiefly was it so sweet to her because busi- 
 ness forged the fetters that a tired love could not break. Busi- 
 ness wove the shroud in which a dead love could be imprisoned 
 in its grave, her own and no one else's, even though, dead, dead, 
 dead ! 
 
 The shrewd hard sense that underlay her amorous vanity 
 told her that passion soon or late calls to deaf ears ; pipes, and 
 none dance ; lifts its lips and meets no kiss ; but that the 
 woman who has interwoven herself with a man's fortunes, and 
 bound his hands to hers with the hempen ropes of common- 
 place, every day cares and troubles, has entered the very fibre 
 of his life as the lichen enters the bark of the tree. 
 
 The lichen may kill the tree ere its time, but what of that ? 
 They are together till the end comes and the axe hews down 
 both together. 
 
 So she crushed the rage, and the fear, and the longing, all 
 into her heart in silence, and drove down beside her lord to the 
 City. For one short savage instant the Cleopatra had leapt up 
 in her to o'erleap sea and mountains, and reach Rome at a 
 bound. 
 
 But the dame du comptoir was still stronger than the Cleo- 
 patra, and she went and worked in the City ; then sent a telegram 
 — instead. 
 
322 FRIENDSHIP, 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI. 
 
 Whilst in her hot heavy morning garb, in the sooty air and the 
 gaslit little den of her agent's office, sitting -with brokers and 
 lawyers, she spun her threads about her distant lover as the 
 spider sj^ins in the dark to catch the firefly that makes love in ' 
 the starlight, Etoile, in her cool white garments, was walking 
 amidst the blue lilies that filled the grass under her ilex groves. 
 The chimes of a church were sounding near ; the bells of goats 
 cropping the honeysuckle in the field beyond, rang in unison 
 softly ; the acacias were full of blossoms and of bees ; the strong 
 voluptuous heat lay on the land like sleep on the eyes of a tired 
 dreamer. 
 
 She walked on, her white gown trailing on the flowering- 
 grasses ; she gathered a lily, and put it in her breast ; she held 
 a fan of green palm leaves between her and the setting sun ; a 
 ripe fruit tumbled and rolled before her feet ; light and silence 
 were about her. 
 
 "How good is God!" she thought. "How beautiful is 
 life ! " 
 
 His shadow fell through the sunshine, his step came through 
 the flowers, his eyes smiled down into hers, and his lips touched 
 her. 
 
 "Dreaming always ! " he murmured. 
 
 " Dreaming of you ! Are you jealous of that?" 
 
 " No ; since your dreams are my prisoners. " 
 
 He wound his arm about her ; he moved the sultry air with 
 her fan of palms. They strayed through the flowering grasses 
 together — their path was sweet with crushed herbs and dropped 
 roses. 
 
 " You are happy?" they asked one another. 
 
 " I am happy !" each answered the other. 
 
 She said the whole truth with no latent thought to mar it 
 when she said that she was happy. When he said the same 
 words, a dark and restless care was tugging at his heartstrings, 
 which, though he often forced it away, yet seldom wholly left 
 him. 
 
 Ruin seemed near him, and vengeance nearer still. When 
 in the sultry noons he wearily pored over the papers and 
 accounts of the many enterprises and sjieculations into which 
 friendship had allured him, he only succeeded in making his 
 eyes and his heart ache ; when the electric wires shocked his 
 
FlilENDSHIP. 323 
 
 nerves with unwelcome reminder that though his friend was 
 absent in the llesh, in spirit she still stood at his elbow, he 
 wearily cui-sed the inventive genius of his generation, and felt 
 a breathless impatience and oppression, such as the magician 
 felt who had forgot the spell by which alone the shadows lie 
 had summoned could be bidden to dissolve and vanish. 
 
 ' ' She would never come back — all would be well ; " so he 
 said to himself, being of a nature that was sanguine even whilst 
 apprehensive. 
 
 He trusted in some vague way to some kind star that would 
 control her course, and turn it far from his. 
 
 Meantime he did nothing : he was happy, and the peril was 
 distant ; and he ceased to go to Fiordelisa. Her memories 
 were too present there, like the scent of sandal wood that is 
 stronger than the scent of roses, and cannot be driven out, do 
 what you Avill ; and the memories stifled him, and he hated 
 them. They were only deodorised when the hand of Etoile lay 
 in his. 
 
 The old hereditary love of his father's home was always in 
 him, but the place was poisoned to him : when he looked at its 
 threshing-floors, its levelled lawns, its freshly-cleared and naked 
 gardens, its hotbeds and plantations and stock yards, the price 
 which all these things had cost seemed written on them in 
 ruinous figures ; and through the solitude, when the throb of 
 the English farm-engines ceased for a moment, he still seemed 
 to hear the voice of his tyrant crying out, ' ' lo, lo ! " as the 
 voice of the horse-leech cries " Give, give !" 
 
 It used to be so beautiful, so shadowy, so still before she 
 came, he thought, and felt that his people had been right when 
 they had wanted to take their axes and hew in pieces the 
 machines that she had brought, yelling and vomiting fire and 
 black smoke into the sweet, serene, classic woodland silence of 
 that fair hillside. 
 
 The noisy, fussy, screaming engine, blackening the blue sky 
 and searing the flowery grass, seemed her meet emblem. 
 
 He sighed and left the place, and went to where a woman 
 clad in white was painting in a fragrant solitary place, with the 
 blue passion-flower ciu-ling about the casements. 
 
 " Teach me to foi'get all in my life save yourself," he mur- 
 mured. 
 
 And Etoile listened to his prayer and let him steep himself 
 in welcome oblivion, when, to be wise, she should have harried 
 and lashed him -with remembrance till he should have risen and 
 stood free. 
 
 But then she loved him. 
 
 Women who in their warmest passions love but themselves 
 cannot understand this utter obedience to an umvise will, this 
 
324 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 tender submission to an unreasoning weakness, this absolute 
 self-negation. 
 
 Yet nothing less is love. 
 
 IMeanwliile this great submission given him intoxicated him 
 like new wine : he thought himself, as he jestingly said, the 
 magician that had called the solitary star do'svn from heaven to 
 earth, and made it his. 
 
 ' ' Wliilst you shone aloof, and aloft, above this world, all 
 the while you were waiting for me ! " he said, with a smile, that 
 she did not see was too victorious. 
 
 Had she been a lowlier woman, perhaps he would not have 
 been so careless of her peace tlirough being so proud of her 
 glory. As it was, he, so long a slave, was never tired of feeling 
 himself a king in a vaster and nobler dominion than any he had 
 ever known. 
 
 This woman would have stood haughty and indifferent 
 before a howling world, unblencliing and serene. He knew 
 that he, alone, could make her grow pale as a chidden child, 
 grow flushed as a sun-kissed rose. 
 
 " The world -will forget you, hidden here," he said one day. 
 
 Etoile smiled. 
 
 " Let it forget me. ^^Tiat matter ? " 
 
 "No, you must not let it forget you. I love that ring of 
 light about your head that men call fame ; it becomes you. " 
 
 " The ring of light makes the eyes ache sometimes and 
 sometimes makes the path under one's feet dark enough," she 
 answered him, and thought with a litte pang, "Is it less my- 
 self he loves than that halo about my name ? " 
 
 For it is possible to be the rival of one's self ; and a vague 
 apprehension touched her. 
 
 "Do you know," she said, dreamily, "sometimes the ring 
 of light seems to me like that chain of fireflies that cruel 
 Mexican women wear at their balls and feasts — for every point 
 of light a little life dies in pain ; so, in such notoriety as we 
 who are famous get, with each glitter some little sweetness of 
 peace, or joy, or obscurity, perishes. Our light is made of 
 dying things." 
 
 " That is pretty but foolish, my dear," he answered her. 
 " Fame is like wealth or rank or power ; it gilds and bui'uishes 
 the dulness of life. Perhaps I never should have looked at you 
 had you been only a mere woman — not Etoile ! " 
 
 He meant nothing, yet the words stiTng her. 
 
 They seemed to her to say that his joy over and in her was 
 rather triumph than tenderness — rather the pursuit of pride 
 than of love. Her heart ached with a sudden longing to be 
 the lowliest creature that lived, but only loved by him for 
 herself, and not for the uncertain fitful light that the world's 
 rays shed on her. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 325 
 
 " Whenever," had Avise Voightcl once said to her " whenever 
 (if ever) yon do love, you Avill be for a few months the most 
 happy, and for over after the saddest of women." The first part 
 of the prophecy had come to pass, and she had proved its sweet 
 truth ; now and then, she thought of the latter half with a chill 
 vague apprehension. 
 
 Not that she had any sense of the real perils that lay for her 
 in the worn-out passion of another woman, which was cast 
 behind her, she thought, like a crushed, killed snake. 
 
 Whilst she dreamed thus amidst the passion-flowers opening 
 their purple hearts to the sun, she was too happy and too unwise 
 to measure or even perceive the coarse and common perils that 
 environed her, or to know the danger that lay for her in an 
 absent enemy who seemed to her too low to merit any kind of 
 fear. 
 
 She had found loris an unwilling bondsman ; whilst yet a 
 stranger he had let her see his galled weariness of the net that 
 held him ; now that he loved her, it no more would have seemed 
 possible for him to desert her for his tyrant's service than it 
 would have seemed possible for a nightingale, freed of the trap, 
 to re-enter it by choice instead of singing his song of rejoicing 
 in the moonlight, fluttering free wings. She never thought of 
 his absent mistress as any peril to himself or her. He was his 
 own master, he was free ; he loved her, he had shaken off him 
 an unworthy and galling servitude ; it never passed across her 
 fancy that Lady Joan was still a danger for them both. 
 
 She knew that he wrote to England, but this he naturally 
 accounted for by his own entangled afi'airs. " They can ruin 
 me," he said, imder his breath, and would not tell her more 
 clearly, save that they had his signatures to many obligations, 
 and had drawn him into many embarrassments that could not 
 be lightly disentangled nor cleared away. 
 
 He never told the truth of his aflairs to Etoile, because he 
 thought her too visionary to care for or to comprehend the 
 entanglements of finance ; partly also because he was always in 
 his own heart ashamed of having been caught in those entangle- 
 ments, and was conscious that for the descendant of a line of 
 warrior nobles, and of knightly princes, the questionable honoiu: 
 of the Bourse, and of its legalised gambling, was not wdse or 
 dignified, or even clean of conscience enough to be fitting. 
 
 "Make me what you think me," he had said to her; and 
 whilst with her he was all she thought him. Away from her, the 
 lower aims and the coarser efforts in which his late years had 
 been steeped by one evil influence might resume their sway, 
 but in her presence the impressionable temper of loris made him 
 truly rise to the heights on which he could meet and unite with 
 hers. 
 
326 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Once she had said to him, ''If they can ruin you, as you say, 
 cut through all these nets of speculation, these gordian knots of 
 obligation ; cut through them all, let it cost what it may, and 
 come out from them "\vith your honour safe and free, if it leave 
 you poor." 
 
 He was tempted to follow her counsel ; he was tempted to 
 cast Fiordelisa and his last remnants of fortune into the hands 
 of the harpies of finance, and rescue by such loss at least liis 
 manhood and his liberty. 
 
 But his temper was too hesitating for so ii-revocable and 
 headlong a plunge into the unknown. He temporised; he 
 hoped ; he Avaited ; he trusted ; he dallied with danger, be- 
 lieving that thus he exorcised it. 
 
 "You do not understand, my angel," he would say to her, 
 and close her lips to silence with his kisses when she would have 
 urged him to say more. He told her little, because these things 
 beside her seemed to him so poor, and gross, and mean ; he felt 
 also that he had been in a large measure the dupe of circum- 
 stances that he should never have allowed to gather round him, 
 and he did not care for the one living creature who saw in him 
 all that the ideal of his youth had once dreamed of becoming, 
 to be roused from her faith and her dreams to hear the common 
 sorry story of fortunes embarrassed by unAvise enterprise and by 
 foolish credulities. 
 
 He could not bear to lower himself in her eyes. If he had 
 understood her more truly, he would have known that nothing 
 would have turned her from him ; that she would have for- 
 given liim any crime, even what is harder to forgive than crime 
 — any folly, or even any faithlessness. But he did not under- 
 stand ai-ight ; and so he erred and went on in silence. 
 
 And all the while tlirough the hot summer, written words, 
 or words brovight by the electric wires, startled him from his 
 dreams, and stung him as mosquitoes sting, the sting making 
 him rise hot, irritable, and wearily awakened. 
 
 She who was absent, knew how to send such words ; blows 
 to rivet loosened bolts, baits to allure vague ambitions, threats 
 to alarm apprehensive honour, thorns to pierce and inflame 
 careless indolence ; words that, like the pale, invisible hosts of 
 the mosquitoes, gave no rest. 
 
 Over and over again he was on the point of severing for ever 
 the ropes that held the barque of his fate to the quicksands of 
 speculation. But ere ever the resolve could become accomplished 
 fact, his tyrant, ever with him even in absence, cried, " Hold ! " 
 and he paused, and doubted, and waited, as he waited to tell 
 her the truth, until for ever it became too late. 
 
 Etoile knew but little of such things ; what poet or artist 
 does ? and she knew his love of his omi old place, and dreaded 
 to urge on him any haste in action which might imperil it. 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 327 
 
 " Even if they ruin you I have euougli," she said once : he 
 kissed her, but said, "My angel, tliat would not do ; I could 
 not live upon a woman ; let me free Fiordelisa in my own way." 
 
 Meantime, her art seemed but little to her now. 
 
 She sketched his features again and again, modelled them 
 in clay, and never tired of that ; but those long, glad, pure days 
 of absolute absor^jtion in her work, when she had used to have 
 no regret but to see the light fade as the sun set, those were 
 over for ever. 
 
 Although her physicians had ordered her to rest for a year,, 
 she did not now obey them ; with his words came the desiie 
 to do something more beautiful for him than she had ever done 
 for Art alone, something with which his fancy and his features 
 should mingle, and his very being be embalmed. With the 
 true artist, Love finds an involuntary uttTei'ance in Art, as the 
 passion of the bird finds utterance in its song. 
 
 In her villa there was a large chamber with tapestried walls, 
 jutting out into the garden, with all the rank riot of lush grass 
 and wild flowers round about it ; here she made her studio, and 
 here, when he was not with her, she passed all her houi's, like 
 Raffaelle, seeing but one face, paint what she would, in that 
 absolute constancy and absorption of every thought, of every 
 breath, of every fancy throughout absence, which is the true 
 fidelity of a life. Did he ever realise all that this gave him, all 
 that this meant, then and hereafter ? Scarcely : with him love 
 was a thing half of the sentiment, half of the senses, and he 
 smiled sometimes to see it become to her holy as religion, deep- 
 rooted as the hope of immortality. 
 
 " Who should ever love you, as you love? " he thought ; and 
 then he kissed her, and what need was there of any subtleties of 
 thought or word ? 
 
 Passion imperious, exacting, cruel, domineering, had long 
 preyed upon his life, but passion tender, obedient, intense, and 
 full of that humility to which a great love bends down the 
 strongest, was strange to him. There were times when he half- 
 f uared it as in the old days of visions men half-feared the angels 
 that came to them in the night. 
 
 That first fancy of her, as half a Muse and half a saint, was 
 with him still, and though he had made the Muse see no face, 
 but his own, and the saint droop to a love all of earth, and was 
 glad and triumphant, yet with a man's inconsistency he was 
 tempted to regret that he had not passed by, and left them as 
 they were; "some day she will reproach me," he said to 
 himself. 
 
 Perhaps some such vague dissatisfaction with himself moved 
 Pygmalion, and some wish that he had left the marble marble 
 came to him when for him alone the statue bent and blushed. 
 
328 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 _ To Etoile, who knew herself well to be neither Mnse nor 
 saint J but only a woman to Avhom mere human joys had long 
 been strangers, the happiness that he had brought her seemed 
 worth the loss of life itself ; love to the looker-on may be blind, 
 unwise, unworthily bestowed, a waste, a sacrifice, a crime, yet 
 none the less is love, alone, the one thing that, come weal or 
 woe, is worth the loss of every other thing ; the one supreme 
 and perfect gift of earth, in which all common things of daily 
 life become transfigured and divine, and perhaps of all the 
 many woes that priesthoods have wrought upon humanity, none 
 have been gxeater than this false teaching, that love can ever be 
 a sin. To the sorrow and the harm of the world, the world's 
 religions have all striven to make men and women shun and 
 deny their one angel as a peril or a shame ; but religions cannot 
 strive against nature, and when the lovers see each other's 
 heaven in each other's eyes, they know the supreme truth that 
 one short day together is worth a lifetime's glory. 
 
 Etoile walking through the blue lilies of the grass in the 
 warm air, listening for his step, looked back at her past that 
 had not known this joy with wonder and with pity. " I thought 
 I saw so clearly and so far in those old years," she thought, 
 " and yet I never saw all that I missed." 
 
 " Nay, dear," said loris, with a smile when once she said 
 this to him, '' to give that insight the magician must come." 
 
 And he was glad and proud that he was that magician, and 
 she let him see the power of his wand too much. 
 
 "Since it pleases him to know his power, what matter?" 
 she thought. ' ' I have been strong against the world ; strong 
 in my art and in my labours, strong to keep my armour bright 
 in the contest with men : the world has called me too strong ; I 
 have earned the right to be weak." 
 
 He had been a slave so long ; it pleased her to crown him a 
 king. 
 
 Even when he was tyrannous, cai^ricious, or unjust, as a 
 man in his love will often be, she bent her head to the yoke, 
 and was silent and patient as Griseldis. " He has sufiered so 
 much," she thought. " There is much to efface for him, so 
 much to be made up to him." So she set herself to atone to 
 him for the cruelty of another, as though it had been her own. 
 
 When a word that might have seemed to him too vain, or too 
 arrogant, sprang to her lips, she repressed it unspoken, lest it 
 should seem to bear any likeness of his tyrant in it. She 
 wanted to give him back all the pride, the self-esteem, the 
 dignity of thought, of which his mistress had so long robbed 
 him : to strengthen his hands she efiaced herself. 
 
 She had been proud all her life. She gave him her pride, 
 now, as she would have given him the kingdoms of earth had 
 she had them. 
 
FRIENDSHIP, 329 
 
 There is a story in an old poet's forgotten writings of a 
 woman who was queen when the world was young, and reigned 
 over many lands, and loved a captive, and set him free, and 
 thinking to hurt him less by seeming lowly, came down from 
 her throne and laid her sceptre in the dust, and passed amongst 
 the common maidens that drew water at the well, or begged at 
 the city gate, and seemed as one of them, giving him all and 
 keeping nought herself : " so will he love me more," she 
 thought ; but he, crowned king, thought only of the sceptre and 
 the throne, and having those, looked not amongst the women at 
 the gate, and knew her not, because what he had loved had 
 been a queen. Thus she, self-discrowned, lost both her lover 
 and her kingdom ; and a wise man amongst the throngs said to 
 her, "Nay, you should have kept aloof upon your golden seat, 
 and made him feel your power to deal life or death, and fretted 
 him long, and long kept him in durance and in doubt, you, 
 meanwhile, far above. For men are light creatures as the 
 moths are." 
 
 But Etoile had never read this story then, nor, had she 
 seen it, would she have read the parable. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII. 
 
 One summer day tidings came whose pain touched her even in 
 
 her paradise — the tidings that gentle, gracious, courtly Lord 
 Arcliie had been drowned during a sudden storm, in which his 
 pleasure schooner had gone down, beating off the Isle of Jura, 
 where he had been shooting on the moor. 
 
 "Dead!" said Etoile, with white lips : death seemed so 
 impossible for that charming idler, that gentle wit, that graceful 
 saunterer through the smooth and sunny ways of a philosophic 
 life. 
 
 " Dead !" said loris ; and his eyes clouded and his brows 
 grew dark, for he foresaw a darker shadow cast by this death 
 across his own path. 
 
 Lord Archie had been the sole fragile tie that had bound his 
 daughter to any kind of truth or reason ; before her father, 
 falsehood had always halted on her lips. Cahn and indifferent 
 though his habits were, his heart was loyal and his temper true, 
 loris had always felt that the dead man had held his tigress in 
 a manner in leash ; and now on his table in the offices in the 
 
330 FEIENJDSEIP. 
 
 Trastevere there was Ij^ing a passionate summons to liim in 
 cypher, flashed in lightning from his tyrant, crying to him 
 from across the mountains and the sea : 
 
 "Come to me come ! '' 
 
 That day their solitude seemed less sweet ; even the siin- 
 fihine of the radiant painting chamloer seemed to grow dull ; 
 clouds heaved up from the south and the east ; a sullen sirocco 
 was blowing, and the golden hearts and blue eyes of the passion- 
 flowers tilled with sand, the tears of the desert. 
 
 "I cannot write to her?" said Etoile, and hesitated, and 
 looked in his face. 
 
 "No," said loris abruptly, and was silent. 
 
 She wound her hand in his. 
 
 "Would you let me write to her? — it seems heartless not 
 to write, and I might tell her the truth of us, in some way, not 
 to hurt her." 
 
 "No ! " said loris. "No, I forbid you " 
 
 Her head drooped. She did not urge him ; she did not 
 chafe against the tyranny of the words, because she fancied that 
 such tyranny was sweet to him after long servitude. 
 
 Those who know themselves strong can bear to be submissive. 
 She was strong with the world ; she was only weak with him. 
 
 He drew her arms about his throat. 
 
 "Mafetnme ne pent paz ecrire a ma maitresse,^^ he murmured 
 in the language which they most often spoke. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIH. 
 
 One morning Etoile was in her painting room. It was about 
 three o'clock, and fresh rains had cooled the aii'. In the fields 
 beyond her gardens the people were at vintage ; their merry 
 ci'ies came to her mellowed by distance, with the laughter of 
 the children and the heavy roll of the grape waggons creaking 
 down the vine alleys. 
 
 She had been working two hours. He was away in the city. 
 Her painting had come forth from the canvas into life — it was a 
 scene from the life of Sordello. 
 
 And in the face of Sordello she had given the face of loris ; 
 and the work was delightful to her — not now, as of old, for 
 Art's sake, but for his. 
 
 She had left ofl' working for a moment and tlu'o-vvn herself on 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 331 
 
 a low coiicli ; the sea breeze came in through the passion-flowers 
 and stirred tlie folds of her Avhite linen dress and lifted the hair 
 from her forehead ; the swallows were Hying before the open 
 casements. 
 
 "The summer will soon be going, so soon this summer will 
 be a thing of the past," she thought ; and the thought smote her 
 with a sudden pang in the light, the fragrance, the stillness that 
 were round hci\ 
 
 This one beloved sweet summer ! 
 
 Shine the sun as it would, and bring forth its flowers and its 
 joys as it might, no summer ever could be quite like this one, 
 which was fading. The vine-dressers beyond the trees were 
 dancing and shouting with gladness because the grapes were 
 ripe and the summer dying ; but each reddened leaf to her 
 was a regret, each purj^le cluster to her was like a lament : 
 the summer so soon would be dead. 
 
 The summer that had had no precursor, that could have no 
 successor, like itself. 
 
 The door of the studio opened suddenly ; loris entered in 
 silence, and quickly crossed the marble floor and threw him- 
 self beside her. He looked worn and very pale ; he knelt at 
 her feet and covered her hands with kisses. 
 
 "My love, I must leave j^ou!" he mvirmured. "I have to 
 go to Paris ; I shall be absent only a little while, but — but " 
 
 Etoile thrust him backward with a siidden movement, in 
 which all the blood and life, and heart and soul, that were in 
 her, seemed to leap in flame to her cheek. 
 
 "You are going — to her!" 
 
 "As I live I am not! " cried loris ; and he rose, too, in as 
 passionate a scorn as her own. " What ! you insult me by 
 thinking I would insult you, and follow that woman. No, I go 
 to Paris on a matter that concerns my honoiu', that is all, to try 
 and save something for all those who trusted me in this accursed 
 Sicilian folly. As for her, she is in Scotland — how can you 
 doubt me so 1 " 
 
 She caught his hands conviilsively ; she grew as white as 
 death. 
 
 "You will not go to her — you will not ? " 
 
 " By my dead mother's memory, if you wish I will, swear to 
 you — No ! By the heaven above us, No— ten thousand times." 
 
 She sank down in a passion of weeping, and piteously clung 
 to him, whilst all the sweet glow of sunshine went round before 
 her blinded eyes in rings of fire. 
 
 "Oh, my love, my life, why leave me? Have I failed in 
 anytliing ? Am I in fault ? Are you not happy ? " 
 
 He kissed her ej^elid.s, and raised her in his arms. 
 
 " We are too haj^py ; — the gods ahvays gi'udge it. Do you 
 
332 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 think I would leave you for a, little thing ? I must go for my 
 honour. I must go to save those who trusted me ; there is no 
 other way. Listen, try and be calm ; I shall be back before 
 our passion-flowers change colour." 
 
 Then his voice faltered, and a qxiick sob caught his breath ; 
 as he held her to his heart she felt the hot tears fall from his 
 eyes upon her. 
 
 Nor was he lying then. He spoke the truth as he meant it, 
 as he saw it. It changed later on in his hands as a gem that no 
 man can control changes colour. He had resisted the passionate 
 prayers of the absent woman who besought him ; he had let her 
 entreaties beat themselves vainly on his deadness and deafness, 
 like fretting waves on the beaten sand ; he had been irre- 
 sponsive, and cold, and unmoved, as only a dead passion that is 
 buried in the charnel house of disgust ever can be. But though 
 the truth was still untold to her, far away in the North his 
 Guinevere had felt the chill sickly shudder that runs through 
 the hot leaping blood of the woman who is jealous — and for- 
 saken. 
 
 She had woven, she had spun, in the dust and the darkness 
 of the great city ; she had pulled the threads ; she had woven 
 like Fate. 
 
 He would not know whither he came, but he would come. 
 So she said to herself. She wove like Fate. 
 
 The irises of May had been in bloom when his tyrant had 
 left him free. 
 
 The white dahlias and asters of September were in bloom 
 when he broke the spell of a joy too great to last, and went 
 northward. 
 
 The memories of those sweet, shining, sultry months lay 
 like sleeping children in the heart of Etoile, and until thought 
 itself should perish in her, they could never die. 
 
 It is so much to have been once entirely happy ; never can it 
 altogether pass away. 
 
 Yet when he went, it seemed to him that she died ; the 
 latter half of the old wise man's prophecy began to realise 
 itself as a cruel spell works slowly out on a doomed thing. 
 
 She had utter faith in him. 
 
 As he had sworn, so she was sure it was ; she never wronged 
 him by the baseness of any disbelief. To doubt him would 
 have seemed to her the foulest insult. 
 
 When she touched the colours and the brushes, with which, 
 all her life before, she had been able to summon spirits and 
 angels at her will, and forget the world around her, it was now 
 only to endeavour to perfect his portrait, or call the soft dark- 
 ness of his eyes up on some blank piece of panel or of canvas. 
 Then she would drop her brush wearily, and lean her head on 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 333 
 
 11 er hands, and weep bitterly : bereft of him she was twice 
 bereaved, for Avith him also had gone her art. 
 
 A vague fear, too, lay for ever on her, like a stone on a 
 living blossom. 
 
 She would not wrong him with any doubt of liis fidelity ; 
 yet he told lier nothing; ; she could not tell what toils were not 
 entangling, what dangers not encompassing, him. 
 
 He had gone to save his honour : if his honour made 
 shipwi'eck ? 
 
 More than once she was sorely tempted to go also to Paris. 
 It was her home ; she had a full and natural right to return 
 there ; all her interests, indeed, were sufiering from her long 
 absence. Yet she did not go ; she feared that it might seem to 
 liim as if she followed him, suspected him, spied upon hun, 
 importuned him. He had had too much of that weary insult. 
 She would not wrong him so ; therefore she stayed. 
 
 The days and the weeks of that time were ever afterwards to 
 Etoile, looking back on them, but a dull blank, a chaos of pain, 
 such as the time of a great sickness seems in memory to the sick 
 man looking back to it. 
 
 She was herself ill in body — so ill that physicians grew 
 grave as they looked at her and murmured of the Roman fever, 
 and felt that there was some mental ill beside of which they 
 knew not. 
 
 She grew thinner, paler, weaker every day ; every night 
 wept more on her sleepless pillows ; and the last of the grape 
 harvest was gathered ; and the last of the people's songs sung ; 
 and the winds grew chill as they swept over bare fields, and the 
 last of the passion-flowers faded and fell. 
 
 One day a nightingale lay dead at the foot of the palms ; a 
 stray shot had stilled its song for ever. 
 
 A great hopelessness had fallen upon her. 
 
 All her life long she had been brave, sanguine, and ready to 
 smile at the worst enmity of the world or fate ; but suddenly, 
 as a finely strung bow may give way, she fell into utter lassitude 
 and depression : a heavy despair seemed to weigh on her like a 
 hand of ice. 
 
 He had left her with tenderness, passion, grief ; but he had 
 left her. 
 
 To her it was like the fiat of their endless separation. 
 
 " Where did I fail ? '' she asked herself with a sort of 
 remorse, as though the fault were hers ; and her great love 
 would not let her recognize that its own very humility, and 
 strength, and depth, had been its foes. 
 
 When loris had passed away over the mountains, he had 
 gone looking back with dim eyes and aching heart indeed ; but 
 he had gone saying to himself : "If she were never to behold 
 my face again, she would never give herself to any other." 
 
334: FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Had he not been so sure, so utterly sure, all the powers of 
 earth would not have made him leave her, even for his honour's 
 sake, or any other force or fate. But he knew that if he were 
 to die that night, in body and in soul would she be widowed for 
 ever, longing only for the kiss of death. Therefore he went 
 secure. 
 
 Such security is the divinest part of love. But oftentimes 
 — alas ! — it does but melt passion, as the fulness of the sun 
 melts snow into water. 
 
 She knew that he was well ; she knew that he was in Paris ; 
 and she knew no more. She did not think that he was near the 
 woman whom he had forsaken, because he had said that to 
 think so was to dishonour him. 
 
 Yet a darkness like the terrible blank of death seemed to 
 her to have come between them. All her life seemed to go 
 away with him. A delirious pain kept her sleepless through the 
 nights ; a deadly apathy kept her motionless and powerless 
 through the days — 
 
 " Dead to use and name and fame " 
 
 now that the cruel charm was read. The dust gathered on the 
 work she had begun, and the flies settled down on it undis- 
 turbed. She never looked at it but once, and then wondered 
 wearily was it she who had ever had the power to create ? Was 
 it she who once had thought life too short and earth too small 
 for Art ? She looked back on her dead self as on some other 
 woman, whom she watched curiously, and wondered at vaguely ; 
 Art ! — all the art of the world might have perished like a burnt 
 scroll, and she would have cared nothing, had one life been 
 beside hers. 
 
 Which is the truth, which is the madness ? — when the artist, 
 in the sunlit ice of a cold di'eamland, scorns love and adores 
 but one art ; or when the artist, amidst the bruised roses of a 
 garden of passion, finds all heaven on one human heart ? 
 
 Both are truth ; perhaps both are madness. 
 
 But it were well to die in one of them, without waking to 
 know ourselves mad. 
 
FHIFNDSniP. 335 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX. 
 
 At four o'clock in that golden October day, when at Rocaldi the 
 shot nightingale lay dead underneath the palms, the Lady Joan 
 Challoner sat in a chamber in the Rue de Rivoli. Her heavy 
 black garments were deep with crape and all the outward signs 
 of woe, and the notepaper before her had black edges of the 
 broadest and the saddest ; but on her face was a radiance of 
 triumph beaming through the sun-bronze of travel ; in her eyes 
 Avas a shining smile of content. She was victorious. 
 
 The transfer was eJlected past recall. 
 
 And before her was seated loi'is. 
 
 The room was small, and close, and gaudy; a gilt clock 
 ticked with feverish haste. The sun came in hot and glaring 
 from the zinc roofs opposite the windows. loris, in the narrow, 
 pent-up space and the stifling atmosphere, shuddered and felt 
 stifled ; he looked worn and very ill. 
 
 He had been betrayed and misled. 
 
 So he told himself, as ruined nations tell themselves so 
 when, through their hesitation and their disorder, they are 
 beaten in war. 
 
 He had been drawn on from one point to another by false 
 hopes; he had reached too late to change or arrest what he 
 disapproved of; his endeavours had all been fruitless and his 
 wishes overborne ; he had thought to save the interests of all 
 those who had trusted him, and he found that he had only im- 
 l^erilled them. The mended pot was sent rocking down the 
 stream, and his honour was embarked, a sad and trembling 
 Xjassenger, on that frail venture. 
 
 He had come northwards honestly believing that he came to 
 retrieve the fortunes of a hapless enterprise, and he found that 
 he had only fallen into the arms of a passionate and jealous 
 woman. The inexorable pressure of circumstances had forced 
 him whither he had sworn not to go ; the inexorable nets of 
 obligation had drawn him into the very peril he loathed ; he 
 had found himself face to face with her through business — only 
 business, as she said to every one ; and his doom, like that of 
 the gold dropped in the sands and the sea of SSicily, was 
 written. 
 
 " lo has come about the transfer," she said to her relatives 
 and her society. 
 
 "lo has come to me in my grief," she said to her closer 
 friends. 
 
336 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Her husband left for the baths of Taiinus, though it was late 
 in the year. The new association for Sicily sprang to light in 
 the money market and on the thick, creamy paper of a brand- 
 new prospectus. loris arrived too late to alter anything ; he 
 found that he could do nothing save sign what she wished him. 
 Lady Joan shook out her crape, and felt that she could have 
 ruled empires had she been called to them. 
 
 " You do look so ill, lo," she had cried to him fondly the 
 first hour they met. " That is all fretting for me. I will never 
 leave you again — never, never!" 
 He shuddered, and was silent. 
 
 She believed what she said, and she meant what she said. 
 In her hard, rough, cruel way she loved him — as she saw love. 
 None can give what they have not in them. 
 They sat together now in the little, gilded, close room in the 
 Paris hotel, and she was happy. He could not escape her, and 
 the transfer as a fact accomplished was before her sight in its 
 printed prospectus. 
 
 Paris was dull indeed, for it was out of the season, and in her 
 heavy crape she could not go to amusements, laugh at theatres, 
 or walk about at open-air concerts ; but it was always Paris, and 
 she could go and dine at the cafes and drive by moonlight in the 
 Bois, and walk about and see the shops, and divert herself in 
 many ways — even crape veils have their uses. And he was here, 
 under her eye and hand, never to be let loose again until safe 
 back in FiordeHsa. 
 
 Later on, that same night of liis arrival, her jealous fears had 
 assailed him. 
 
 " I hear you have been always with Etoile whilst I have been 
 away," she had said suddenly, her eyes fastened on his. 
 
 But loris, being well conscious of all that would be said to 
 him, was impenetrably masked. 
 
 "I have seen her sometimes, of course," he made answer. 
 
 "Is that all?" 
 
 " What more should there be?" 
 
 " I heard there was a great deal more — a great deal too 
 much. " 
 
 " Believe what you Like ! It is the same to me." 
 
 " You are cruel, Ireneo ! " 
 
 " It is you who are suspicious and odious ! " 
 
 "To be called that after all I have slaved to do for you, 
 all I have suffered this cruel summer ! " 
 
 " Why will you talk folly, then]" 
 
 "Is it folly?" 
 
 " Of coin-se." 
 
 " You have not been with her?" 
 
 " Who can have told you I have !" 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 837 
 
 " Marjory told me." 
 
 " She is a miscliief-maker ; she is cnvions." 
 
 " But Etoile is in love with you!" 
 
 " Do not say such things to me of any woman ; I do not like 
 them." 
 
 "It is true." 
 
 " True or false, do not say it : it is unpleasant to me." 
 
 " AVill you swear to me you do not care aboiit her, then? " 
 
 ' ' Why do you ask ? Can you not be satisfied ? Am I not 
 here ? " 
 
 She was satisfied ; and being blinded and muffled in a vast 
 vanity that prevented her from seeing anything that was not 
 worship of herself, she never noticed that all these answers were 
 but evasions ; they were none of them such denials — firm, frank, 
 and fierce — as the man will give who, being faithful, is suspected 
 of infidelity. 
 
 But though merely evasions, his conscience smote him 
 heavily for their usage. He thought he was blameless in 
 deceiving Ms tyrant, but he knew himself guilty in denying one 
 who adored him. 
 
 He seemed to see the deep scorn flash from the tranquil, 
 studious eyes of Etoile — if she could know. 
 
 "It is only for a little while longer till all is clear " he 
 
 said to himself, as in the evening shadows of Fiordelisa he had 
 said to himself, " It will be easier to write the truth." 
 
 So he stayed on in Paris and hated himself, and with every 
 day that rose, said, " I will tell her, and go to Rome alone to- 
 night." And every day passed with the truth still untold — the 
 fatal, unnerving influence of a violent temper and a furious will 
 had once more fallen on him, numbing all his strength. 
 
 And another and a worse thing began to come to him — he 
 began to be ashamed to go back to Etoile, ashamed to say to 
 her, " I have sinned and been faithless !" 
 
 He had made an efi'ort to return alone ; had pleaded the end 
 of the vintage, which needed the presence of its loi-d. But his 
 tyrant had raised heaven and earth, and so moved all their 
 forces, that the formalities of business had bound him as the 
 threads of the Lilliputians the wrecked traveller ; and there 
 were necessities for his presence in Paris weightier and more 
 costly to break from than the necessities of the old classic ciistom 
 of the grape harvest at home. 
 
 So he stayed, galled and fretted and half broken-hearted, 
 knowing himself befooled, knowing himself a traitor, knowing 
 himself unfaithful where his fairest faith lay, and sat in the 
 gilded close room, with the zinc roof shining through the lace 
 curtains of the window, and thought of cool palm shadows, of 
 creamy daturas and blue passion-flowers, of a white form 
 moving slowly through the sunlit grass. 
 
 z 
 
338 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Sometimes, ■when he could evade his tormentor's vigilance, 
 and leave her engrossed with some agent de change, or some 
 artistj or some mirtliful wi-iter of indecent comedies, or any- 
 other of her numerous acquaintances, he would go by himself 
 and look at the old house by the trees of the Luxembourg, 
 which was still Etoile's, and speak of her a little with the old 
 people left in charge there. 
 
 They let him enter once, and he sat down in the great wooden 
 atelier opening on the garden, and felt as if her presence were 
 near him ; and when they uncovered a white bust that was of 
 herself, and done by Clesinger, he tiu-ned from the sightless eyes 
 of the marble as one ashamed. 
 
 It was a small house with a few great rooms. It had been 
 decorated and arranged to her own tastes. It was full of sugges- 
 tions and remembrances of her, to her lover, who now knew her 
 every fancy and every feeling. Her very presence seemed close 
 to liim. In the library, with its bronze and oak shelves and 
 many ancient and classic books ; in the great salon, with its few 
 pieces of marble sculpture, its pictures, its arched alcove, with 
 its fern and palms ; in the little dining-hall, with its old Oude- 
 nard tapestry and old Rouen and ceramics — in it all a certain 
 severity of taste that was allied with all her love of colour and 
 grace seemed to sjjeak to him of her. 
 
 " How unlike to all other women she is ! " he thought, even 
 as those rooms were unlike all the gilded and overloaded luxury 
 of the day. 
 
 At other times he woiild go in the academies and private 
 palaces where her works hung, and study their power, and their 
 colour, and their classic grace, and feel his pulse beat more 
 quickly as he thought, " The woman who can create those only 
 lives for me ; the INIuse that reigns here is but a fond and fragile 
 thing to me, that trembles if she grieves me, that tmms pale if 
 I but frown ! " 
 
 And the sense of her power was sweet to him, because it lay 
 like a dog at liis feet. 
 
 But the moments when he was free to wander or to remem- 
 ber them were rare to him, for his tjTant was niggard of his 
 liberty and a miser over his very thoughts. 
 
 Ever and again she would wound him with the thorn of some 
 gross word, some wanton lie, some echoed cahimny that she flung 
 carelessly but brutally at the name of Etoile as a low hand 
 throws a handful of mud against a marble statue, pleased to see 
 the pure whiteness of it stained. He felt almost as base as she 
 who threw it, since he did not raise his voice to save the outrage. 
 
 " She would die for me ! " he thought to himself, " and I, I 
 have not the courage even to defend her from the senseless 
 caliunnies of jealous hate ! " 
 
FlilENDSHIP. 339 
 
 And he kept a sullen silence that his tyrant translated as. 
 indillerence_, and, so translating, -was content. 
 
 About any name brighter, any powers higher than those of 
 the common mass of men and women, vile innuendoes, foul 
 inventions, cowardly slanders always buzz and beat in the air as 
 insects in the heat about the flower that bears most honey in its 
 breast. These were in the air about the name of Etoile as 
 about every other great gift of excelling ; it was easy for 
 another woman's jealousy to gather them together and make a 
 poison-cloud of them, and point to it and say, "Look how 
 heavy the cloud is ; how the stinging things cluster ; there 
 must be corruption near ! " 
 
 And he longed to strike her on the mouth for her lie, yet 
 could not, she being a woman . 
 
 One night she had a comedian and an author to dinner with 
 her in the Rue de Rivoli. They were i^ersons whom she had 
 known long ; they were men of mediocre talent and of dubious 
 reputation, but they were useful to her — had been useful, 
 might again be useful — she invited them once whenever she 
 passed through Paris. 
 
 The comedian had desired a part in that comedy in verse 
 which had been one of the triumphs of Etoile. It had not been 
 given him. The author had had a dramatic piece rejected at 
 the great theatre where hers a little later had been so brilliantly 
 received. Both were of that second rank in the world of liter- 
 ature and art wliich is the most bitter enemy to the leaders of 
 that world that they possess ; both had been passed over by 
 Etoile with that indifference to their existence which was only 
 carelessness in her, but which all took for pride. 
 
 Lady Joan launched her name on the sea of their cigar 
 smoke when their dinner was done. 
 
 They threw themselves on it as hounds on a deer. 
 
 They tore it, they worried it, they strangled it as the deer is 
 torn, worried, and strangled ; only out of the malice of medio- 
 crity, but perhaps that is the most cruel malice that human 
 life holds, because it is the most stupid. 
 
 loris sat and heard — in silence. 
 
 His tjTant watched him, but in vain. She caught no glance, 
 she heard no word that she could construe. He might have 
 been deaf. 
 
 When they rose to go, she bade him see them down tlie 
 staircase of the hotel. 
 
 He rose and obeyed. He even ushered them to the court- 
 yard, and tlirough the courtyard into the street, with an im- 
 passable courtesy that flattered both very greatly. 
 
 When they were faiiiy in the street under the midnight 
 skies, he struck each by turn on the lips with a glove that he 
 had been twiatintr in his finj^ers. 
 
340 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 "Messieurs, voits etes deux laches !" he said, very tranquilly, 
 a sombre light shining in his eyes that startled them. 
 
 Then he turned on his heel and entered the hotel once more 
 before either of them had recovered from his astonishment. 
 
 He felt the first contentment that he had known since he 
 had left Rome. 
 
 He waited within the next morning, expecting some message 
 from them, but he received none. The next day he learned 
 that the comedian had been arrested for debt, and the author 
 for an offence of the press against decency. 
 
 " You have choice friends, ma chere! " he said to the Lady 
 Joan, who answered him sharj^ly : 
 
 " They wrote me that you insulted them the other evening ; 
 what did you do that for, prayl They are most excellent 
 creatures, though a little imprudent and unfortunate. " 
 
 " They spoke too coarsely before you/' said loris^ carelessly. 
 She smiled^ well gratified. 
 
 "And you would have made a duel and a fuss about that, 
 and compromised me! You must not do snch things, lo; it is 
 dangerous. " 
 
 loris laughed aloud. 
 
 She did not understand his laugh. 
 
 She began dimly to fancy that she did not understand him, 
 weak as water, docile as the silk to the hand that winds it 
 though she had always deemed him to be. Still she was content. 
 " How fussy and foolish he is still about me! " she thought in 
 her happy conceit. " The idea of being so angry, just for my 
 sake, about nothing ! " 
 
 And she was vain and proud. 
 
 Yet a certain sense of anxiety entered into her. She had 
 always known him so docile and so patient to her command. If 
 alone, unknown to her, he could rise in such anger (though for 
 her sake), what might he do some day for his o^vn ? 
 
 For she knew very well that she had misled him to his 
 hurt ; that she had dragged him where it was hard to walk in 
 clean paths; that she had exposed him to bitter misconstruc- 
 tions and harsh obligations ; that one day he might resent and 
 revolt — who could tell? 
 
 But, after all, did it matter ? She had him close and fast. 
 If she made his fortune, gratitude must bind him for ever to 
 her; if she had him ruined, necessity must keep him by her 
 side. So she was content, and the days rolled on in Paris. 
 
 These days were ghastly to him ; he loathed every hour of 
 them — from the long, dreary mornings filled with interviews 
 and correspondence on a transaction that his intelligence mis- 
 trusted and his conscience condemned, to the long, gaslit 
 evenings spent in a tetc-d-tete dinner in a caf^, a saunter through 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 341 
 
 the crowded streets, a drive by the hxke, a supper at a restau- 
 rant — all the old, worn-out routine that seemed to him now so 
 coarse, so common, so gross, so hateful. 
 
 Every moment that passed by seemed to make him tenfold 
 a traitor ; every night, looking up at the stars shining over the 
 sea of gaslights in the Champs Elyse'es, he thought of a woman 
 in his own land whom the moonlight was finding out in her 
 solitary chamber kneeling by her bed to pray for him, or lying 
 sleepless with wet eyes for his sake. " She loves me so much, 
 she will forgive even this," he said to himself ; and yet felt so 
 base in his own sight for his faithlessness, that it seemed to him 
 he could never look her straightly in the eyes again. 
 
 To his tyrant he did not think that he had sinned, but tu 
 EtoUe he knew that he had, 
 
 " She loves me so much! "he thought; and then his hand 
 would loosen itself from his companions clasp, and he would 
 move impatiently and tlirust her away with a restless fretful- 
 ness. 
 
 " You are very changed," she said to him once. 
 
 He answered her sullenly : 
 
 ' ' You have acted without me : you have imperilled my 
 name ; you have loaded me with fresh obhgations. Can you 
 expect me to be grateful ? Do not make me scenes, for heaven's 
 sake!" 
 
 And she was stilled and vaguely alarmed, for she knew in 
 her own secret heart that she had brought ruin and him very 
 near one to another. 
 
 True, the mended pot was swimming gaily down the stream 
 amongst the bronze ones, but who could tell how long it would 
 be afloat? She had done a clever thing, and she had put money 
 in her purse, and she was rejoicing in her strength ; still, like 
 a cold wind, there came over her the consciousness that some 
 day loris might rise in fury and reproach her as liis ruin. 
 
 The chill passed quickly off, the momentary spasm was soon 
 still ; she was not a woman to mistrust herself or feel the heart- 
 ache of a self-reproach. If matters turned out well, it was she 
 who had made him do so ; if ill, why, then, other people had 
 been fools. And that was all. So she sat in the little, hot, 
 gilded room and read her letters, and was fiercely glad and 
 fiei-cely proud because she had woven her threads so patiently 
 and well that here loris was beneath the autumn sun, here by 
 her side in Paris. 
 
 For a time there was no sound but the ticking of the gilt 
 clock, and the scratcliing of her steel pen. loris was stretched 
 upon a couch ; liis eyes were closed, his face was colourless and 
 very weary. He was thinking — would it be possible by any plea 
 to escape alone and go to Rome that night? 
 
342 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Her writing finished at length, the Lady Joan lifted her 
 head and looked at him. She conld not but see that he looked 
 very ill and very fatigued, but it gratified her to see him so 
 because she took it as witness for his grief at her long absence 
 from him. 
 
 "Poor lo, how silly he is!" she said softly to herseK, the 
 self-satisfied, vain smile of complete complacency breaking over 
 her face and softening its harsher lines ; and she rose and leaned 
 a little over him, and brushed a fly from oft' his low, broad brow. 
 
 loris, startled, lifted himself with a sudden, quick movement 
 from the cushions of the couch. As he did so a letter fell from 
 between his shirt and waistcoat. He caught it rapidy, but not 
 30 rapidly but what she had seen its superscription. 
 
 "That is the writing of Etoile !" she cried, and snatched 
 his wrist and held his hand motionless. 
 
 "It is her writing," she said between her teeth. " Give it 
 me — do you hear me ? — give it me ! " 
 
 But he was more agile than she. 
 
 He twisted his wrist out of her grasp, and with a rapid 
 action tossed the letter on to the fire glowing in the open 
 stove. 
 
 It flamed in a moment ; in another moment it was but a few 
 grey ashes on the wood. 
 
 " You have secrets from me ! She Avrites to you ! You dare 
 to deceive me !" 
 
 The words hissed through the air about his head like a 
 Tolley of arrows ; she screamed, she raved, she poured abuse 
 and upbraiding from her lips in torrents of flame. 
 
 " You have secrets from me ! " she cried once more in her 
 fury. " That woman loves you, writes to you — you carry her 
 letters in you breast — and I Oh, you traitor — you faith- 
 less coward ! " 
 
 His face grew dark, and he looked at her one moment with a 
 cold, pale I'age, with an imjDulse that, followed, would have 
 given him back his manhood and his peace. 
 
 "If I be faithless and a coward, I am the thing you make 
 me " — the answer sprang to his lips, and with it all the truth. 
 
 But once again was chance against him. 
 
 The door of their sitting-room opened; there entered one 
 of her fellow-financiers fresh from the Bourse, Avhere the shares 
 of the new company were being liberally favoured and pur- 
 chased. 
 
 She choked the wrath into silence, as only finance could 
 have had power to make her do ; and, Avith lowering bi'ows and 
 ■eyes of flame, forced a smile for the bringer of good tidings. 
 The financier was a Jew of Gallicia ; he was voluble and 
 •vivacious ; he had much to say, and was eager to say it ; he 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 343 
 
 was inquisitive, and not delicate ; he stayed a long time, thoiigli 
 ha saw that the air he sat in was charged with a storm, and he 
 was too important and too necessary to be lightly dismissed or 
 dealt with harslily. 
 
 The face of loris had grown expressionless and unrevealing ; 
 he had had time to stifle his impulse to assume his mask. At 
 his heart a sudden rage was eating, but he smothered it, and 
 resumed a glacial graceful calm. 
 
 When the door closed on their visitor, she flashed her glitter- 
 ing eyes of steel upon him. 
 
 " Now answer me, if you can— if you dare " 
 
 " I have no secrets of my own from you," he answered her 
 chillily. "But you must allow me to keep the secrets of 
 others. I could not do less than biu-n the letter of any woman 
 rather than have it read by any other — even by you." 
 
 She looked at him savagely, questioningly ; his eyes met 
 hers with a cold, impenetrable serenity in their dark depths. 
 
 He had made up his mind to baffle her at any cost. He 
 succeeded. 
 
 " The secrets of others ! " she echoed. " You mean that she 
 has a passion for you, and that you care nothing for her — is 
 that what you mean? Is that why you burnt her letter? " 
 
 loris was silent. 
 
 Silence gives consent. 
 
 "You might have shoAvn it to me," she muttered. "You 
 ought to have shown it to me whatever it was. To bum 
 it '" 
 
 " The woman I love is the last that I could show it to, 
 surely," said loris, with his cold smile unchanged, and his eyes 
 impenetrable. He could have laughed aloud at the ironical 
 equivoque, even whilst every drop of blood in him burned 
 with a sullen anger. But to her vanity and self-delusion the 
 answer was a triumph and a joy. 
 
 ■' Then you admit she loves you? " she cried aloud. 
 
 ' ' That is what I never admit of any woman, to either woman 
 or man." 
 
 His voice had a soft, icy chill in it ; his eyes had their change- 
 less impenetrability. 
 
 She screamed, and clapped both hands above her head. 
 
 " As if you didn't admit it by that very answer to me ! Oh 
 you chivalrous ass, lo ! — to give j-ourself all these grand airs, 
 and almost make us quarrel. What nonsense ; what stuff! I 
 always saw she was scheming to entangle you. I always saw she 
 was Avild about you " 
 
 •' Hush, hush ! Is a ruined man such fine prey? " 
 
 "Ruined! you have Fiordelisa, and you are going to make 
 your fortune through me. Besides, are you not always Prince 
 
344 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 loris? I tell you I always saw her designs — yes, the veiy first 
 night she came to us. AVith all her wonderful talent she could 
 not hide it from me. And to write to you, unasked ! How 
 unwomanly; how disgraceful! You were far too considerate 
 and too clement in burning her letter. What do such women 
 deserve? But how does she know you are here?" 
 
 A sudden awakening suspicion flashed freshly across her, 
 and interrupted the flood of her just indignation and of her 
 chaste disgust. 
 
 loris stood, still, opposite to her, with his back to the light ; 
 a more observant woman would have seen the strain in his calm, 
 the rigidity in his expression, the enforced indifference and 
 restraint; but she observed none of them. She was not 
 observant ; she was only suspicious. 
 
 " How could she know you were in Paris?" she said again. 
 He answered coldly — 
 
 " No doubt it is known in Rome. My servants " 
 
 " Oh, if she is low enough to go to your servants ! " cried his 
 tyrant, "I dare say she is ; well, if she ask, she will know you 
 are with me" (she did not note the spasm that passed over the 
 rigidity of liis featiu-es). " She will know you are with me. 
 How dare she write; how dare she ?" 
 
 " Chere," said loris, with a smile, whose bitterness escaped 
 her. "Ghere, you forget; o^x£ friendship, sweet as it is and 
 sacred to me, is not a bond that the world resiaects very much ; 
 she may not understand its sanctity. That is possible." 
 
 " Then she should be made to understand," said Lady Joan, 
 curtly. 
 
 loris was silent. 
 
 " The forward wretch, to dare to write," muttered his com- 
 panion, glancing longingly at the grey ashes in the stove ; she 
 felt that she would never wholly pardon him for burning that 
 letter so, before her very eyes. 
 
 " Let us go out for our drive," she said less fiercely, '' and 
 as we go, I will tell you all I heard of her from my dear father, 
 before he left us for that fatal cruise. We will dine uj) at 
 Madrid ; the nights are so fine ; and there is a full moon still. 
 Nobody will recognise me with my veil on, will they?" 
 
 The hours that followed were sickly as hours of fever to loris. 
 
 The dusty roads; the seared and reddening trees; the 
 passage by the lake, so different to what he had kno^vn it when 
 the Second Empire had been in its gilded glory ; the dinner at 
 Madrid ; the cigars on the wooden balcony ; the garden where 
 the gaudy dahlias were dying; the creepers that were faded 
 and seared; they were all loathsome to him. He hated the 
 flare of the lights ; he hated the smell of the smoke ; most of 
 all he hated himself. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 845 
 
 "1 am faithless; faithless!" he said to his conscience; and 
 his conscience echoed — faithless. 
 
 It seemed to him that the moon-rays slanting in through 
 the balcony windows seeing him would find their way to the 
 dreamer in Rome, and say to her, "Dream no more ; he is 
 faithless to you." 
 
 It was for this that he had left her ! this exhausted mockery 
 of love ; this shame and satire of passion ; this gross, grotesque, 
 unlovely union of violence, of voluptuousness, of mercenary 
 greed and guile ! The white rays of the moon seemed to pierce 
 him like Ithuriel's spear. 
 
 They saw him here. 
 
 They saw Etoile where she slept in Rome. 
 
 He was disgusted with liimself. 
 
 He felt himself scarcely higher or nobler than the men whom 
 he had struck on the mouth with his glove. 
 
 He had sun-endered her to the violence and coarseness of a 
 jealous woman. 
 
 He had let a base and unreturned passion be imputed to her 
 and had held his peace. 
 
 He had let a lie like a serpent wind round and enfold her, 
 and had not lifted liis hand to pluck it off; nor lifted his heel to- 
 stamp its poisonous, flat, hissing head lifeless for ever. 
 
 And in vain he said to his conscience : "It is only for a 
 little wliile ; a few days more " 
 
 In vain ; for he knew that he should have strangled the Ue 
 at its birth ; that he should have risen and said manfully to his 
 tyrant : 
 
 " I am yours no more ; I am hers for ever." 
 
346 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTER XL. 
 
 It Avas a cheerless day in the late autumn, and Rome was 
 drenched with chilly dusky rains, dark and dreary and depress- 
 ing, swept with high winds, and overhung with mist and cloud. 
 
 It was six o'clock in the grim old palace where the Scrope- 
 Stairs dwelt by the Forum Trajani ; it was the first day of the 
 rites of the tea-urn and the gathering of the incoming spinsters 
 and dowagers in that holy quarter. All the matrons and 
 virgins of the Inviolate Isle and of the Free Republic had not 
 yet arrived in Rome, but many had done so ; many had come 
 thither that dark, dreary afternoon to partake of the bohea that 
 was purification, and the muffin that was a voucher. 
 
 The religious rites were over ; only two or three of the 
 familiars of the place were lingering : they were JNIr. Silverly 
 Bell and Mrs. Macscrip , and the maiden lady who had -vvritteu 
 so learnedly on the Penalties and the Privileges of Vestals. 
 
 They still stood roxmd the fire, conversing. 
 
 " Is she still here 1 " said Mrs. Macscrip. 
 
 " Still here/' said Mr. Silverly Bell. 
 
 " Taken that beautiful place that is called Rocaldi ? " 
 
 " Yes, and the rooms by the Rosijigiiosi also. It must cost 
 a great deal to live as she does." 
 
 " How does she do it ? How can she do it ? " 
 
 " Ah, how indeed ? No capital, you know. Makes money 
 certainly ; makes money — but Avhat is that? " 
 
 " Why doesn't she go back to Paris? She has a house there 
 they say, and one would think all her interests- " 
 
 "Ah ! " Mr. Silverly Bell smiled first, and then sighed very 
 deeply. 
 
 "Artists are all alike!" added Mr. Silverly Bell, with a 
 tender regret over the sad shortcomings of genius. 
 
 " I hope we shall never meet her any more in society," said 
 the author of the " Privileges and Penalties," and she shud- 
 dered between each word. 
 
 " Not likely," said Mr. Silverly Bell, with another sigh, and 
 took a letter out of his pocket. 
 
 " Here is a little portion I can read to you without any 
 violation of confidence, and written me a few weeks ago by our 
 dear absent friend ; what her poor father said to her before he 
 went on that fatal cruise to Scotland ; he could never express 
 himself with suflicient indignation at its ever ha\ing been 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 347 
 
 imagined as possible that he coukl have presented her to Lady 
 Joan. It is all very sad." 
 
 And ho read the extract from the letter in a low mellow 
 voice, with a touching melancholy accent. 
 
 " My poor father told me a few days before he left for that 
 fatal cruise that he never had known her at all, except ]\\si as 
 men do know Avomen of no character ; going in and out of 
 studios and seeing her in the crowd, when the Salon opened. 
 He could not be furious enough at its ever having been dreamt 
 that he could have sent her to me ! You may contradict it 
 everywhere. Sly father always tho\ight the worst of her. I 
 believe her very pictures are not her o\vn." 
 
 " Is it not sad ? " said the reader again, as he finished this 
 communication. 
 
 " Poor dear Lady Joan ! " said Mrs. Macscrip. " Infamous 
 indeed ! To abuse her hospitality in such a manner ! But she 
 is so sweetly confiding." 
 
 ' ' Yes, so fatally frank herself, you see . She never has a 
 suspicion of evil." 
 
 " A beautiful character ! " 
 
 " Most noble, yes. But sure to be abused." 
 
 "Sure to be," echoed Mr. Silverly Bell, "and its kindness 
 traded on. She should have thought, inquired, been more 
 cautious, before receiving a person merely recommended to her 
 by so notoriously bad a man as the Baron Voightel ; a great 
 man indeed, as we all know, but an excessively unscrupulous 
 one. A man may discover a continent, and yet be unfit for all 
 the decencies of ordinary life.'' 
 
 All the ladies sighed with him, and old Lady George, 
 straining her deaf ear to hear as she knitted, muttered over her 
 lambswool — ■ 
 
 "Bad? a cannibal ! I have heard him confess that he ate 
 human flesh, and preferred it to butcher's meat. He told 
 me so." 
 
 " If that were all ! " said Mr. Silverly Bell, gently, " One 
 might conceive the horrible agonies of hunger in ship^vreck 
 driving a man even to such frightful extremity as that. But 
 in cold blood, in everyday life, to introduce a notorious 
 adventuress to a noble and blameless lady " 
 
 " Can you call a great artist an adventuress ?" said sleepy 
 Lord George, with a gleam of humour shining in his watery dim 
 eyes. 
 
 " It is an expression," said Mr. Silverly Bell hastily. "A 
 common expression. A usual expression. ^Vlien one knows 
 nothing of a person, of whence they came, of how they 
 exist " 
 
 "Etoile banks at Hottinguer's. I wish I did,'' said Lord 
 
318 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 George, with a little sad mirth in the twinkle of his eyes. " If 
 she have taken a fancy to loris I think he is very much to be 
 envied ; I wish I were he ; what does he go away for 1 He is a 
 silly fellow if he don't know his good fortune." 
 
 "Good fortune!" echoed Mr. Silverly Bell, in horror. 
 ' ' My dear sir, excuse me, are you mad ? What worse could 
 happen to our charming, but too vacillating, friend, than to fall 
 into the power of an unscrupulous woman of genius who " 
 
 " You think an unscrupulous woman without genius better? 
 Well to be sure, he has got that now," muttered Lord George, 
 fumbling for his snuff-box. But his daughters stifled the 
 atrocious words in their screams. 
 
 " Papa, how can you ! How dare you ! Of course you only 
 say it for fun, but still " 
 
 Lord George shuffled off into an inner room out of the 
 storm ; Mr. Silverly Bell resumed — 
 
 " Wlio, because she only understands the baseness of lawless 
 passions herself, is utterly incapable of comprehending the 
 purity of a simple friendship, such as a woman that is all Tiiind 
 takes delight in ; a woman that is all mind never thinks of the 
 misconceptions that her innocence and noble actions may be 
 open to ; Lady Joan is all Mind. She has done the most 
 wonderful things in London and Paris ; entirely saved the whole 
 Messina affair from ruin by her energy and promptitude ; it is 
 impossible to say what the shareholders do not owe to her ; and 
 then, just because a mei'e friend, who is a director of the affair, 
 has naturally to go over to Paris to negotiate a loan with 
 Erlanger or Rothschilds (I think it is Rothschilds), foul-mouthed 
 people pretend that he is gone over for lier ; that he is her lover ; 
 that — oh, it is disgusting, quite disgusting ! " said Mr. Silverly 
 Bell, breaking off with eloquent abruptness as his feelings grew 
 too strong for his habitual suavity. 
 
 Prim and proper little Mrs. Macscrip stroked his arm con- 
 solingly. " Dear Mr. Bell, do you suppose anybody worth 
 thinking twice about ever dreams of anything wrong with dear 
 frank Lady Joan and dear good Mr. Challoner ? Impossible — 
 quite impossible ! " 
 
 "If all the world were as excellent as Mrs. Macscrip it 
 Avould be impossible," said Mr. Silverly Bell gallantly. " It 
 should be impossible, even foul-mouthed as the world is," he 
 said more bitterly. " But she is all mind, and she forgets that 
 a base tongue always attributes a base motive. She was utterly 
 amazed to see Icris in Paris. She tells me so. He went over 
 quite unexpectedly on a telegram from Erlanger or Rothschild, 
 I think it was Rothschild ; and of course he went to see her — 
 what more natural, with such business interests as theirs are in 
 common. But a mere simple thing like that is enough for 
 calumny ! " 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 349 
 
 And teai's suffused the gentle pale eyes of Mr. Silverly Bell. 
 
 At that moment in from a bed-chamber adjoining came the 
 youngest daughter; she was excited and eager, even more 
 than her wont, and her thin features were quivering with 
 agitation. 
 
 " A telegram from dearest Joan," she said breathless with 
 emotion, "from Perugia. She arrives to-night, in an hour's 
 time. "We are all to meet her." 
 
 " Dehghted," murmured Mr. Silverly Bell, a little envious. 
 " I will go also. Seven o'clock — the train from Mont Cenis, I 
 think? Is it Mont Cenis? Did you know she was coming so 
 soon ? She wrote me next week." 
 
 " She meant to have waited till next week. She does not 
 say what has hastened her. She only says — ' Meet me, seven 
 to-night.' Dearest Joan! " 
 
 " You must go and get ready, dears ; I might take you in my 
 landau," said Mrs. Macscrip, who was always good-natured to 
 quite proper people. 
 
 " Oh, no, that would detain you too long and we are too 
 many, thanks so much," said Marjory fluently. " Mr. Bell will 
 get us a cab ; Mr. Bell will escort us. Dear Joan ! You can 
 understand my delight, I am sure. We have not seen her since 
 May! An eternity! Dear Joan! — and after such gi-ief as she 
 has had too ! " 
 
 Then the guests took their leave, and Mr. Silverly Bell 
 poured himself out a weak cup of tea and talked to Lady George 
 about her knitting, and the Scrope-Stairs daughters went and 
 robed themselves in waterproofs and thick veils, and went out 
 into the misty rain and howling winds mth their escort. And 
 the heart of one of them beat high. 
 
 " I hope she is not all alone, you know," she said to their 
 escort. " I do hope she is not all alone ; I should think loris is 
 sure to have come with her." 
 
 "Oh, I should think so," answered Mr. Silverly Bell. 
 " Challoner being still away in Germany, they would not let 
 her travel alone with her maid — naturally he will have returned 
 with her ; most naturally." 
 
 For Mr. Silverly Bell, in his way as a friend, was quite price- 
 less — unless he quarrelled with you ; until he quarrelled with 
 you he would see you tlirough anything, with his smile and his 
 sigh at your service. 
 
 Marjory never felt the streaming rain, the piercing winds. 
 
 In her own small way she was triumphant, vicariously she 
 was victorious ; for she was sure that loris was returning, or else 
 never would her friend be coming over the mountains. 
 
 He would not be hers indeed, but she felt that to see him in 
 the old, worn fetters tread the old, dull paths would be almost 
 
350 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 happiness compared witli the agony of the summer, which had 
 seen him pass to new joys, where the passion-flowers embraced 
 the pahns. The woman who, nnloved herself, loves a prisoner, 
 can bear her fate whilst daily she can see him behind his bars 
 pacing to and fro his joyless cell; but when release comes, and 
 the ship of good tidings bears him free over the sea to fresh 
 joys under fairer skies — then, then indeed she knows bitterness, 
 unless she be a very noble woman, and Marjory Scrope was not 
 noble. She had betrayed the captive's flight ; she had locked 
 the chains anew about his feet, that so at least she might keep 
 him in her sight and still the hunger of her aching heart. She 
 was a merciless, jealous, envious soul, but being a maiden of 
 good name and of good society, she did not let these cruel 
 passions rise to the surface to be seen of men; instead, she 
 cloaked herself in waterproof and friendship, and hastened 
 through the foggy night to meet her dearest Joan. 
 
 The train was late ; the night was very cold and rainj'. Mr. 
 Silverly Bell, despite the warmth of his rejoicing, shivered as 
 he paced the stone floor of the waiting hall; but Marjory ^\•as 
 burning hotly with the fever of hope and the joy of success. 
 She strained her ear, she strained her eyes ; her heart beat 
 quickly, her pale, waxen features flushed. 
 
 ''I do so long to see her, darling Joan ! " she said, with 
 breathless lips. The bells clanged, the doors were thrown open, 
 the tlirong of travellers poured out in the gaslight and mist, in 
 the gloom and the rain. Foremost among the crowd, she saw 
 grey eyes like steel, a flash of white teeth, a sunbrowned face 
 with a crape veil tossed from above it. As she threw her 
 arms about the advancing form, and welcomed her, her eager 
 glance saw another face in the shadow farther back — a face 
 pale, cold, very weary ; the face of a proud man, unwilling and 
 ashamed. 
 
 Then Marjory said in her heart her psalm of praise. 
 
 The fetters were fresh locked. 
 
 "Are you all here, dears'? — and darling St. Paul too?" 
 cried Lady Joan. "How good of you, such an awful evening 
 as it is ! Ah, yes, my grief — such grief indeed ! lo, have you 
 got my jewel-case safe ? The tickets ? — oh, lo has them." 
 
 So she returned in triumph. 
 
 Wlio would ask her what she had done in Paris ? Who would 
 mind how she had returned, or with whom ? Who would dare 
 to comment on her travels, since she had the wit to be met at 
 the station by these irreproachable maidens and their venerable 
 and venerated escort ? 
 
 Other women might And such a journey from Paris land 
 them in endless troubles and obloquj^, but she knew how to 
 make such adventures innocent as milk and harmless as a dove, 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 351 
 
 only by sending a telegram — one telegram that had cost her a 
 franc ! 
 
 Society is often bought cheaply, but not often so cheaply as 
 that. 
 
 " Tuc-Ia!" cries a famous writer, preaching the old, natural, 
 just crusade of man against the faithless wife. 
 
 " Tue-la!" — his Guenon de Isoe grins, from one of her small 
 ears to the other, at the absurd, antiquated notion as she troops, 
 with hundreds Like her, through society, applauded, welcomed, 
 well content, smiling complacently in the face of a world that 
 smiles comj^lacently at her. 
 
 " Tue-la!" — why, she laughs aloud. Who should kill her? 
 Her husband ? Behold him as he comes meekly in her wake, 
 joking good-humoui'edly with the person by whom, in barbarous 
 ages, he might have imagined himself injured ! Society ? She 
 caresses Society, and Society icisses her in return on both cheeks. 
 The Ape of Noah might be the Dove of Noah for the olive 
 branches that she offers and sees accejjted. 
 
 " Kill her! " — the law has been re-written. 
 
 Far away is the day when, in old Judasa, they led such 
 women as she out under the meridian sun, and bared them 
 naked, and stoned them to death in the sight of the people, so 
 that their name should be a byeword and a reproach through 
 all the land. 
 
 The law has been re-written. 
 
 The Ape of Noah may smile against the sun ; she may sit in 
 the seat of honour ; men shall praise and women salute her with 
 a kiss ; for her there is no need of night and darkness ; she may 
 take her pleasure in peace and pride, and no voice shall arraign 
 her ; and at the banquets of her world, the one whom it pleases 
 her to choose from others shall be summoned beside her in tender 
 forethought of her fond desire. 
 
 " Kill her ! " The re-written law says to her — 
 
 "Tou shall enjoy the sum and substance of all vice; you 
 shall draw your lover within your chamber whilst your child 
 sleeps against the chamber wall ; j'ou shall be guilty, and your 
 world shall know your guilt ; yet if your lord be only as base as 
 you, all things shall go well with you — you shall say your empty 
 shibboleth of ' friendship,' and the world will let you say it and 
 receive you." 
 
 True, if you were not guilty, but only took pleasure in coun- 
 terfeiting a guilt you had not, you would be a still poorer and 
 more contemptible thing even than you are now ; true, if it were 
 as you say, and you were innocent, you would be the very fool 
 of fools to play thus upon the housetops the antics of a sin you 
 have not ; true, turn you which Avay you will, you nnist be either 
 the silliest or the basest of all women. 
 
352 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 But you are many in number, and you agree to stuff your 
 shibboleth down the yawning throat of your world, and you are 
 strong by reason that you have so many sisters ; and so you turn 
 the face of the world to you and set it smiling, as he who keeps 
 the key of a clock sets the hands of the clock to noonday. The 
 day of passion is gone, with the old heroical ages ; the day of 
 devotion has fled away to the dreamland of poets ; the day even 
 of sin that was honest has passed as a foe too frank. 
 
 Your day has dawned, and is at its meridian— the day of lust 
 that folds its arm within j^rudence, of pale love that is hid in 
 the warm cloak of convenience. 
 
 When the day of truth comes where will you be ? 
 
 In your grave, with marble Virtues weeping over your name 
 in letters of gold. For the law has been re-written. 
 
 CHAPTEK XLI. 
 
 It was night, and Etoile sat alone. 
 
 The lamps had been lighted, and shed a mellow glow over 
 the great room, the pale busts and white marbles, the dusky 
 outlines of powerful sketches in charcoals, the green drooping 
 fronds of palms and ferns, the faint soft hues of old frescoes and 
 older arazzi. 
 
 The unfinished i^icture of the Sordello stood on a great oak 
 easel untouched since the day that loris had left her ; only one 
 thing was perfected in it, and that was the face of the poet ; the 
 face there was that of loris. 
 
 She sat alone, doing nothing. For the first time in all her 
 life her hours were empty: came without welcome, departed 
 without use. These full rich studious days which, before she 
 had known him, had always seemed too short, and never had 
 one vacant moment that was not sweet through labour or 
 through dreams, how far away they seemed ! They were as 
 dead as the dead birds that she had buried in her childhood 
 under the green leaves in green Ardennes. 
 
 "Oh, my love, my love; what you have cost me!" she 
 thought, with the scaldiDg tears rushing to her eyes ; yet even 
 though he had cost her a hundredfold more bitter pangs she 
 would not but have had his life cross hers : she never for one 
 instant wished that they had never met. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 353 
 
 To bavc been happy once : it is so much. Well is ho who 
 made ns so, pardoned all after cruelty or pain. 
 
 The winds roared angrily without through the yellowed 
 passion vines whoso flowers were dead. The rains beat on 
 the long gi'ass, and the leafless boughs against the wooden 
 shutters. 
 
 There was an ebon crucifix in the dusk beyond the lamp- 
 light ; above it hung the first portrait she had ever made of him ; 
 she kneeled there and wept bitterly, and prayed for him. 
 
 The door unclosed gently. 
 
 He came into the shadow, and thence into the light. He was 
 pallid as death, weary, worn, ashamed. Sbe looked up and saw 
 iiim through the mist of her tears ; with a cry of unutterable joy 
 she sprang to him. 
 
 In a little while he loosened his arms from about her and 
 sank down at her feet. 
 
 " You are the good angel of my soul ! What can I say to 
 you ? Will you forgive ? " 
 
 She leaned her hands upon his shoulder as he kneeled there, 
 and thrust him backward, gazing on his face ; she felt as if a 
 knife had pierced her heart. 
 
 " You have been— — with her ? " 
 
 The words were so low they seemed to stifle her as she spoke 
 them. 
 
 His face drooped till it was hidden on her knees. She knew 
 then that he had sinned against her. He knew then that to 
 have been faithless to her was the darkest infidelity of all his 
 life. 
 
 2 a 
 
354 FBIENDSmP. 
 
 CHAPTEE XLII. 
 
 Thbee was a long silence, broken only by tbe sound of the 
 falling rain in the darkness -svithout. His arms ■were still about 
 lier, his face still buried on her knees. 
 
 " Can you forgive ? " he muttered at length. " Dear, I said 
 the truth. I never meant to go to her. I was deceived, misled, 
 drawn on to where I loathed to be. When I left you I never 
 foresaw what she would do. I have sinned against you, but 
 never with my heart." 
 
 She i3ut his arms away from her, and lifted her head with a 
 sense of suffocated pain. 
 
 " You have been with her," she echoed once again. She felt 
 as if her own lips were polluted, as if her own life were full of 
 unutterable shame, and scorn, and outrage. 
 
 A man cannot perhaps know all that a woman suffers from 
 his infidelity. Hers to him may wring his pride and his passions 
 with a great agony, but it cannot seem all at once to bring 
 intense humiliation, intense desecration, personal and spiritual, 
 with it as does his to her. It cannot make him ashamed to 
 exist, as it makes her. Moreover, he has his vengeance : she is 
 helpless. 
 
 "You have been with her ! " she repeated: and had the knife 
 been truly in her breast, it would have hurt her less than this. 
 
 "1 have confessed it," he muttered wearily. " Men are weak 
 and vile ; we are not worth a thought. All the while I have 
 
 hated myself, and yet My angel, look at me ! Do not look 
 
 like that ! You frighten me, Etoile ! " 
 
 " Your angel ! And you could — — ! " 
 
 A burning flush overspread her face ; then she grew deathly 
 pale; she strove with trembling hands to put his hands away 
 from her; she could not endure that he should touch her; a 
 dull confused murmur seemed surging in her ears ; she felt faint 
 and blind. 
 
 Then all at once the bands of pain at her heart seemed to 
 loosen; a great sob rose in her throat; she shrank away from 
 him and wept bitterly. 
 
 loris gathered her weeping thus in his arms, and kissed her 
 on her closed eyelids. 
 
 " She will forgive now," he thought. " If she would not for- 
 give me, she would not weep. Women that are vain and are 
 hard, do not grieve — they avenge." 
 
FRIENDSHir. 355 
 
 And his sin seemed slight to liira, because it wvas pardoned. 
 
 "Are the passion-flo^vers dead, dear? "he said caressingly. 
 " Well, they will bloom another summer, and they will find your 
 love and mine lovelier tlian ever, will they not ? My treasure, 
 Avhy will you weep so '? I am here with you once more. And 
 you forgive me — ah, yes, you forgive me, you are one of the 
 women that forgive. You would kiss my hand if it stabbed 
 you ! " 
 
 CHAPTEE XLIII. 
 
 ^Meanwhile in the Turkish room Lady Joan was smoking. All 
 the racket of hasty arrival, all the disorder of long travel, were 
 about her, but she was happy. She had come back successful. 
 Who can want more than success ? Tongues were going gaily 
 aroimd her ; Mimo sat on the sofa beside her, and Guido Serra- 
 valle on a stool at her feet; Marjory Scropc was making her tea, 
 and Mr. Silverly Bell was arranging her lamps. 
 
 " lo's gone to his own house with a headache," she said to 
 her companions ; but it did not disturb her ; the transfer was 
 made and he was safe back in Eome. He had always a headache 
 after a journey, and it certainly was very cold comiug over the 
 mountains. 
 
 She herself had no headache, nor any ills at all. She never 
 had, unless it were desirable at any moment to appear an 
 invalid ; she was bronzed, bright-eyed, animated, amicable, even 
 gay beyond her wont, till she remembered she was in mourning. 
 She was glad to be home again ; glad to have managed so well ; 
 glad to have brought her captive in her train ; glad to shine in 
 the lamplight before the eyes of her adorers as a very Semiramis 
 of Finance. 
 
 loris was absent indeed; he was sullen, cold, unwell, but 
 that was not of very much consequence ; she had had him with 
 her in Paris ; she had brought him with her to Eome ; that was 
 all that really mattered : she was even glad he was away ; she 
 had so many teacups and triptychs to account for with Mimo, 
 and tuneful Guido was a sillier young goose than ever as he sat 
 at her feet. 
 
 " You were quite wrong about all that," she took a moment 
 to whisper to her watch-dog. " Oh, yes, you were, dear, quite 
 wrong ; he cannot endure Etoile, she persecutes him ; actually 
 wrote to him in Paris ; would you believe it ? " 
 
356 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 The pallid skin of Marjory Scrope flushed painfully. 
 
 " Are you sure he does not care ? " she said, nervously. 
 
 " Sure ? Do you think anybody can ever deceive me ? " 
 
 " But indeed /' began her poor watch-dog. 
 
 "He cannot endure her," said Lady Joan, clinching the 
 matter. " He tore her letter into shreds before me — he was so 
 disgusted. lo has no secrets from me, you know — no more than 
 he would have had from a sister." 
 
 Marjory kissed her with effusion. 
 
 "So glad to have you home, darling ! " she murmured; for 
 indeed she felt that here was a gaoler from whom no escape 
 would be possible for the prisoner, whom she herself could only 
 see if he remained behind the bars of his prison-house. She was 
 certain that her lynx-eyed frieud was blinded; she could not 
 herself forget those summer evenings when the shadow of loris 
 had passed under the palms, and she had seen him so pass, 
 ■watching under the cistus shrub of the open plains. She could 
 not forget, and she was not deceived. But she forbore to press 
 her convictions home. What her friend chose to ignore, she 
 would ignore also ; what she chose to impute, she would impute 
 likewise. She had supreme faith in her friend's power to hold 
 and keep : faith so great that she kissed her in all sincerity. 
 
 The gaoler was so much better than the barque of good tidings 
 that would bear him away to fair and free countries ! 
 
 Marjory, going home in the blowing winds and rains, at night, 
 felt a dull yet fierce pleasure stir at her heart. She was quick 
 to catch a clue, she was swift to follow a hint, and she was cruel 
 as unloved and unlovely women often are. 
 
 This woman whom she hated, this Muse whom she envied, 
 this cold and careless celebrity who could sit amidst her flowers 
 doing nothing, this stranger whom loris loved, was to be called 
 the fool of a hopeless passion ! — the vengeance was sweet to this 
 lone maiden whose own hopeless passion had been the mockery 
 of her little world. She did not know how the lie was to be 
 fastened, how the story was to be told ; but she had firm faith in 
 her friend and in her powers of falsehood. 
 
 " Joan will separate them," she said to her own sick heart 
 with a cruel joy, going home in the beating rain. She herself 
 could only wait, as echo waits till it is summoned. 
 
 For the few next succeeding days Lady Joan was in a whirl 
 of business and contentment. There was a multitude of things 
 to see after and arrange — all the threads to be taken up that 
 bound the Temple of On, the venture to Mimo's shop and Trillo's 
 studio ; Mrs. Grundy and Mrs. Candour to be called on and pro- 
 pitiated lest they should see anything odd in that Paris sojourn 
 and homeward journey ; all the winter's campaign through 
 Society to be thought over and mapped out ; and, beyond all, the 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 357 
 
 newly-painted pot to be set on high, with its glittering charms 
 gleaming on its glaze. 
 
 The pot would not long hold water — no mended pot ever 
 does ; but it looked very well, and made a beautiful etlect, and 
 that was all that was wanted. On the whole, on these first days 
 of her return she was more than even satisfied ; she was brilliantly 
 triumphant. 
 
 True, although the affairs of the bridge were going on again, 
 and the crabs and the barnacles were having more planks driven 
 into their native waters to become their home in due time ; true, 
 the Societa Inglese Italiana — be it under whatever name it might 
 be — was much like that famous knight of woeful story who, 
 whether he ran in doublet of blue, or red, or green, ran always 
 equally ill and tilted direfully. But the brass plate on the modern 
 door in the old palace down in Trastevcro had its inscription 
 altered from that of the Ponte Calabrese-Siciliano to that of the 
 Promotriee delle Communicazioni Meridionale, and the prospectus 
 read quite differently, and Tunis came into it, and much was 
 made of the mails from Malta ; and altogether it was quite a new 
 thing — to look at — if underneath it remained very much the same 
 as a lady's face does under the kolk and the paint and the pearl 
 powder. Mr. Challoner was to keep his crook and sit at his 
 handsome desk when he liked ; the old shareholders were to get 
 nothing indeed, but the new ones were to get everything — mako 
 their fortunes, in point of fact ; and as any old shareholder could 
 become a new one if he liked to buy new shares, what, in heaven's 
 name, had he to complain about ? His money was gone down in 
 the sand amongst the crabs and the barnacles, and the winds and 
 the waters alone were responsible for that misfortune. If the 
 old shareholder would not buy a dredger to get it up again in 
 the shape of fresh shares, it was clearly his own fault if it 
 remained at the bottom, or if the more enterprising new share- 
 holder dredged for it. 
 
 So at least Lady Joan said, and she knew all aboxit these 
 things, and had dwelt in the Laud of Goschen, where money is 
 always going down in the sand. 
 
 loris was bitterly dissatisfied and disquieted indeed, and the 
 Duke of Oban had withdrawn himself in a fury and fume, and 
 nasty people said that the old shareholders would have still 
 demanded an inquiry in pi;blic tribunals only that they were 
 loath, as timid hiiman beings are, to throw good money after 
 bad. But loris never understood anything (at least, so she said), 
 and old Oban was a muft' and an idiot ; and the old shareholders 
 might bluster till they were hoarse — it was all their own faults 
 if they would stand still and scream, instead of coming dredging 
 again as they might do. So she settled everything to her own 
 complete satisfaction ; and when she was satisfied herself, she 
 
358 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 was not oyer mucli given to heeding the dissatisfaction of 
 others. 
 
 The new dredgers wonld go on dredging for a few years, and 
 the engineers would go on driving new piles in to please the 
 crabs, and Tunis would always be on the horizon and Malta on 
 the sea ; and if the new shareholders could not make the bridge 
 stand, or the mails come and go by it, it would be their own 
 fault — in the future ! Nobody would be responsible except the 
 sea. When the tides are against you, you can always come into 
 court with a clear conscience and quote Canute (Knut, as we are 
 told we ought to write it). She was always quoting Canute now, 
 and could always do so equally hereafter. 
 
 " No speculation is infallible," she would say. " No one can 
 be perfectly sure that they have Providence and all his ins-and- 
 outs on their side. One can only do one's best to succeed." 
 
 After all, it does 'not very much matter whether you succeed 
 or not when you are only that blessing of Providence —a pro- 
 moter. 
 
 Besides,'Lady Joan was beginning to think that a little touch 
 of ruin might not be altogether disadvantageous. Not such ruin 
 as will end in bailiffs and no dinner to eat ; not real ruin such 
 as some of those silly shareholders were screaming about as their 
 fate ; but a little touch of poetical ruin, or rather retrenchment. 
 It would look well, as if one had sacrificed a good deal in driving 
 the piles in the sand, so she meditated, as if one also had been a 
 victim to the tides and the winds ; besides, if one had to retrench, 
 one might have to live altogether at Fiordelisa — why not ? The 
 great old house was full of sun and had carpets. On the whole, 
 she was not sure, if necessary, that she would not be ruined a 
 little. She was a clever woman, and could draw usefulness out 
 of everything, as Southern farmers get good olives out of old rags. 
 
 So that she was in high spirits in this rough rainy weather 
 that followed her return to Eome. Her husband had not yet 
 come over the mountains ; her slaves and courtiers were all at 
 hand about her; her mourning was useful, for it evoked so much 
 sympathy, and some people out of sympathy called on her that 
 had not called before ; night and day she was busied with the 
 new shares and the new agencies and the new enterprise : she 
 was in paradise. loris held himself aloof indeed ; loris seemed 
 dull and cold and grave, said he was unwell, left her to herself 
 very much, but what of that ? He had chosen to sulk about the 
 transfer — let him ! He could not alter the fact of it ; and he 
 would recover his temper in time, so she said. JMeanwliile there 
 was Douglas Gramme fresh from chamois hunting, and Guido 
 Serravalle eager to sing the same songs, and Mimo and Trillo, 
 those Tyndarids of art, both ready to' run about with her into 
 society, east and west; Lady Joan was hai)py. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 369 
 
 "Was sTic going to make herself miserable because loris siilked 
 in a corner and accused her of having jeopardised his honour ? 
 ^not she ! lie might frown as he liked ; she had got the transfer, 
 and she had got Fiordelisa. 
 
 She put her hands in her coat pockets and a cigar in her 
 mouth, and drove over to Fiordelisa, with ]Mr. Silvcrly Bell and 
 young Guido Sorravalle and his lute by her side. 
 
 " I have saved the place for loris/' she said to every one ; it 
 was a title the more to it. 
 
 " Did the Prince come here with anybody whilst I was away ? " 
 she asked of the peasants, as she visited the pigs. 
 
 They told her that he had come seldom, and been always 
 alone. 
 
 " Then of course there never was anything between him and 
 Etoile," she thought with great content. "He would have 
 brought her here first, of all places, at once if there had 
 been." 
 
 For such follies as delicate instinct and lofty passions never 
 occurred to her. She was clever, but she made a common error 
 of some clever people ; she judged others by herself. This kind 
 of error, however, conduces to content, and Lady Joan was 
 content, and, as she rambled about, thought that next year she 
 would really have that frost-bite of ruin, and winter here. 
 
 Imperator would never get an hour of liberty then, nor his 
 master. 
 
 " To think I have saved the dear old place ! It is so delight- 
 ful ! " she said again and again to her companions, and said it so 
 often that she ended in believing it herself. 
 
 " She has saved his estate for him ! " cried her friends after 
 her in chorus with strophe and autistrophe of praise, marvel, 
 and applause. 
 
 It was a fine day, though cold, this first day that she had 
 visited Fiordelisa. The snow was on the mountains, and she 
 ■wished that it might be thick enough to block up Mr. Challoner 
 in Germany, but in the green plains the sea wind was blowing 
 not unkindly, and the yellow colchicum cups were glancing 
 amongst the grasses. She spent a short day, but a bright day, 
 rejoicing to seize her sceptre and her scales, to set her foot down 
 heavily on the innocent little freedoms that aged servants had 
 taken in her absence, to see the household all hurry and skurry 
 like trembling schoolboys, the dog cower, and the steward turn 
 red over his books, to feel her power all over the old house and 
 the old lands and the old peoj^le. 
 
 She had a happy day, though a brief one, and drove back to 
 Eome as the sun set, feeling that truly for a wise woman all joys 
 of this world are possible. 
 
 " Is that adventuress woman hero still ? " she said to her 
 
360 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 companious, as they droye across tlie burning amber glow that 
 rested ou the plain. 
 
 " What adventuress ? " 
 
 " Etoile." 
 
 " Oh, yes, she is in her solitude at Eocaldi." 
 
 " Always at Eocaldi?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Is she painting ? " 
 
 " They say not ; she has finished nothing ; some say she 
 is ill." 
 
 Lady Joan smiled. 
 
 " 111 ! " she echoed, and she lighted a new cigar. " She has 
 never come to me ; never written me a word ; I knew she never 
 would when once I had seen my father." 
 
 BIr. Silverly Bell sighed ; he was always compassionate. 
 
 " She is in love with lo, yon know — actually sent him letters 
 to Paris ! " she continued. 
 
 "Indeed?" said Mr. Silverly Bell, cautiously; "and 
 he ?" 
 
 " Hates her ! " said the Lady Joan " lo knows nothing about 
 love, you know ; he is like me ; he only cares for friendship ! " 
 
 Mr. Silverly Bell coughed ; not knowing quite what to say. 
 
 Fortunately there was a very fine simset, and he made a 
 remark on it. 
 
 The Lady Joan drove onward with a smile on her face ; it 
 pleased her to think of Etoile, ill, with her pictures untouched. 
 
 She set down her companions at their respective destinations, 
 and then turned the heads of her steeds to the house of loris by 
 the Piazza del Gesii. There was still a dull red glow from the 
 west suffusing the city. 
 
 He was absent, but she entered as her habit was, and 
 brushed past his servant up the staircase to his own little 
 chamber. 
 
 " I want some papers for your master," she said to him. 
 
 The servant dared not oppose her entrance wheresoever she 
 might choose to go. It was quite true that she wanted some 
 papers ; papers concerning the new society that had sprung to 
 life under her fostering care ; papers that she knew were on his 
 table. The little room was dark, but she struck a match and lit a 
 candle, and began unceremoniously her search amidst the letters, 
 books, and documents of all sorts that were scattered over his 
 bureau. She knew all his ways and all the hiding-places of his 
 desk, and rummaged in them without remorse, searching for 
 what she wanted, the eyes of her own portrait looking down on 
 her from the chamber wall. 
 
 Suddenly amidst her search through the mass of business 
 correspondence and ceremonious letters on ceremonials of the 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 361 
 
 court, she saw a handwriting which made all the blood leap to 
 her face, and her hand seized the note that bore it as a cat seizes 
 prey. 
 
 It was a note of Etoile's, written that day, and left by him 
 there in an nnwontcd carelessness, instead of l)cing consigned tO' 
 that secret drawer of which his visitor did not possess the secret. 
 He had put it back in its envelope, moved it hastily under a pile 
 of letters, and gone out quickly to go to Kocaldi. 
 
 Lady Joan read it. 
 
 It was not of great length, but there were words in it that 
 told her all the truth hidden from her so long. She read it 
 thrice; all the blood fading out of her face while her teeth 
 clenched like the jav/s of a steel trap. 
 
 She had beeu befooled, beguiled, betrayed. And at length sho 
 knew it. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIV. 
 
 Her first impulse was that of any wounded tigress : to spring 
 and rend and kill. 
 
 A sort of madness seized her ; in her fury she would have 
 slain him at a blow had he been there before her. A thousand 
 fires flashed before her swimming eyes ; a thousand hammers 
 seemed beating on her brain ; the room reeled around her ; she 
 could have screamed aloud, but her tongue clove to her mouth : 
 she stood and stared down on the letter in the dull light of the 
 flickering taper and knew herself befooled, beguiled, betrayed. 
 
 Vengeance alone seemed to her worth living for ; to kill them 
 both as tigers kill. 
 
 There was fierceness enough in her blood, and strength 
 enough in her nerve, to have driven the steel straight home 
 through flesh and bone without ever wavering once. 
 
 But it is women who love, even if they love guiltily, that kill : 
 she loved herself. The little chamber was very still, the light of 
 the taper very dim; in the silence and the calmness and the 
 solitude the paroxysm passed away — she remembered the 
 world. 
 
 The fierceness of her fury seethed and hissed itself into a 
 sullen calm ; she was alone and there was nothing for the 
 tempest to destroy ; it raged, impotent, and spent itself. 
 
 Prudence, which soon tempered her passions, to harden them 
 
362 FEIENDSHIP. 
 
 the more as the cold flood of water hardens the heated steel, 
 returned to her. 
 
 What use is it for you to kill any one ? 
 
 They suffer for ten minutes ; you suffer for the rest of your 
 life. 
 
 There were other ways than that. 
 
 Despite all her vanity, all her credulity, all her willingness 
 to believe the thing she wished, still at the back of her thoughts 
 in the depth of her heart, unadmitted, detested, thrust away, 
 there had always been the latent consciousness that the loVe of 
 loris had passed from her and gone to this other woman whom 
 she hated. 
 
 A million little traits came back upon her now that might 
 have told her all the truth long before had not her eyes been 
 blinded by the cataract of an immense and undoubting vanity. 
 Out from the limbo of forgotten trivialities there started to her 
 memory, now, a million trifles of glance, of word, of gesture, that 
 should have told her ere the Lenten lilies had been white, that 
 these two had understood each other in tenderest sympathy and 
 comprehension. All these memories now seemed to dart from 
 their hiding-jjlaces and shoot little tongues of flame at her like 
 demons at their play. She had been fooled all the while ! 
 
 To a vain woman what blow so deadly, what offence so beyond 
 all pardon ! 
 
 She stood like a stupefied creature, the letter in her hand, 
 till the recollection of her world — the world she lived for — came 
 to her. 
 
 Though her rage should choke her, and her hatred strangle 
 her, she must have no scene the world would hear of ; no rash, 
 wild vengeance that would level the Temple of All the Virtues 
 with the dust. 
 
 Her first impulse was the impulse of every woman that finds 
 lierself forsaken for another. Her second instinct was the 
 stronger one of self-interest. Keen, violent, tempestuous as her 
 passions were, one curb lay on them always : the resolve never 
 for them or their indulgence to lose a single advantage, a single 
 practical gain. 
 
 To dash his hands away, to strike the lips that had touched 
 another's, to drive him out of her presence xmder a storm of 
 curses, ay, even to send a trusty blade straight through his 
 breast-bone, these were all her first impulses, fierce, natural, 
 maddened, unthinking. But before her, like a saving spirit to 
 arrest her blows and teach her patience, rose the memory of — 
 Fiordelisa. 
 
 To slay loris — even to quarrel with him — was to lose 
 Fiordelisa. 
 
 Fiordelisa was first ; and he but second. 
 
FRIENDSIIir. 363 
 
 But for Fiorclelisa, sbe would liavo scourged him from her 
 sight, or havG done worso to him ; but Fiordclisa was as a silver 
 chain lying on her rage, and keeping it dumb and still. 
 
 The years were waning with her, and in a little while men 
 would cease to find sorcery in her smile. If she exiled herself 
 from Fiordelisa, never would she find such another kingdom, 
 never again would winepress and granary bo piled full for her 
 gain, and indolence and negligence drop a sceptre to her grasp — 
 never again. 
 
 And she knew it. 
 
 Though a woman who deluded herself on many things, she 
 had no dehision here. 
 
 " You will never find such another fool," had her husband 
 said once to her in a moment of candour, and she knew very well 
 that she never would — that Cleopatra though she was, her days 
 with Cfesars were done. 
 
 Dearer than all passion, sweeter than all vengeance to her, 
 were her scales and her stock-books, her ledgers and her 
 leathern purse, her sway on the breezy wild hills, her rule in the 
 ancient grey halls. 
 
 Lose Fiordelisa ! 
 
 Her heart turned sick, her blood ran cold, at the mere 
 thought. 
 
 Have another woman reign there in her stead? — a woman 
 who would hold the old oaks sacred, let the songbirds sing, 
 kneel by the old altars, and bid roses bloom, and children laugh, 
 and peasants be free, and the lord of all be lord in truth ? 
 
 Never, she swore in her soul, never ! never, by all the gods of 
 vengeance, would she be thus dethroned and thus displaced. 
 
 Sooner would she hurl torches in the granaries and see the 
 flames rise in a hurricane of fire north and south and east and 
 west till Fiordelisa were a blackened waste ! 
 
 The terror of this peril calmed her. 
 
 loris she might furiously have released, or as furiously have 
 struck with her clenched hand and cursed and banished. But 
 Fiordelisa never would she risk ! 
 
 Therefore burn in anguish, chafe in humiliations as she 
 would, she must needs choke herself into silence and give him 
 no pretext of an angry glance, no opening of a furious word, no 
 hint of her knowledge of his infidelity, no power to seize the 
 liberty that lies in dissension and avowal. She must be silent, 
 let silence cost her what it would. 
 
 She sat there in the little darkling room with the taper like 
 a tiny star beside her, and felt that she would sooner lose her life 
 than Fiordelisa. 
 
 It was quite night. 
 
 Time had fled without her taking any count of its swift 
 
364 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 passing. No ono had dared disturb her. loris had not re- 
 turned. 
 
 Prudence, and the chilHer self-control begotten of a supremo 
 self-love, ruled her once more. She put the letter back under- 
 neath others as she had found it, and gathered up the papers 
 she had come to seek, and blew the taper out, and groped her 
 way to the door. 
 
 On the staircase a lamp was burning ; his servant hurried 
 out, hearing her. 
 
 "I thought milady was gone long ago," he stammered, 
 wondering. 
 
 She controlled her voice to cheerfulness and calm command. 
 
 " No, Giannino, your master had left me so much to wri te ; 
 I wish he would do his own work," she said, with her usual 
 familiar laugh, and frank curt way. " Call me some cab, will 
 you ; I shall be late home for dinner. Do you know where the 
 Prince is gone ? " 
 
 Giannino knew very well, but he threw his hands to heaven 
 and swore ignorance. 
 
 She went out of the house, and home. 
 
 At home she locked herself in her bedchamber and passed 
 the most bitter hour of her life. But when the hour was passed, 
 her resolve was taken, 
 
 A weak and tender woman would have broken her heart, a 
 true and impassioned woman would have ruined herself, taking 
 some fleet, fierce revenge to be mourned for with a lifetime of 
 remorse. 
 
 She who was always strong and never true, knew better ways 
 than these. 
 
 When she heard his laggard step on the stairs and his tired 
 voice in the antechamber, she rose and withdrew the bolts and 
 bade him come to her. When he came she threw her arm about 
 his throat. 
 
 "I am feverish and cold, lo ; feel my cheeks and my hands. 
 I liave been doing too much for you at Fiordelisa. Where have 
 you been all day ? " 
 
 And she kissed him. 
 
 She felt him shudder. 
 
 And again she kissed him ; navmg chosen her vengeance — a 
 vengeance that should not lose for her Fiordelisa. 
 
 If she had never known the truth she would have been sus- 
 picious, importunate, watchful, jealous, angered, curious, always 
 interrogating and always spying ; and loris would have grown 
 impatient, and soon or late some bitter word would have un- 
 locked the gates of his secret, and the fetters of his bondage, 
 both at once. 
 
 But to be forewarned is to be forearmed. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 365 
 
 Knowing the truth, and liaving resolved never to show she 
 knew it, nothing could seem more trustful, no one more un- 
 conscious of any rival near her than was she ; she seemed com- 
 pletely credulous of all ho said, and against her mingled ardour 
 and good faith, devotion and trustfulness, his restless conscious- 
 ness broke itself bitterly in vain, as waves break powerless on a 
 bank of sand. If she had but broken out into rage once, all 
 would have been said, and he for ever free. 
 
 But she kept her temper, like a very Griscldis. 
 
 Since the first winter that she had wooed him, he had never 
 known her so tender and so caressing; the harshness of her 
 natural tones was hushed, and the vigilance of her endless 
 espionage was abated. To a woman who suspects you it is easy 
 to say, "I am faithless;" to a woman who trusts you it is very 
 hard to say it. 
 
 She knew this so well. She took heed to let no shadow of a 
 doubt ever seem to hover near her. "With the snow white on 
 the streets and plains, she spoke with a smile of their coming 
 summer at Fiordelisa. 
 
 Now and then carelessly, as of a thing indifferent alike to both, 
 she spoke of Etoile. 
 
 " I am glad she has the conscience not to come near me," 
 she said one day. "That shows she knows what my ijoor 
 father said to me. Does she persecute you, lo, with any more 
 letters ? " 
 
 " Did I ever say that I was persecuted ? " he muttered, as he 
 tuned away impatient with himself. 
 
 The Lady Joan laughed pleasantly. 
 
 " Oh, no, I dare say you felt very complimented ; men always 
 do on their honnes fortunes, do they not, Marjory ? " 
 
 And the Echo was careful to reply. 
 
 " lo looks quite vain, I think ! It is not everybody who 
 fascinates a feminine Eaffaelle who can give his features immor- 
 tality upon canvas ! " 
 
 " What folly ! " said loris, with a dark flush on his cheek. 
 Then Lady Joan and the Echo laughed again. 
 
 But that was all. 
 
 When he was absent, when he was inattentive, when he was 
 intentionally negligent of her summons, and ceased to accompany 
 her in society or to any iDublic place, she was still a very Griseldis 
 in her patience. She even said to him, " You are right, dear, 
 perhajDs to be seen with me less, — people will talk." 
 
 But all the while, with all her patience, she made him feel 
 that she held him closely in a very labyrinth of his own weaving, 
 and she never spoke of any coming day or year, or even distant 
 hereafter, but what she spoke of it as something they were quite 
 sure to share together. 
 
366 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 There was a sort of hateful auodyne in this security of claim 
 that seemed to drug him and hold him motionless and paralysed, 
 as the fell curare holds the victim that it drugs. 
 
 Once she said to him tenderly — 
 
 " Caro mio, I feel quite ashamed when I think that I made 
 you that scene in Paris. With all your devotion to me, to insult 
 you by any idea that you could be untrue to me for five minutes ! 
 I quite hate myself, lo ; I do, indeed ! " 
 
 She would say these things in the noise of a street, in the 
 buzz of society, in the midst of the world, so that they gave him 
 no chance of a reply that might have been the prelude to truth 
 and freedom, but only filled^ him with a sickly sense of all that 
 she expected, all that she would exact, and of how entirely she 
 took for granted that he was hers for ever. 
 
 All this cost her very dear ; when hate and fury, dread and 
 jealous fear, were seething together in her, and all her veins were 
 on fire with outraged vanity and the consciousness of his broken 
 faith, to have to keep her fury dumb, to rein in her violence, to 
 caress and smile and be still, and seem to know nothing, and 
 give no vent to any one of the bitter words that every moment 
 sprang up to her lips ; all this cost her very dear. But she had 
 served a long apprenticeship in the world to the art of self- 
 repression ; and here she held steadily one great aim in view, and 
 it gave her nerve and patience. 
 
 Not to lose Fiordelisa ; never to lose Fiordelisa. This was 
 her Alpha and her Omega, 
 
 A feebler or a franker woman would have jeopardised all in 
 one hour of reproach or of entreaty. But she knew better than 
 to give him any such loophole for escape. A tempest clears the 
 air : she filled her atmosphere with mist, in which, strive as ho 
 would for the light, he should lose his path and be for ever lost. 
 Long, long before, hanging her cashmere, up in the loggia of 
 Fiordelisa on the first day of her entrance there, she had known 
 that the wisdom for her in the- future must be — immovability. 
 
 That she must never seem to know, to hear, to see, to feel, 
 any sign that he might ever give that her reign should cease 
 and her steps depart. 
 
 To that wisdom she adhered now. 
 
 It cost her many bitter hours to cling to it, but it was her 
 sheet anchor and she never let it go. And in her way she was 
 very wise. 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. Challoner had returned for Christmas; ho 
 never by any chance neglected a domestic festival ; the city was 
 full, and teacups and triptychs were in requisition; the mighty 
 cousins were some of them arrived or arriving ; the houses that 
 had to be called at were many ; Mrs. Grundy and Mrs. Candour 
 were at the head of their serried battalions ; and she, as usual. 
 
FEIENDSUIP. 3GT 
 
 wtis busy conciliating, propitiating, purchasing, selling, smiling, 
 entreating, investing, ingratiating; yet slio looked ill, and grew 
 very thin, and had a feverish, harassed glance in her eyes. 
 
 " It is the great grief she has had," said the Scrope-Stairs. 
 
 " It is the superhuman energy slio has shown," said Mr. 
 Silverly Bell ; and Society said after them, " Great grief — great 
 energy — most laudable — most admirable," and went still oftener 
 than ever to call on her. 
 
 She was supposed to have had a great tinancial success. 
 People are very fond of such success. 
 
 Success like that of Etoile is not popular; it seems to be 
 seated on some inaccessible pinnacle whence it seems to shower 
 pity and scorn on mankind. But a success like the mended 
 pot's, monetary, commonplace, practical, comfortable, that is 
 another thing, everybody likes it, everybody trusts it. 
 
 Everybody went to her accordingly, and she had many 
 pleasant little occasions on which to drop a word in Everybody's 
 ear. 
 
 " Etoile ? Oh, dear no ! I never see her, never ivish. She 
 never comes near me since I saw my poor father. If I thought 
 I should meet her anywhere, I should not go there — No. Well, 
 perhaps not worse than other artists ! .... I believe she lays 
 nets for lo. He hates her, but he is very weak. Poor lo! 
 Fancy anybody making a hero of lo ! But to be sure, perhaps 
 I cannot judge myself; he has been like a brother to me so long : 
 poor lo ! " 
 
 For she was of this complexion, that heaven might have been 
 crashing, and the earth reeling to its doom, but she would have 
 been ready to buy cheap a length of lace, or make a desirable 
 acquaintance. It is of this stout stuff that great characters are 
 always made. 
 
 She was really wretched ; she was really half mad with rage 
 and pain and terror ; in sober truth, waking or sleeping, night 
 or day, the thought of her rival was never absent from her. But 
 all the same she neglected none of all the minutia) that Society 
 exacts ; she ran up the stairs alike of her studios and her 
 drawing-rooms; she went on her rounds of visits with her 
 husband ; and she could still rouse herself and calm herself in a 
 hurricane of hysterics if there came the shghtest chance of 
 selling a teacup at a profit. 
 
 And when Everybody was gone she would lie on her sofa 
 and take some ether, and say to her maid, " Send for the Prince 
 loris, will you, Marianna. Say I am very ill this evening : " 
 when reluctant he obeyed, she would note how cold his glance 
 was, how unwilling his step, how indifferent his voice, and choke 
 with jealous rage in silence in her heart, and pass her hand 
 over his hair and murmur to him, "I am so ill to-night; I 
 
368 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 cannot let you go again ; amor mio, give me those drops — I am 
 faint." 
 
 He bent his knee beside her, sullen and yet contrite. She 
 looked thiUj she looked hectic^ she looked worn : he could not 
 doubt her love for him, she grew so gentle. 
 
 " Would to heaven she would hate me ! " he thought : and 
 hated himself. 
 
 But she did not hate him. 
 
 True there were times when she could have^ snatched the 
 silver dagger from her hair, and plunged it in his breast, like 
 any jealousy-maddened fisher-girl on the edge of the waves by 
 Amalfi ; true there were hours when, knowing how he had fooled 
 her, how he believed he fooled her still, how laggard was his 
 step, how languid his caress, how dark and averted his glance, 
 she could have rent him limb from limb. True there were 
 moments when even yet the fierce, wild temper in her asserted 
 itself, and she was ready to fling the truth in his face and curse 
 him and let him go. 
 
 But in her inmost soul she loved him, in her savage selfish 
 way, more than she had ever done in her life ; in her heart she 
 felt a sullen respect for him for having so well deceived her ; and 
 the sense that his love was gone to another sharpened the 
 passion in her to new keenness, gave it a new birth, a new lease 
 of life, fresh vigour and fresh tenacity. She had grown careless 
 of him, being so very sure he was her toy for life ; but now that 
 she knew how slender was her hold, and how at every hour it 
 might snap, she strained every nerve to hold him. Vengeance 
 she would have; but it should be such vengeance as should 
 fetter him for ever and not cast him free. 
 
 For in her way she was very wise. 
 
 And she lay on her sofa, and took her ether and her morphia, 
 and sent for him, and wound her fingers close about his wrist, 
 and said, " You must not leave me, dear : yes, I feel faint and 
 ill. I shall be strong again with the spring— at our dear 
 Fiordelisa." 
 
 I 
 
FEIENDSIIIP. 369 
 
 CHAPTER XLV. 
 
 " One of the women that forgive," he had said of Etoile. 
 
 What woman is not of these that loves truly? 
 
 She forgave from the depths of her soul, though shuddering 
 she turned from the memory of what it was that she forgave. 
 She forgave, even as he had justly said she would have kissed 
 his hand if it had stabbed her. But even as, had she been 
 stabbed by him, the dulness of death would have come to her 
 through him, so now a great dread and a gTeat humiliation 
 weighed on her and would not pass away. 
 
 " You have let her come back, not knowing the truth ? " she 
 said to him ; and when he could biit answer " Yes," with averted 
 eyes and a flush on his olive cheek, she felt a great sense of 
 hopelessness fall upon her. 
 
 She was not angered ; she did not upbraid him. These are 
 the selfish ways of little and vain natures. She loved him so 
 much that she shut her lips over all reproach or rebuke. But 
 she began to comprehend that his will was much as are the reeds 
 by the river, and his promise unstable as the winds that wander 
 amidst the reeds ; and this was more terrible to her than any 
 peril of circumstance could have been. Against circumstance, 
 the strong nature will rise dauntless and unwearied, however 
 long or painful be the conflict ; but against the woes that spring 
 from character, the bravest is powerless. No one can alter 
 nature. 
 
 Dully and slowly Etoile awoke to the consciousness that 
 when she had thought that she loosened the toils from about his 
 feet, she had but wound them about herself as well. 
 
 He soothed her with tender words. He reassured her with 
 earnest promise. He begged of her only to have patience a little 
 while longer, and said that all would be well. She listened and 
 obeyed, fearing to rouse the mysteries and dangers that seemed 
 to lie about his path. She did not understand, therefore she 
 was afraid to move. On one thing only was she resolute. 
 
 " If I sec her " she said, with a shudder, to him, " If I 
 
 see her — which I pray heaven to spare me — I cannot speak to 
 her, or look at her ; she must think of me what she will." 
 
 " Surely : would I ask you to know her now '? " he answered ; 
 and he did feel that not for an empire would he have the hands 
 of these women meet ; and Etoile would not have been what ho 
 loved if she could have smiled upon her foe and his destroyer. 
 
 2 B 
 
S70 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 Yet in his heart, though he hated himself for the transient 
 emotion, he felt a momentary impatience, a momentary wish 
 that she were of lighter temper like others, and took things less 
 deeply. He had been used to a world in which the wife smiled 
 on her husband's mistress ; the husband on the man that dis- 
 honoured him ; the bitterest foes were the best friends in seem- 
 ing, and the rivalry, the intrigue, the crime, the enmity of the 
 hour, were all alike concealed beneath a surface of courtesy and 
 cordiality, and the friendship of society was but a mask for lusts, 
 for treachery, for hatreds. He loved her because she was not 
 like this world ; yet habit and usage made him for an instant 
 wish that she would stoop to its convenient hypocrisies, its 
 bland untruths. 
 
 " What would it cost her to be ostensibly friends with her 
 rival for a few brief weeks till I am free ? " he thought ; and then 
 he repented of the thought, and felt that it was unworthy both 
 of himself and her. And how did he mean to take his freedom ? 
 He did not know. He drifted ; trusting to chance. He had lost 
 his opportunity. Opportunity is our good angel, but if when it 
 knocks we do not open quickly, it goes away from us, rarely to 
 return. He was in the mist and twilight of a great dilemma, 
 and as one little cloud spreads all over the heavens till the earth 
 is dark with storm, so one hesitating and timid untruth spreads 
 into a night of falsehood, a shipwreck of life and love. 
 
 Etoile, who all her life had been strong because she had been 
 aloof from mankind and indifferent to human pains and joys, 
 and wrapped in the lofty egotisms of the arts, Etoile was now 
 weak as the weakest ; every woman is so that loves greatly. In 
 a great love, the eyes are blinded, the lips closed, the ears deaf, 
 the will paralysed; only beholding, only breathing for, only 
 hearing, only obeying, one other life out of all the millions upon 
 earth : and nothing short of this is love. 
 
 She was weak, and weakness is ever unwise. She shrank 
 from any chance of meeting the woman whom it made her burn 
 with shame to think was still her rival. She shrank from any 
 obligation of going into the routine of society, and greeting, or 
 passing by, as some mere acquaintance the lover who was all the 
 world to her. All the trivial untruths, the conventional mas- 
 querades that society regards as venial, indeed as right and wise, 
 were to her cowardly and guilty evasions ; she could not stoop to 
 them. She would keep silence since he wished it; she would 
 bear pain if it pleased him to lay it on her ; she would even 
 submit to injurious construction and slanderous comment if it 
 came to her through obedience to his will. But she would not 
 act a social lie ; therefore she shut her doors on the world and 
 would not go out to it, and let it babble what it might of her. 
 
 She was very happy still, very often she believed that he 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 371 
 
 scarcely saw her rival ; she was full of faith in his words and 
 in her future. She withdrew into solitude, because solitude was 
 sweeter to her than any companionship when he was absent. She 
 prayed for him, she smiled on him often when she could have 
 wept in his absence ; she gave herself to art for his sake, that he 
 might still be proud of her. 
 
 Alas ! prayer was of no avail ; nor tenderness, nor love nor 
 a,ny delicacy or constancy of faith. To save him she needed to 
 have been of coarser fibre, of colder heart, of tougher mould ; she 
 needed to have been blunt and fierce and subtle and resolute 
 like her foe. 
 
 Ariel could not combat a leopardess ; Ithuriel's spear glances 
 pointless from a rhinoceros' hide. To match what is low and 
 beat it, you must stoop ; and soil your hands to cut a cudgel 
 rough and ready. She did not see this ; and seeing it, would 
 not have lowered herself to do it. 
 
 She withdrew herself into solitude, and loved him as one 
 woman perhaps loves once in a century. It seemed to her that 
 it was all that she could do; that it must be enough, since he 
 loved her. 
 
 But it was not enough ; because he was not alone ; restless, 
 ruthless, ever-present, avaricious of every moment, unscrupulous 
 in every guile, fierce as a driving sirocco, and penetrating 
 everywhere like the sirocco's sand, her rival was for ever beside 
 him. 
 
 If she had gone down into the mud of the arena and fought 
 with the same weapon as her foe, she would have vanquished ; 
 but pride held her back, and love, and] faith, which would not 
 insult him : she stayed aloof and could not struggle with what 
 was base basely. 
 
 So the day of battle waned and went against her. 
 
 The same crowd on the Piucio spoke of her that had spoken 
 the year before, only with interest less lively because she was no 
 more a novelty. 
 
 " She is always in Kome ? " 
 
 " Yes, at Eocaldi." 
 
 " What does she do at Eocaldi ? " 
 
 "Humph — well — ah! . . . . " 
 
 Then people laughed, no one knew very well why. 
 
 " Does she send to the Salon this year ? " 
 
 " Nothing." 
 
 "Is she ill?" 
 
 "Nobody knows." 
 
 " One sees her driving ? " 
 
 " Oh, yes, you may see her driving." 
 
 " Not in society ? " 
 
 "Not in society this year." 
 
372 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Very odd." 
 
 " Such women are always odd." 
 
 " She seems to shut herself up like a nun ; perhaps the big 
 dog is a man in disguise." 
 
 Then everybody laughed again, and thought they were 
 witty. 
 
 On such a congenial temper of society, and into minds so well 
 prepared, the voice of her foe and its echoes easily droj^ped 
 well-chosen words. 
 
 Lady Joan was in mourning and could not go out in the 
 evening, but she called upon people assiduously and received 
 them at home on her Wednesdays, there being nothing in tea 
 and talk against woe. 
 
 " So sorry j'ou should ever have been exposed to meeting her 
 here," she said, with cordial apology and a sad tone in her voice ; 
 " so very, very sorry. But my poor dear father's name was used 
 without his knowledge ; his very last words to me almost were 
 in anger about her ; oh, for myself I do not mind ; I am not 
 prudish ; but for all my dear friends who met her here — I feel 
 I cannot make atonement enough." 
 
 Then she would smile a little and add : " It is so tiresome for 
 poor lo ; she has taken such a fancy for him, and now that she 
 does not come here she never sees him of course, and she is always 
 teasing him — sending after him. He never goes indeed, but still 
 to a man of delicate mind like lo it is painful — yes, artists are 
 always very strange ; it is a gi'eat pity." 
 
 And she would look very frank and very sorrowful, and her 
 echoes would say the same thing a little more faintly, but very 
 faithfully, till Society was all one big echo, singing the same 
 song, like the rocks round a lake. 
 
 Mr. Silverly Bell, like the famous Hibernian echo which 
 embroiders variations, would add — " The generous hospitality 
 of Lady Joan so abused ! Her noble friendship so slandered ! 
 So sad, so shocking, so shameful ! No, I have no idea who pays 
 for Eocaldi. Not its tenant — certainly not its tenant. She sends 
 nothing to the Salon this year. Poor loris ! It all annoys him 
 unspeakably. He never saw her save in the Casa Challoner — 
 never ! " 
 
 This was what Etoile had done by leaving the field to her foes, 
 whilst scornful of the tongues of the world, and always indif- 
 ferent to their blame as to their praise, she lived on in her 
 solitude, counting the hours till they brought loris. He told 
 her that he scarcely saw her rival ; never save when the compli- 
 cations of their entangled affairs made it unavoidable. To doubt 
 liim was very difficult to her. To watch him was impossible. 
 
 Out of an exaggerated sense of the honour due to him she 
 would never utter his name to others ; never pass down a street 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 373 
 
 whero it could seem as if slio watched Jiim; never take ary 
 meaus, not the most innocent, to ascertain whether what he said 
 were true or false. lie loved her, and that was enough. Ho 
 was master of both their fates. 
 
 " So you have withdi-awn yourself to your rock in the middio 
 of the sea, or rather in the middio of your vineyard," said Lady 
 Cardiff to her one day, with approval in her phrases, but vexation 
 in her soul. " Well, no doubt you are very wise, my dear. Every 
 one to his taste. Perhaps it is better to drop society altogether 
 unless you conform to it altogether, and make it pleasant to you 
 by being pleasant to itself, painting your eyebrows, tittle-tattling, 
 wearing your gowns half way down your spine, iincliug an H.E.H.'s 
 impudence honour, kissing your worst enemy, being prettily fickle 
 and smilingly false, and making yourself generally iDlacable and 
 affable. As you will not do that, perhaps the rock in the middle 
 of the sea — or the vines — is best for you, as his skylight was for 
 Victor Hugo. I am sure I dare not say it isn't. Only it does 
 seem a pity, at your age, with your talents, to shut yourself up 
 in a sort of Paraclete with a lot of palm-trees. It does seem a 
 pity. To be sure, there is Tsar." 
 
 " There is always Tsar," said Etoile, with a smile. 
 
 "And loris," thought Lady Cardiff, with impatience and 
 discontent. 
 
 " loris embellishes a Paraclete, no doubt," she mused to her- 
 self. " But she is making a terrible error. She loves with the 
 immortal love of the poets, and he with the trivial passion of the 
 world. I am sure of it, as sure as if they were both before me. 
 And what is the use of secluding herself under her palm-trees ? 
 Seclusion will not beat that bully who owns him. On the con- 
 trary, she should be always in the world, always taking away 
 her foe's friends, countermining her foe's mines, shining, suc- 
 ceeding, giving her lover hosts of rivals to fear, showing him 
 always her own power, her own triumph, her own caprices. That 
 is the way that rivals are beaten, and men are retained. But she 
 does not see it. If she did see it, she would not do it. She will 
 wait under her palms for him to come to her. "Whenever he 
 ceases to come, then she will break her heart and live alone till 
 she dies. I always used to wonder how Heloise, with all her 
 sense and knowledge and genius, and Greek and Latin, ever 
 could let Abelard beat her. I don't wonder since I have known 
 Etoile. I am quite sure loris beats her — metaphorically speaking 
 — ^just because he has been so tired of being beaten himself. Ah, 
 dear me ! why couldn't the fates have been kinder and have left 
 that other woman on her housetop in Damascus ! " 
 
 But Lady Cardiff was a gramle dame and a wise person, too 
 high-bred to speak of what did not concern her, so she thought 
 all this only in vexed silence, and merely said with a pleasant 
 smile — 
 
374 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " To be sure there is always Tsar." 
 
 Tsar, who at that moment was tossing in play, in the air over 
 his head, a man's glove — a glove that belonged to the slender, 
 soft, long hand of loris. 
 
 Lady Cardiff saw that it -was a man's glove, but she said 
 nothing. 
 
 " You have heard of my poor friend ; of Dorotea ? " said Etoile 
 hurriedly, to alter the subject. 
 
 "■ Yes ; I have heard." 
 
 "Is not the world bitterly cruel? Can there be a viler 
 sentence — a more hideous injustice ? " 
 
 " Perhaps the one the world will pass on you will be as much 
 so," thought Lady Cardiff, as she answered aloud : " You hear 
 nothing from herself? " 
 
 " Nothing — now — for many months." 
 
 " But you believe in her innocence ? " 
 
 " As I believe that the sun shines in the heavens." 
 
 " Dear me ! Yet she is worse than dead ? " 
 
 " Worse than dead ! " 
 
 The tears rolled down the cheeks of Etoile as she spoke, and 
 she turned away. Life, from one lovely, classic, cold vision of 
 all the arts, had changed and become to her a thing so exquisitely 
 beautiful, so fearfully terrible, that she grew dizzy in its midst. 
 
 Lady Cardiff glanced at her, and said aloud pleasantly — 
 
 " My dear. Tsar will tear that glove. Is it yours ? " 
 
 " It is Ireneo's. He spoils Tsar very much," said Etoile un- 
 thinkingly, and then she grew a little pale, being afraid that she 
 had betrayed the secret of her lover. 
 
 " loris ? Ah ! he is very fond of dogs. Lady Joan beats 
 them," said Lady Cardiff tranquilly. 
 
 The colour burned in the face of Etoile. She was silent. 
 
 "After all," mused Lady Cardiff, "Paraclete is more like 
 common hiimanity than one thought. That is a comfort." 
 
 But a vague apprehension was upon her, and she went away ; 
 once more too, engrossed and too pained to care to read her 
 Figaro, which was the effect that her visits to what she called 
 Paraclete always produced on her. 
 
 The Figaro was equally interesting and veracious that day. 
 It contained, like many other journals of Europe at that epoch; 
 the full account of the suit of the Due de Santorin against his 
 wife, known to the world as Dorotea Coronis— a suit in which the 
 husband was completely triumphant, with a triumph chiefly due 
 to the letters of a dead lover that he placed before the judge. 
 
 "Why loUl people write letters?" said Lady Cardiff to 
 herself, with a tender pity for human nature. " Were there any 
 entanglements before people took to letter-writing? I don't 
 think'there can have been. Every bother and show-up that we 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 375 
 
 have, come out of letters uow-a-days. How nice and safe it 
 must have been with only flowers for correspondence, as they 
 had in the East before we civilised it. If a marigold or a clove- 
 pink had been found, and meant anything dreadful, you could 
 always have said it was a mistake of the gardener's. Santorin 
 himself coi^ldn't have taken a marigold or a clove-pink into 
 court." 
 
 She drove on to the Pincio and got out and walked, and 
 found every one talking of the Santorin suit, and full of 
 sympathy for the husband. 
 
 " She woiikl never sing a note after the E;issian died. Tliat 
 was proof of guilt enough ! " said lovely Mrs. Desart. 
 
 " And she is gone into a convent in Spain," added Lady Eye- 
 bright. 
 
 " She should have gone there before," said Mrs. Desart. '' 
 
 " Why do convents open their doors to such women?" said 
 Lady Joan Challouer, severely. 
 
 " But the letters were no proof of her infidelity," said a man 
 who thought with a pang of that fairest face and that loveliest 
 voice veiled and dumb in a living grave. " The letters clearly 
 reproached her with cruelty, with coldness. I cannot see 
 myself " 
 
 " There were the plainest possible proofs of criminal inter- 
 course," said Lady Joan and Mrs. Desart and Lady Eyebright 
 together. " The letters proved it, and if they did not, the ser- 
 vants' testimony did " 
 
 " A maid she had discharged and a valet of Santorin's ! The 
 old Spanish woman swore to her utter innocence " 
 
 " The old Spaniard was in her dotage : the judge said so. 
 Besides, the Eussian was not ih.Q first " 
 
 " Oh, mesdames 1 " 
 
 "She was a most profligate creature. To think she should 
 have so often sung to our Queen ! " 
 
 Lady Cardiff put her glass in her eye : — 
 
 " She wasn't divorced then, my dear Lady Joan. Anybody 
 adorned with the Scarlet Letter that is not a divorcee may como 
 to Court, so I suppose they may sing at it. It is the Victorian 
 rule. It has many conveniences " 
 
 Lady Joan winced, but was stern in her justice. 
 
 " It serves Santorin right for marrying a person out of the 
 mud like that," she said still severely. ""What could he 
 expect ? Ai'tists are always the same. And it will be so hard 
 upon him now. He won't be able to marry unless she dies." 
 
 " You think it hard on men not to be able to marry '? How 
 nice of you! But then all marriages are not as happy as yours, 
 dear Lady Joan," said Lady Cardiff, and she turned to IMr. 
 Challouer. 
 
376 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " Santorin takes two millions from her under his marriage 
 contract. Eather bathos, that, don't you think ? If Menelaus 
 had taken two millions from Helen, would Greece have sym- 
 pathised? One doesn't know. Morals alter so, and manners. 
 Ours seems a lucrative age for husbands, doesn't it ? If she 
 could have gone on singing and paying his debts, I am sure he 
 would never have brought his suit. No ? " 
 
 Mrs. Challoner reddened, and said something vague about 
 no payment of debts compensating any gentleman for dis- 
 honour. 
 
 Lady Cardiff went onward meditatively. 
 
 " Dear, dear ! " she thought to herself, " that singing-woman 
 is dying in a convent, and our feminine Eaffaelle leaning on a 
 reed that will pierce her heart like a spear some day ! Dear, 
 dear ! what is the use of being born with the Muse in you if you 
 cannot take better care of yourself than that ? The woman was 
 innocent — yes, certainly innocent; the letters prove, if they 
 prove anything, how she strove against her love for her lover's 
 sake ; and yet if she were singing anywhere, virtuous women like 
 Lady Joan and the Desart could not hear her, and the very 
 theatres would be scandalised, and very likely hiss ! What an 
 admu'able century ! Eoyal courts are severe as Ehadamanthus 
 on the morals of the few that sing at a State concert ; the twelve 
 hundred that come to listen may have sinned as they liked ; that 
 don't hurt a Court at all ! " 
 
 Left alone, Etoile paced restlessly to and fro the long terrace 
 on which the dog had been at play with the glove. 
 
 The fate of her friend Dorotea had tilled her with pain and 
 indignation, though she had heard nothing more than what the 
 world knew, or since the moment that she had been told of 
 Fedor Souroff's death, Dorotea Coronis had died herself to the 
 world : all ties and memories of hviug things or living friends 
 had perished from her. But to Etoile also had come that 
 supreme absorption of love in which other affections perish, and 
 nothing in the wide world seems to matter so that one life lives 
 and is near. She understood now Dorotea Coronis as she had 
 not understood her on her first night in Eome : that was all. 
 
 The world often rails at this isolation and absorption of 
 passion as an egotism, but it is in truth its highest sublimity. 
 
 Love that remembers aught save the one beloved, may be 
 affection, but it is not love. 
 
 The name uttered before her in union with her lover's had 
 cut to her very soul. 
 
 It was to avoid this pain, this humiliation, this bitterness 
 which she could not resent, that she had shut herself in loneli- 
 ness here, letting the world that hked to chatter of her give 
 what motive it would to her solitude. 
 
FRIENDSniP. 377 
 
 Was it possible that in that world they still deemed him her 
 rival's ? 
 
 Her checks burned, her pulse throbbed high, as she paced to 
 and fro in the late, chilly day. How long was it to last, this 
 secrecy, this silence, this mystery ! She was everything to him, 
 and she seemed to be nothing. 
 
 She had accepted this position because it was of liis doing 
 and his choice, but she had been always impatient of it. To the 
 woman whose courage had been contemptuous and daring to a 
 fault, no sacrifice could have been so hard as this demand to 
 bear with a cowardice and mask a truth. 
 
 She had been shut in her solitude till she had forgotten how 
 the world went on : she remembered it with a shudder now. 
 
 Was it possible that in the world he still passed as the lover 
 of another ? 
 
 No : he was hers. That was enough. 
 
 She would not wrong him with a doubt. He had told her 
 such doubt was insult. 
 
 So she paced her lonely teiTaces in the red wintry afternoon, 
 and trusted him, and when his step was heard and his hand 
 touched hers, asked nothing more of him or heaven. 
 
 " When I am not there, she is alone and dreams of me," loris 
 said to himself, and that knowledge made him careless. 
 
 If her nature would have let her do so, it would have been 
 wiser to have had her painting room full of worshippers and her 
 hours full of pleasures and ambitions ; he would have been in- 
 secure and anxious to keep his power, and would have hastened 
 to cry to all others, " Stand off— she is mine ! " 
 
 For men are made so. 
 
 Moreover the complexities and contradictions of his own 
 nature were at war. He liked the very peril of his path ; he was 
 glad once more to steal unseen by moonlight to a tryst that none 
 could know. Long obliged to pass through a crowd under a 
 blare of trumpets to a mistress who loved her vanity far more 
 than he, this silence and this solitude was precious to him. 
 Silence and solitude are the twin divinities of love that guard its 
 portals while it dreams ; but the Lady Joan had detested them : 
 like the old sovereigns of Eome she thought no victory of worth 
 without its triumph moving down the public ways. He had 
 been bound so long behind her chariot, jaded and impatient of 
 the throngs that jeered, that the sweet sense of imperious 
 mastery both of the woman he loved, and of the secret of his 
 love, came to him with the delight of variety, the charm of 
 power. Etoile had seemed to him at first like Del Sarto's 
 Sebastian, with the palm and arrow, and uplifted eyes, looking 
 for higher things than earth can give. It was sweet to him to 
 bend the palm and break the arrow and make the eyes sink 
 earthward and see only his. 
 
378 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 In all the feverisli pangs of love there is none sharper than 
 that with which the woman, who is loved in secret, sees the life 
 that is her own passing in the crowd of the world amidst other 
 women, aloof from her, as a friend, as a stranger, whilst she 
 must hold her silence, and give and take from him the empty 
 phrases of ceremonial and custom ; for a little while it is sweet, 
 that contrast between solitude and society; that soft, secret 
 tie ; that tender complicity undreamed of by others ; for awhile 
 it is very sweet, but afterwards it grows into a fretting pain and 
 brings a sense of galling bitterness. 
 
 To Etoile the pain of it was doubly galling, because in all her 
 life she had never stooped to seem the thing she was not. 
 
 " Love loses its loveliness made public _; it is like the grapes, 
 once handled, the bloom is gone," he said to her, seeking to 
 reconcile her ; and it was a truth, but only true of love that 
 does not speak to any, out of supreme indifference to all except 
 itself ; not true of love that dares not avow itself, and tells a lie. 
 
 At other times he said to her, " Wait, dear, wait but a very 
 little more ; then all the world shall know that I — such as I am, 
 and most unworthy — am all yours." 
 
 And she loved him so well that the mere sound of his voice — 
 say what sophistry it would — was her paradise. 
 
 " She is nothing to you ? " she murmured to him that daj-, 
 and hid her face on his breast as she asked it, because the ques- 
 tion hurt her and seemed to her shameful. 
 
 " Do you dishonour me with the doubt ? " he said petulantly 
 and with anger ; and she asked his forgiveness. She was no*t 
 wise now, nor strong : she only loved him very greatly. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTER XLYI. 
 
 " Have I chosen the right way ? " the Lad}" Joan asked herself 
 again and again, with rage and fear at her heart. 
 
 She knew all that he did with his time now, being once on 
 the trace of his trespass ; she knew the honrs that he passed 
 with her rival ; she knew the way in which he spent evenings 
 for which he accounted to herself with a thousand specious 
 excuses. When these excuses were palmed off on her, she, 
 knowing the truth, felt at times as if she must strike him dead ; 
 but she held her peace staunchly, and smiled, and accepted 
 what he said. Was it the right way ? Sometimes she doiibted, 
 sometimes a spasm of dread seized her ; but she knew men and 
 their weakness and then* impulses ; her experience told her that 
 there was no other way half so sure. So she wore her mask. 
 
 It was an iron mask, and hurt her ; but she wore it staunchly, 
 never loosening it, however great the strain. She never let it 
 drop before any living creature, not even before plump Mimo, 
 from whom she had no secrets ; not even before her watchdog 
 who had put her on the trail. 
 
 " I cannot forgive myself for ever introducing poor lo to 
 Etoile ; she will end in entangling him ; she is clever and he is so 
 weak," she would say to the former ; and to the latter add, with 
 a smile, " lo comes to me every day to complain of that woman, 
 and her passion for him. I laugh at him for being so fatally 
 attractive. It does seem so absurd to us, dear — doesn't it ? — 
 that anybody can see a hero in lo ! Of course we are all of us 
 fond of him ; but lo will never set the Thames or the Tiber on 
 fire." 
 
 Marjory Scrope could only listen and feel a thrill of envious 
 wonder at her friend's coolness and skill. She herself could not 
 wear a mask like that ; she could only feebly imitate her greater 
 leader, and murmur in turn to Society : " Oh, no, we never see 
 her now ; we do not feel we could ; we have heard so very much. 
 . . . They say, too, that she pretends there is something wrong 
 between our good dear friend and loris. As if ice did not know ! 
 as if anybody could know as ice do ! So absurd, you know ; so 
 cruel ; so like a woman who errs herself, and judges every one by 
 her own errors. Oh, no, indeed, you need never fear meeting 
 her at our house ; we never see her now ; we should not receive 
 her." 
 
 So the three sisters brewed the sulphur fumes in their 
 
580 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 cauldron, and in that cauldron, as also in the Temple of All the 
 Virtues, the name of Etoile was daily sacrificed as a votive 
 ofifering to the kind gods of Calumny ; those gracious and just 
 gods who never frown when their priests are pleased or when 
 the baked meats are plenteous. 
 
 And Silverly Bell would shake his head, which he always 
 found more effective than words; shake his head and sigh 
 profoundly. 
 
 Society understood that the sigh meant all kinds of unmen- 
 tionable sin. 
 
 Of a woman who had ceased to receive, as Etoile had done, 
 who dwelt aloof from the world, and made it feel that it was 
 less to her than the grasses under her feet in the fields, Society 
 was always ready to believe anything. 
 
 " Oh, you noble imbecile ! Oh, you noble but most absolute 
 imbecile ! " thought Lady Cardiff, in a futile frenzy of irritation 
 at the seclusion of Etoile. " Why don't you understand ; why 
 don't you understand ? Have twenty lovers, and nobody'll say 
 anything ; but to have one .'.... It is a standing insolence to 
 all the rest of our sex. If you must have only one, and if that 
 one must be some one else's perjured Launcelot, there is only 
 one way for you to get yourself and Launcelot pardoned, and to 
 beat black-browed Guinevere out of the field and be victorious 
 — only one way : throw open your house, give dinners, go out 
 everywhere, smile on everybody, be en evidence everyday: make 
 Guinevere look a disagreeable, stingy, and shabby nobody beside 
 you ; then the world will go with you, most likely, and never 
 ask if you have only one lover or have twenty. But to shut 
 yourself up, and merely live for perjured Launcelot, and when 
 he is absent model clay, and paint on panels, what can the 
 world of women make of you when you do this ? You belong 
 to lusus naturai,ferai nature — unlike everything and everybody. 
 Of course they will stone you, as village bumpkins run out and 
 stone an odd stray bird that they have never seen before ; and 
 the more beautiful the plumage looks, the harder rain the 
 stones. If the bird were a sparrow the bumpkins would let 
 it be." 
 
 But Lady Cardiff could only think her thoughts, not utter 
 them, being too high-bred to interfere in any one's destiny 
 unasked, and could only say, when she heard the stones pelting 
 in Society : — 
 
 " Etoile ? Oh, dear, yes ; of course I know her ; of course I 
 go to her. Why not ? Everybody did ^o last year ; I should go 
 if nobody did. It is very uncommon, you know, to see a woman 
 who paints everything except her face, and who thinks Milton 
 and Sophocles better company than ourselves. Odd ? Yes, 
 ■very odd; that I grant, but interesting. An adventuress, is 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 381 
 
 she ? Ah, I didn't know it. Docs it matter ? I thought she 
 was a great artist. I may bo mistaken ! I am not mistaken ? 
 Then why an adventuress ? I do not quite understand. Same 
 thing, is it?" 
 
 And then Society winced imder Lady Cardiff's eyeglass and 
 her courtly smile; and, feeling that it looked foolish to her, 
 felt so. 
 
 But one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one 
 friend, or fifty, suflSce to stem the tide of enmity that is popular. 
 The world, as a rule, was always angered with a woman whom 
 it had crowned, and who did not care for it ; who valued a dead 
 poet or a living daffodil more highly than itself; and who shut 
 herself in a solitude that looked scornful, with her marbles and 
 her canvas. "When it found a weakness in her it shouted with 
 joy and rained its stones. It was sweet as the rotten apples in 
 Schiller's desk to the vulgar. 
 
 Her foe knew how to hold up rotten apples in the light and 
 vow she foiind them on her. The world believed. The world, 
 being made up of human beings, is very human; it believes 
 what it likes to believe. 
 
 loris knew it ; it angered him, but he let the sulphur fumes 
 rise and the echoes ring. 
 
 " It is always so with what they envy," he said to himself, 
 and it seemed to him that she was more his own — thrus isolated. 
 
 What were such calumnies ? A rain of arrows that would 
 be borne for his sake, as Sebastian bore them for the sake of 
 heaven. 
 
 "I am enough for her," he said ; and, when his conscience 
 smote him, thought, "It will be all clear some day when they 
 know all ; she does not heed it ; she is not like other women ; 
 the world is nothing to her. I am all." 
 
 Besides, the worst he did not know ; for the voice that raised 
 the echoes from the rocks was careful to call its worst in a 
 language that was unfamiliar to him. Past his ear when it was 
 strained to listen, the voice of the Lady Joan went down the 
 wind calling aloud on Calumny, but always calling in English ; 
 and Calumny that looked the other way when she herself was 
 sinning, and went by like a meek dog, mute, leaped up Uke a 
 mastiff at her call, and came foaming at the mouth. 
 
 For Lady Joan was a great administrator, and could manage 
 even Calumny : it never bit her, and, when she wished it, flew 
 on any foe she had. 
 
 The close of Carnival came, and the revels of the Veglione 
 with it — the Yeglione for so many years so dear to the soul of 
 the Lady Joan, with its noise and glare, its malice and mischief, 
 its shrieks and suppers, its travesty of mirth, its blasphemies of 
 love. 
 
382 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 It was a bitterly cold night, aud loris shivered as he left 
 Etoile when the ^twelfth hour struck and went out into the 
 frosty air. 
 
 " I have masses of correspondence to look into and answer 
 by dawn," he murmured as he kissed her, and left her there, 
 amidst her palms and ferns, her bronzes and casts, her unfinished 
 work in clay and on canvas. 
 
 Then, with reluctant stej) and sinking heart, he went down 
 into the heart of the city, to the gaslit and crowded vestibule of 
 the Apollo, thronging with black dominoes aud many-coloured 
 masquers, and up the stairs of the theatre to the ball that he 
 had gone to, year after year, on such nights as these, and, 
 opening the door of it, saw shining eyes through a vizard of 
 satin, and heard a voice shout with malicious glee : — 
 
 " Take me downstairs, lo, quickly ! I have changed my 
 rosette ; not a soul will know me." 
 
 He gave her his arm sullenly and silently. His thoughts 
 were back in the silent shadowy chambers where another woman, 
 in the pale light of her oil lamps, was putting the last touch to 
 his own bust in marble. 
 
 " Thus you seem always with me," had said Etoile as they 
 had parted ; and he had left her and had come to the opera- 
 ball. 
 
 He descended to the tumult and turmoil, to the fumes of 
 the wine and the smoke, to the screeching and whooping of 
 masks — to the old worn-out, stale, stupid roystering. 
 
 His comiDanion's hand clutched his arm tightly; her voice 
 jiierced his ear as she hissed her innuendoes to others, or 
 screamed the shrill whoop of the place. Year after year they 
 had passed through the same things. He was sick of it, he 
 loathed it, and loathed himself for coming to it; but Lady 
 Joan was triumphant. 
 
 She knew whence he had come ; and she said once to him, 
 "Poor dear lo! your head aches? That comes of sitting all 
 alone all your evening over those tiresome papers." He muttered 
 a vague assent, and did not notice the glance, like the flash 
 of sharp steel, that darted at him from the eyeholes of her 
 mask. 
 
 As he walked, deafened and weary and answering mechani- 
 cally all those who challenged or laughed, he was wondering to 
 himself why he had not had the courage to tell her the truth 
 that night in the old garden-paths of Fiordelisa — wondering why 
 he had not the courage now. 
 
 No one knew that she was here save her tried friends Mimo 
 and Guido, who were very sure to keep her secret. The world 
 supposed her still deep in crape and sorrow, safe in seclusion ; 
 and Mr. Challoner, who for once might not have condoned so 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 383 
 
 great an oflence to Society, was for the moment in Venice on 
 affairs connected with his shepherd's crook and flock. 
 
 This was the sort of merry scappata in whicli her most happy 
 temperament rejoiced, and gambolled as gambols a young 
 goat. 
 
 When she was tired of the boards below and of the yelling 
 throng and went upstairs to her niche in the third circle, she 
 was in the highest sj^irits, or at least appeared so. There were 
 none who knew her but her old friends. She ate her caviare 
 with a relish, and cried aloud : — 
 
 "Didn't you know that black domino that leaned against 
 this door, lo ? Oh, for shame ! I did. It was your Corinna — 
 Etoile ! " 
 
 loris grew very pale : he knew it was a lie, but the lie in- 
 furiated him. 
 
 " She here ! " he said bitterly. " What are you dreaming of? 
 That she is like yourself ? " 
 
 She controlled her rage with the wonderful strength that 
 self-interest and self-mastery had given her even in her wildest 
 fury. She laughed aloud. 
 
 " My dear lo, take care what you say ; she may poignard us 
 going out. Give me a sandwich. Etoile most certainly : why 
 not ? Come to watch you ! You cannot be adored by a Corinna 
 without being bored by it. Isn't she a Corinna? Wasn't 
 Corinna a Muse no better than she should be ? Guido, let us 
 drink to the Tenth Muse, who is not hke me ; the Tenth Muse 
 who adores lo, and who is watching at the door with a dagger, I 
 dare say ! " 
 
 And she laughed and emptied her glass. loris sat silent, his 
 arms folded, his head bent. 
 
 There were the other men present ; he could not speak ; it 
 seemed to him like profanation to even defend the woman who 
 was absent in such a place as this. 
 
 He saw nothing of the scene before him — of the black mask, 
 the glittering eyes, the glare of gas : he saw Etoile, in the white 
 serge of her working dress, with the drooping fronds of the 
 ferns behind her, and her hand on the marble moulded in his 
 likeness. 
 
 On the morrow Lady Joan said to her friends, with a frank 
 regret in her voice — 
 
 " Those men that went to the Veglione last night tell me 
 that Etoile was there, actually there, and following loris every- 
 where. Poor lo ! who only went because, as one of the club, he 
 was obliged to entertain. I feel such pain, I really do, that an 
 accidental rencontre with her in our house should have brought 
 about such a nuisance and scandal. And lo is such a gentle- 
 man, you know : all the old chivalrous ideas of honour ; he will 
 
384 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 not even allow that she is to blame, though it is quite too annoy- 
 ing for him. What a horrid noise, by the way, all those 
 masquers made going home! I could not sleep the least all 
 night for them — could you ? " 
 
 On the morrow, loris, with his eyes heavy and his head hot 
 from the stupid noisy tumult of the night, went and found 
 Etoile as he most cared to think of her, in her white working 
 dress, in her studio, amidst the marbles and the panels. 
 
 She looked to him, as compared with that other, like one 
 of her own cool, pale roses, beside a tumbled gas-lit red 
 camellia. 
 
 He siged as he looked. 
 
 She put her arms about his throat. 
 
 " What is there to make you sigh ? Tell me. If you would 
 only trust me — quite ! " 
 
 "I do trust you— entirely. I was only thinking what gross 
 and foolish beasts men are, and that to be loved by you one 
 ought to be (as a friend of yours once said) Petrarca at the 
 least." 
 
 " I do not want Petrarca : I want only you." 
 
 " You have me, my angel : such as I am." 
 
 She looked in his eyes with a hesitating fear. 
 
 " Wholly — always ? Are you sure ? " 
 
 " Wholly and always." 
 
 And he kissed her. 
 
 " That other is my weariness, my bane, my care," he 
 thought. "No more. That is truth before heaven. No 
 more." 
 
 No more ! But to be that is so much. 
 
 It is to be as the lichen on the tree, as the rust on the steel, 
 as the canker in the plant, as the mildew in the air. It is to 
 penetrate, to weaken, to obscure, to entangle, to destroy, in- 
 visibly, imperceptibly, but certainly with the certainty of 
 death. 
 
 Travellers in Western forests of virgin lands tell how 
 strange and sad a sight it is to see a tall and stately tree, in all 
 its pride of leaf and crown of blossoms, striving in vain to stretch 
 upward to air and light under the clasjoing, strangling masses 
 of its parasite creepers, that climb aloft on it and stifle it, 
 till it becomes no more than a mere leafless shaft, borne down by 
 what caresses it. 
 
 Whoever looks on a man's life strangled under the parasite of 
 a worn-out yet persistent passion sees the same sorrowful sight 
 as the wanderer in the Western wilds. The death of the tree in 
 the forest is like the moral death of the man who is held by 
 what he knows to be base. The tree strains upward, pines for 
 fresh air, and struggles beneath the enervating and paralysing 
 
FRIENDSniP. 385 
 
 thing it nourishes, but all in vain. Tho poisonous parasite 
 is the stronger. 
 
 The days and tho weeks went on now, and ho was not free, 
 though tho woman ho loved and deceived believed him to 
 bo so. 
 
 He thought that he did not deceive her, because that other 
 was to him, as he said, only his weariness, his bane, his ruin ; 
 because each touch of her rough hand had grown hurtful to 
 him; because each glitter of her watchful eyes mado him 
 nervous and restless ; because he only bore with her as a man 
 may bear with an adder about his wrist, because he fears its 
 mortal bite if he stir it. 
 
 " I am yours only," he said to Etoile, and deemed it no false- 
 hood, because all that there was in him of heart, and mind, 
 and soul, and tenderness, and passion — all were hers ; and to 
 that other he rendered only such sullen counterfeit of unwilling 
 and unreal emotions as were wrimg from him by her insistanco 
 and his hesitation. A passive obedience counts not as loyal 
 service. A forced assent means nothing. 
 
 So he told himself and bade his conscience be still when, 
 with a heavy sense of guilt, he sat beside his tyrant, and heard 
 her speak of future summers in his old home together, and bent 
 his reluctant head to the ardours of her greeting or her lingering 
 " Good-night." 
 
 Looking back over the waste of years since she had crossed 
 his path, he saw them strewn with lost time, lost talents, lost 
 hopes, lost honour, lost fortune — all lost by her or through her, 
 and gone for evermore. Yet she was like the adder on the wrist, 
 the parasite on the palm : he dared not stir, he could not reach 
 the light of heaven. She saw that well enough : she was no 
 longer blind. But she only drew closer round him, as the adder 
 round the wrist, as the creeper round the tree. 
 
 For her passions might be weak, but she was strong. 
 The earth was once more sweet with the honey-smell of the 
 golden tulips in the springing corn, and the darkness of the bay 
 and the laurel were starred all over with little white blossoms, 
 and springtime was here. 
 
 Lady Joan sat alone in her Turkish room. 
 It was dusky and heavy with the smell of stale smoke ; the 
 flowers brought there faded in it. She did not care for the 
 honey-smell of those cups of a gold she could not coin, and she 
 only liked the bay and the laurel because their berries fattened 
 the blackbirds for the market-stall. 
 It simplities life not to be a poet. 
 
 She sat in the Turkish room all alone, and her face was dark, 
 her eyes were clouded, her teeth were clenched. She knew how 
 he spent the hours absent from her, and he was absent now. 
 
 2c 
 
386 fBIENDSHIP. 
 
 She was Argus-eyed, and had as many ears as Yishnu. She 
 saw, heard, understood, all that moved him, all that he con- 
 cealed. She had borne it long and with the stern patience that 
 only the consciousness of a great aim could give. She meant to 
 have vengeance and Fiordelisa — both the two sides of the shield 
 that should hang up in the halls of her triumph. 
 
 She sat in the darkened room, and thought ; she was alone, 
 and she knew where he was. It seemed to her as if her patience 
 would burst its bonds, her vengeance outstrip her wisdom, her 
 heart break from her bosom : yet she was strong to keep silence. 
 Until he spoke she would not speak. 
 
 Time does so much and fate works so well for those who 
 know how to wait ere they strike. 
 
 The rvimble from the streets filled her ears ; stray lines of 
 sunshine shone in through the dusk of the room ; she thought of 
 him there, at the feet of Etoile, under the green palms where 
 
 the nightingales sang at eventide All these months ho 
 
 had fooled her thus ! 
 
 In her black garb, with a silver dagger run through her 
 dusky braids, with her stern lips close shut, and her eyes dark 
 and stormy as a tempestuous midnight, she looked a woman to 
 take a vengeance that should have rung through Europe: to 
 strike one blow, and see her lover dead, then sheathe the dagger 
 in her breast. 
 
 She looked so ; as she sat, her clenched hand resting on a 
 steel cuirass of old armour that lay near : her own namesake of 
 D'Arc had not had more bitter pui-pose on her brows ; a Cleopatra 
 infuriated had not had more foiled fierce passion in her gloomy 
 eyes. 
 
 Alas ! the age is an age of prose, and she was in unison with 
 her age. 
 
 The old armour but lay there to be sold to a collector 
 expected on the morrow, and she, instead of wrenching the 
 dagger from her hair, took out some letters. 
 
 " That will do," she muttered, much as lago said, " 'twill 
 serve." 
 
 In the many vicissitudes of her adventurous years she had 
 made many friends ; she had made one in especial very useful to 
 her. He was only a little common attorney, but he was a very 
 clever little attorney ; not at law, of which he had left the public 
 pursuit, though he kept its wisdom packed up in his brain, but 
 in speculation — vague and gorgeous speculation in distant 
 unseen places, in Southern or Western waters, whence it was 
 easy to return, with silver mines, and diamond fields, and lodes 
 of lead, and stories of savage princes with squalid palaces, but 
 with generous souls; a quite invaluable little attorney: always 
 sunning out above all to the Coral Isles that lie in the glow of 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 88t 
 
 the setting sun in the pellucid seas of the peaceful Pacific, and 
 running back again with romantic Marco Polo stories, and pro- 
 ducing any kind of prospectus to suit the money marts and 
 'clianges of all countries — a little attorney that she corresponded 
 "with, caressed, petted, almost loved, because he was so useful to 
 her, and called Theodore, with that pleasant touch of intimate 
 friendship which had characterised her since the earliest days 
 when all mankind first became her " brothers " under the 
 shadow of Mount Lebanon. 
 
 Her letters were from Theodore. 
 
 He was not in the Coral Isles in the pellucid seas, but in the 
 office that knew her so well in the foggy courts of the City of 
 London. He had brought a gigantic enterprise from the Coral 
 Isles — an enterprise that was only as yet an idea, as even a 
 leviathan at the commencement of its existence is an embryo. 
 
 Lady Joan loved ideas — when other people took them for 
 facts. 
 
 The idea was to run railways through all the Coral Isles, 
 and steamers between them ; at least, not indeed to run them, 
 because Theodore did not much think they would ever be 
 made, but to obtain the concession for making them, which is 
 all to which sensible people ever commit themselves. Theodore 
 had peculiar advantages in the Coral Isles ; he had, or said he 
 had, a few coral reefs, a few spice forests, a few sugar planta- 
 tions, a few whole islands even ; perhaps he had a few savage 
 wives also ; at any rate he had many royal savage friends in King 
 Ooo-too-ta, and King Fee-fi-fa, and King Ze-zoo-za, and all the 
 other dusky monarchs of the smiling seas. From Ooo-too-ta, 
 and Fee-fi-fa, and Ze-zoo-za he meant to get all he wanted ; and 
 the idea was already sown in many mercantile minds — soil in 
 which a very tiny seed springs up a giant pumpkin. 
 
 Concessions are not as slow-growing as coral. 
 
 It was of this that Theodore now wrote ; it was of this that 
 Lady Joan thought instead of the dagger. She was a woman 
 who was not conscious when she dropped from heroics to bathos. 
 She was a woman who even in the depths of her bathos might 
 look ridiculous, but yet never failed to strike home. 
 
 With a dagger one may easily fail ; but with her vengeance 
 in specie and speculation she never did. 
 
 She sat and studied the letters of Theodore and other letters 
 also : her brow was dark with wrath, and in her eyes was ever 
 and again a lightning flash. 
 
 The sheep that were sillier than swine were roaring like 
 wolves from whom meat has been snatched. The transfer did 
 not content them. The foreign workmen, English, Irish, and 
 German, were swearing bitter oaths down by the shores of the 
 Faro of Messina becai;se the new direction was about to employ 
 
388 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 native workmen; and tliese foolish, fierce, foreign creatures, 
 perhaps because they were in a land without beer or potatoes, 
 were roaring louder than wolves, and could not be quieted. 
 
 The roaring reached her ear through the means of her cor- 
 respondents. It solaced, it almost soothed her. She knew it 
 was almost madness to loris— loris, who would not see the 
 beauty and the excellence of the transfer; loris, who felt 
 remorse and cared for honour. 
 
 She put this and that together, her hand resting on the old 
 steel cuirass. 
 
 Far away in the south were these ravening wolves that he 
 thought it his duty to feed, because by his means they had come 
 where they starved ; further still in the Pacific were these coral 
 isles, with the spice forests, and the dusky kiogs, and the stores 
 of vague and virgin wealth. She had devised a bridge across 
 the waves of Messina : at a bound her imagination and her will 
 went wider afield, and threw a chain of connection from the 
 Sicilian shores to the coral reefs. 
 
 He should be told that the coral reefs should be made to 
 feed the ravening wolves. 
 
 He should go to the coral reefs. 
 
 Weaker women might have deemed it as easy to uproot the 
 dome of St. Peter's and bear it over the mountains. But she 
 quailed before no difficulties ; she had compassed harder things. 
 
 Having made Society accept herself, what was there too hard 
 for her ? 
 
 He should go to the coral reefs. 
 
 As the eagle lifted Ganymede in its talons and bore him 
 away, so should her mighty will uplift him in its claws and bear 
 him to far isles and distant shores. If he would ever return, 
 who knew, who cared? Shut in a secret drawer she had a 
 foolish scrawl that left her, in event of his death before her, 
 Fiordelisa. He had given the paper long ago; he had half- 
 forgotten it; he attached no import to it. To a man still young 
 Death seems so vague a word to play with, if it please a woman. 
 
 " He shall go," she said in her solitude, and her brow cleared. 
 Since here her rival was, and his new love, and his fresh passion, 
 and she saw no other means, from his own land he must depart. 
 She did not pause to ask how she would move him ; she had 
 done harder things. 
 
 She drew her pen and ink to her ; and wrote to her Theodore 
 in the dusky den. 
 
 " lo's health has broken down under the strain of all this 
 anxiety," she wrote in conclusion. " He is so harassed with his 
 wish to make it all up with the old shareholders. One cannot 
 quarrel with so noble, if exaggerated, a sense of duty. I think 
 your idea will be the very thing for him. I have not named it 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 389 
 
 to him yet. When the whole affair is quite ripe then wc will 
 act ; you will tell me. You had better come over ; your room is 
 all ready. The voyage with yovi will do him good, and, who 
 knows? Perhaps wo may all come there some day. I have 
 always wished to see those mango groves and those txirquoiso 
 seas ever since I read ' The Earl and the Doctor.' lo must 
 make money somehow ; he has spent too much on those howling 
 beasts whom he calls victims ; and I do very much fear, unless 
 we can help him with these projects of yours, that his pictures 
 will have to be sold, and his palace in the city, too, and heaven 
 only knows what else ! Come over, Theo, and be quick about it." 
 
 Then she signed " Joan," with a fine flourish. 
 
 What did she want with a dagger ? 
 
 Yet, the letter done, she sat sullen and gloomy whilst the sun 
 died off her casements. 
 
 Let vengeance be sweet as it will, it is never so sweet that 
 it can smother the acid and bitter of humiliation and betrayal. 
 
 She went out and posted her letters with her own hands, 
 like the wise woman she was, and then she made a series of visits 
 as the sun set. 
 
 " Go yourself if you please ; not I," said loris, with petulant 
 contempt, when he heard of this. He knew her Theodore as a 
 common, scheming, shrewd, and vulgar little person, who had 
 been distasteful to him, that was all. 
 
 '•■ Of course I said it in jest," she answered, being too wise 
 to throw her cards on the table. " The idea of my going ! The 
 idea of my being anywhere except at dear old Fiordelisa ! But, 
 jesting apart, amor mio, have you any conception, I wonder, of 
 how much you have thrown away on those workmen down by 
 the sea? I have been computing it all. I am afraid you will 
 have to do something — unpleasant. Would you like me to tell 
 you " 
 
 " Another time, another time," he said hastily. 
 
 " Very well," said Lady Joan, with the marvellous patience 
 to which she had braced herself. " Only don't blame me if you 
 drift into trouble, that's all. By the way, I want a gang of 
 eighty new men put on to work at those new vineyards. Money ? 
 You have money for those yelling brutes by the sea, but of 
 course you have no money for useful work at home. By the 
 way, lo, what do you think if oijr way of planting and irrigating 
 were tried in the Pacific? Theo tells me there are most astonish- 
 ing capacities for production in the soil out there, but all 
 wasted in bad management,'_as your lands were till I took them 
 in hand." 
 
 " Take the savage isles in hand, then," said loris, with some 
 roughness and contempt. 
 
 She laughed good-humourcdly. 
 
390 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " It's a long way to go, and Fiordelisa can't spare me yet," 
 she said. " I never loved any spot on earth as I love Fiordelisa. 
 How I long for April, to be living under the dear old roof once 
 more ; don't you ? " 
 
 loris was silent. 
 
 " Since Fiordelisa is mine " he began with hesitation. 
 
 " "What is yours is mine," she interrupted him, as she smiled 
 in his eyes. " Ah, yes, dear, I know ; it is good of you to say it 
 again, though ■ Hush ! Some one is coming." 
 
 It was Mr. Challoner who entered, his hands, as usual, filled 
 with papers and newspapers. 
 
 " This is a very fine idea about the Pacific," he said in his 
 most solemn manner. "It promises extraordinarily well. 
 
 Theodore always knows If one could get a capitalist 
 
 to take it up and issue the shares? A beautiful climate, a 
 delightful voyage, an interesting, unsophisticated people, a soil 
 that is the garden of the world " 
 
 " You are not writing the prospectus yet, Eobert," said his 
 wife drily. " I was asking lo if he would like the voyage. The 
 sea air might do him good ; he looks so very ill. Those ship- 
 wrights worry him so." 
 
 " I am almost inclined to go myself," said Mr. Challoner in 
 his usual spirit of self-sacrifice. "I believe there are very 
 beautiful varieties of ninfea to be found there, especially the 
 niiifea rubra." 
 
 " We'll all go some day," said the Lady Joan, with her happy 
 decisiveness; "some day between vintage and spring time, so 
 as not to lose much of Fiordelisa." 
 
 loris stood between them in the familiar chamber that he had 
 so long frequented, that stifled him between its stuff-draped 
 walls, and the courage was wanting in him, though so strong 
 the longing, to cry to them both, " Let my future be quit of you ; 
 stand off ! Let me be ruined, but let me at least be free ! " 
 
 He stood silent, his head bent, his colour changing, as his 
 desire strained against the weakness of his will. 
 
 She flashed a glance at him from her keen eyes and read his 
 soul as though he spoke his thoughts. In years bygone she 
 would have burst into tempestuous reproach, into mad rage ; 
 but grown prudent with peril and cold in caution, she kept her 
 patience still. 
 
 " We will all go together," she said, with her frank and 
 cheerful smile. " You shall go for your water-lilies, Eobert, and 
 I for coral, and lo for a fortune. And we will bring the lilies, 
 and the coral, and the fortune all back to Fiordelisa, and be 
 hai^pier than ever ! " 
 
 Mr. Challoner smiled benignly as far as ever he could bo 
 said to smile. 
 
 i 
 
FlilENDSITIP. 891 
 
 "We will go for the innfe'i. and the coral certainly if you 
 like, my love," he said amiably. " As for the fortune, loris must 
 please himself. Wo havo no right to persuade him or even 
 suggest to him; he is his own master; we arc only his friends." 
 
 There was no one listening to be impressed by it ; but Mr. 
 Challoner never dropped the stage toga and the stage tones even 
 in the privacy of intimate friendship. 
 
 The Lady Joan went out and paid more visits. 
 
 " Theodore — you remember Theodore White ? " she said to 
 several people. " He was staying with us at Fiordelisa two 
 years ago, and in the winter too. You know he has vast influence 
 in the Pacific ; yes, in all those wondrous tropical spicy isles we 
 read about and feel never to believe in ; he saved some savage 
 king's life there; and he has great possessions there; and, 
 indeed, he has a very fine idea : nothing less than to create a 
 network of steam communication from isle to isle; in time it 
 will make them quite a sea-confederation. Theodore has great 
 talent at combination. Would you like to be in it, anybody ? 
 Well, I will tell you all about it, then, when I hear more. Theo 
 will come over before he goes back to the Pacific. I fancy the 
 scheme will interest lo. If it would only help him! Alas! 
 yes, he has spent so much maintaining all those foreign navvies 
 and shipwrights ; nobody else would have done it ; but he has 
 such a noble sense of honour, and is always ready to sacrifice 
 himself. Poor lo! Eeally, if my husband did not restrain 
 him a little he would ruin himself in a week. Mr. Challoner is 
 always very generous, too, but he is more practical than poor 
 lo. Wouldn't you like to see those coral islands and all the 
 dear primitive, unsophisticated, childlike people? I should." 
 
 And she spoke thus in many different ways, in many suitable 
 places, being a woman who always had the right regard for 
 appearances, and knowing that when a vulture soars away with 
 prey in its talons it should always look like an eagle — or a 
 guardian angel — if possible. 
 
 When many people were around them, she would jest and 
 jeer at him. 
 
 " lo ? " she would cry. " Oh, lo is to be made immortal in 
 the Paris Salon, so they say. What a fine thing for him that he 
 should have charmed a Muse ! Look at him : he is quite 
 ashamed of all his glories. He is quite thankless, you see. Do 
 you go to Etoile's atelier ? No ? She lets no one in, they say ; 
 is that true? Well, I suiDpose she has her reasons. But they 
 tell me if you do go you will see lo as Sordello — lo in all kinds 
 of studies and of casts. What it is to be enamoured of him ! It 
 must be quite delightful to be so much in love. I wish I could 
 be, but I never was." 
 
 And then she would laugh frankly and show her handsome 
 teeth. 
 
382 FRIENDSBIP. 
 
 " Poor Id does not like it — man's ingratitude ! We call him 
 Sordello ; it plagues him so ; he works himself into quite a rage 
 when I chaff him about his conquest." 
 
 TheUj with a touching regret and modesty, she would change 
 her tone and lower her voice and say : 
 
 " It is most painful, really, to us. We never thought we were 
 preparing such distressing scenes for him when we asked her 
 here ; he is so gentle and so trustful, one is always afraid he 
 may fall into her hands at last. Oh, no, we never see her. My 
 husband would not allow me; of course one always concedes 
 a great deal to genius. But still — and, after all, who knows 
 if it be genius ? Some say it is only borrowed plumes. Yes, I 
 am very sorry that she came to Eome." 
 
 Then she would take her mourning crape out of the throng of 
 matrons and spinsters to whom she had thus spoken, and go 
 away with a candid, cheerful smile, pointing to loris standing 
 aloof : — 
 
 " Look at ' Sordello ! ' How pensive he is, and how bored he 
 looks ! Ho must feel all the conspicuous unpleasantness of being 
 a celebrity — vicariously ! Do go to her atelier and see if you can 
 see the picture. But I believe she won't let you in ; she has 
 grown quite sauvage, they say. What a thing it is to have a 
 grand passion ! Especially an unreturned one." 
 
 And she laughed so cheerily and contemptuously that Society 
 never noticed that she drew the man she laughed at after her 
 black skirts, and took him home with her. 
 
 " Very well done, very well done indeed ; a little overdone, 
 perhaps, a little over-acted, but clever, undeniably clever," said 
 Lady Cardiff, hearing and watching the same sort of speech and 
 the same sort of sneer half a score of times in as many different 
 houses. But Society was not as clear-sighted ; Society thought 
 that Lady Joan was always outspoken and frank, and was very 
 naturally and very properly impatient of foolish sentiments to 
 which she was herself too wise to stoop ; and Mr. Silverly Bell 
 murmured, with a sigh, as he shook his head : — 
 
 " A woman that is all 7nind cannot understand the vagaries of 
 unjustifiable passions. Talk to Joan Challoner of love ! she docs 
 not know what you mean, not she ! She is all mind." 
 
 Thus she was not idle, nor were her echoes idle either, in this 
 tedious time of enforced seclusion, when she could trail her 
 skirts thi'ough no cotillons and launch her cascade of confetti 
 from no Carnival break, but could only go decorously to clergy- 
 men's breakfasts and spinsters' tea-fights, and could only solace 
 herself at home with guitar and cigars, with private purchases 
 and public companies, with Fiordelisa and friendship. 
 
 " Some one should tell Etoile," said Lady Cardiff to Vera von 
 Eegonwalde. 
 
FBIENDSHIP. 893 
 
 " Tell Etoile ? Who should tell her ? "We have not her con- 
 fideuce ; we do not even know what she and loris are, or are not, 
 to one another." 
 
 " Some one should tell her," said Lady Cardiff, having for the 
 fiftieth time heard the scoff and the sneer and the slander of 
 Etoile's enemy. 
 
 " It would be very difficult," said Princess Vera, 
 
 " Difficult, perhaps, and I never meddle. Yet it is infamous 
 that she should be jeered at by that black-browed audacity and 
 not know it. It is true she tells us nothing, but I am sure that 
 loris has entangled her without disentangling himself. It is 
 what I foresaw he would do. It is of no use regretting, but it is 
 melancholy. It is always women like that who sufier. Those 
 people with fine brains and with generous souls will never learn 
 that life is after all only a game — a game which will go to the 
 shrewdest player and the coolest. They never see this ; not 
 they ; they are caught on the edge of great passions, and swept 
 away by them. They cling to their affections like commanders 
 to sinking ships, and go down with them. They put their whole 
 heart into the hands of others, who only laugh and wring out 
 their lifeblood. They take all things too vitally in earnest. Life 
 is to them a wonderful, passionate, pathetic, terrible thing that the 
 gods of love and of death shape for them. They do not see that 
 coolness and craft, and the tact to seize accident, and the wari- 
 ness to obtain advantage, do in reality far more in hewing out a 
 successful future than all the gods of Greek or Gentile. They 
 are very unwise. It is of no use to break their hearts for the 
 world ; they will not change it. Le culte de Vlmmanite is the one 
 of all others which will leave despair as its harvest. Laugh like 
 Eabelais, smile like Montaigne ; that is the way to take the 
 world. It only puts to death its Sebastians, and makes its 
 Shelleys not sorrowful to see the boat is filling." 
 
 " The boat shall not fill for her if I can help it," said Princess 
 Vera. " I will try and tell her something." 
 
594 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 CHAPTEE XLVII. 
 
 loBis left their house that day, after the discussion on the coral 
 and the ninfea, and went home to his own. 
 
 Her portrait looked no longer on him from the wall ; he had 
 removed it, giving her as the pretest that to have it hung there 
 hurt her good name. In its stead hung a brown saint on a gold 
 ground of some old tender and sombre Umbrian painter. 
 
 But he always looked up to the place on the wall, and felt 
 the fierce eyes upon him, though they were there no more. 
 
 The golden balls on the orange boughs swayed against the 
 open casement ; there was a soft blue sky siTch as Eaffaelle loved ; 
 birds were singing. Spring had come. 
 
 He sat down and leaned his head on his arms. He felt 
 ashamed and contrite, stung with remorse and conscious of cow- 
 ardice ; weighed down, too, beneath a burden of obligation and 
 of irrevocable errors. A shudder ran through him ; he felt ex- 
 hausted with a sickly sense of fatigue. 
 
 He knew very well that he was ruined, or would be so in a 
 very little space. It unnerved him, and kept him mute and 
 irresolute. It is easy to deride riches, but they give us a supreme 
 ease and force which without them are hard to attain. To hear 
 her parcelling out the years to come, seizing and mortgaging his 
 future, made him feel as the garrotted slave may have felt wben, 
 bound and helpless, he heard Nero and Locusta talk before him 
 of how they would torture his living body, and of when and 
 where. 
 
 There were masses of unopened correspondence before him ; 
 he turned from them with reluctance and aversion ; at this hour 
 he was wont to be with Etoile, his hand ruffling the hair above 
 her brows, his eyes watching her with a smile. 
 
 In the pain and depression of the moment his heart almost 
 hardened against her. 
 
 " She should not have listened to me," he thought, with love's 
 captious ingratitude. " I am not what she thinks me ; I never 
 shall be." 
 
 Why had he not left the Muse aloof in the coldness of art ? 
 Why had he brought her mortal pains and joys ? His conscience 
 reproached him, and his remorse made him capricious and 
 unjust. 
 
 " Why did she trust me, why does she place her faith in me ? " 
 he thought. " If she only knew me as I am ! " 
 
FBIEND8HIP. 395 
 
 And then all his heart went out to her in an ineffable tender- 
 ness. 
 
 He thought of all he had seen and heard in Paris, of her 
 works and the strength that was in them, and the many talents 
 that the world wondered at, and the grace and the colour of all 
 things that she did, and the coldness that men blamed in her, 
 hurt by her neglect ; and to him she was timid as the doe ; at a 
 word he could make her heart flutter in her breast ; against him 
 she had no more strength than has a flower in the hand that 
 holds it. 
 
 Yet almost he wished he had never loved her, nor she him. 
 
 Suddenly the door of his chamber opened, and in the ruddy 
 glow of the light from the setting sun he saw her. 
 
 He rose appalled by the look on her face, and knowing that 
 to bring her to his house there must have been some great and 
 sudden cause at work. 
 
 Her hair was ruffled above her eyes that were dark and wet ; 
 her lips were very pale. She came hurriedly towards him ; her 
 hands trembled as they touched him. 
 
 " I have come; perhaps I have done wrong ; I could not wait 
 for your coming to me. They make a by-word of my name in 
 that house of hers, I hear, and they say you stand by silent. Is 
 it true ? It cannot be true. Yoii are not a coward." 
 
 His conscience made the word smite like a sword ; he grew 
 as pale as she. 
 
 " Is this your faith ? " he said inevasion, and he put her hands 
 away as if in anger. 
 
 " It cannot be true," she murmured. " In society I hear (it 
 is a common jest) that she says foul things of me, and that you 
 listen; that you let her speak ill of me; that you deny — 
 deny " 
 
 " Deny what ? " 
 
 " What we are to one another." 
 
 " No one knows what we are to one another ; is it not the 
 charm of our love ? Who has said this thing to you ? " 
 
 "A woman who is my friend, yours too; she has heard it 
 some time ; at last she told me. My beloved — it is not true ? " 
 
 " What is not true ? " said loris with impatience and con- 
 fusion. " I cannot understand what you mean. Where have 
 your beautiful calmness and lucidity gone ? It is unUke you to 
 tilt at windmills, to split straws." 
 
 "1 do not. But can it be true that you — you! — let her 
 calumniate me ? " 
 
 He moved angi-ily and looked away at the sun setting behind 
 his orange trees. 
 
 His conscience stung him bitterly, and he took refuge in 
 affected indignation and sternness. 
 
396 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 " How should I know what she says or what she does ? 
 What is her house more than any other house ? I was never 
 her keeper." 
 
 Her lips parted; she would have spoken, but he saw his 
 advantage in his anger, and so pursued it. 
 
 "Is this your trust in me? A moment's idle gossip fropi 
 some fool, and you believe me capable of any baseness." 
 
 " You swore to me not to go to her, yet you were_with her in 
 Paris." 
 
 She spoke very low, under her breath, but the unmeant re- 
 proach struck him like a scourge. 
 
 " I was with her in Paris. Yes. I avowed it to you, I my- 
 self ; I told you I had sinned, and you forgave the sin. "What is 
 forgiveness worth if its ghost rise in reproach like this ? You 
 have said I am a coward " 
 
 " I said you were not." 
 
 " You said it so as to mean I was one. What has come to 
 you, whom have you been hearkening to ? Is it you who speak of 
 me with strangers, with dolts, and idiots and slanderers ? You ? 
 Can I help what is said in her house ? She hates you because 
 I love you. Can you complain of that ? She has a bitter tongue, 
 and is a bitter foe ; I told you so long since. I cannot help her 
 saying what she chooses. In Paris I struck two men because 
 they spoke of you too lightly ; I cannot strike her : she is a 
 woman. A woman unsexed, if you will, but still a woman ; she 
 must say what she will." 
 
 " But you must leave her." 
 
 She spoke very low, but her voice was firm ; her eyes shone 
 through their mist with a strong, steadfast light. 
 
 " You live in solitude until you dream these things. You are 
 too much alone," he said, with that manlike inconsistency which 
 turns the obedience it has commanded into a fault and makes of 
 it a reproach. " Why do you not go into the world as you did 
 when I met you ? It would be better — wiser far. It would keeji 
 you from these brooding fancies." 
 
 " When you are not with me I am best alone," she answered 
 him ; " you know that so well. Besides — besides, I cannot risk 
 seeing you beside her ; I could not bear it." 
 
 He looked past her out to where the golden fruit of his garden 
 hung in the dusky light. 
 
 "What folly !" he said uneasily. "You are everything to 
 me, she is nothing. Is not that enough ? " 
 
 " The world thinks me nothing. It thinks her everything ! " 
 
 " You are perverse," said her lover irritably, and his colour 
 changed. 
 
 " I have left her in every sense that you can mean. Do you 
 think — can you think — for one moment that you need be jealous 
 of hei- ? " 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 397 
 
 "Jealous!" 
 
 She echoed the word in an infinite scorn. It seemed to lower 
 her to the level of the woman they spoke of, to sink her all at 
 onco to the intrigues and baseness of low thoughts and of gross 
 passions. Jealous ! — she ! — who had found him in his captivity 
 and learned from him to disdain the tyrant who chained him 
 in it! 
 
 " I do not think that I am jealous," she said coldly. " That 
 is not the word to use between us. Can I be jealous of what so 
 long ago you told me was a weariness and a shame to you ? No, 
 it is not that." 
 
 " It is that," he said, with a passing amusement in her pain. 
 " Yes. You are jealous, my proud one. But you need not be. 
 I cannot break with her, just yet, entirely — as a friend, I mean — 
 not yet, because of all the meshes that hold me, all that she 
 knows of, all we are embarked in — I have told you so. As for 
 her calumny, how can I tell what she may say ? She speaks in 
 her own tongue ; it passes me as the wind does. What spirit has 
 changed you that you become like other women, all at once, and 
 stoop to their low level and listen to the chatter of the world ? I 
 thought you never would have wronged me so. It is not worthy 
 of you, What, you, my Muse, a listener to babbling, drivelling 
 rumour-mongers ! Oh, for shame I " 
 
 A faint smile came on her face ; she looked at him, and all her 
 love was in the look. 
 
 " Dear, if you give your word it is enough for me." 
 
 His eyes did not meet hers. 
 
 " I have given it. Let it be enough." 
 
 A spasm of doubt ached through her heart, but she was 
 silent. 
 
 " Forgive me," she murmured, after a pause. " I did not think, 
 indeed,, that you could hear any ill of me and be mute— and ill 
 from her ! — but yet the mere thought hurt me so. Forgive me 
 that I did you any wrong." 
 
 " I forgive," he murmured — he who had done the wrong — and 
 kissed her. 
 
 For the first time she shrank a little from him. 
 
 " Wait," she said wearily. " Does she not know the truth 
 yet?" 
 
 " No. I never speak of you ; it is best so — yet — for a little 
 longer." 
 
 " It is always— a little longer." 
 
 " Were I not half-ruined, it should be to-night." 
 
 " How can she help or hinder you ? " 
 
 " The woman that is forsaken is an enemy : she will be the 
 bitterest the world ever saw." 
 
 Etoile raised herself and looked at him once more. She was 
 still very pale. 
 
398 FEIENDSEIP. 
 
 " But you will forbid her to go to Fiordelisa ? That at least 
 — for me." 
 
 He was silent. 
 
 A certain resolve and imperious will, that he had never seen 
 there, which if he had seen it oftener might have saved himself 
 and her, came on her face as she gazed at him. 
 
 " You will keep her from Fiordelisa, if you love me — now." 
 
 " I will. That I swear to you," 
 
 He spoke hastily, but he spoke with resolution. 
 
 Then, having his word, she went away from his house which 
 she scarcely ever entered, and in which she always stayed unwill- 
 ingly, because it seemed to her, like Fiordelisa, desecrated and 
 usurped by the memory of a dead base passion. 
 
 When she passed out into the red evening light two dusky 
 figures were hastening by on the other side of the street ; they 
 were the sisters from the Forum Trajani. 
 
 " There are her watchdogs," he muttered. " They have seen 
 you. Yov^should not have come. I should have been with you 
 ere the sun set." 
 
 He bowed to her ceremoniously, standing with uncovered 
 head. Her horses bore her away through the red glow towards 
 her home. 
 
 The watchdog hurried to the Casa Challoner. 
 
 " I have proof positive, dearest, now ! " that admirable crea- 
 ture cried, " She came out of his house— owi of it — ^we both saw 
 her — five minutes since ! " 
 
 The eyes of the Lady Joan grew cold. 
 
 " I know it, dear," she answered tranquilly. " She is always 
 going to his house. What can lo do more than show her out 
 again ? He is a gentleman and too gentle-hearted, else he might 
 do something roughter." 
 
 " But it is disgraceful ! " 
 
 " Oh, yes ; but what can one expect? " 
 
 "It is disgraceful!" 
 
 And the watchdog's back was up and its teeth set — in the 
 interests of moraUty, of course ; nothing more. 
 
 Lady Joan smiled still, coldly. 
 
 " Poor lo ! he ivould think a Paris Corinna a Tenth Muse, and 
 an innocent recreation, and he gets his punishment ! It is really 
 hard on him though to be so persecuted, just because he made 
 himself a little pleasant in my house to a stranger. You know 
 lo's pretty manner, dear ; you know it means nothing." 
 
 Marjory did know — had known, to her cost. She sighed a 
 little, and was silent. 
 
 "Will you not speak to him? "she said hesitatingly. "It 
 is really so disgraceful ! " 
 
 Lady Joan laughed outright 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 399 
 
 " Speak to him ? Not I ! What is it to me ? It serves him 
 right ; he would play with edged tools. All that matters to you 
 and me, dear, is not to know Etoile ; and we don't know her. 
 Let lo take 'lare of himself; if he have got into any trouble 
 through imprudence." 
 
 Then she went out into society, and said much the same 
 thing — more cautiously, or more slightingly, as her prudence 
 told her was best. She did not go out very much, being still 
 ostensibly in deep grief, but she saw a very large number of 
 persons, and to most of them contrived to say, " Etoile ? Oh, 
 yes, I don't know her this winter — I do not like to know her, 
 you see, after all my poor father told me. Great genius ? Oh, 
 yes ! that, of course, though it is odd she paints nothing here. 
 But I believe she is in love with our poor friend loris — yes, 
 loris, that you so often see about our house — she took a fancy 
 to him, meeting him two or three times, and has left him no 
 l^eace ever since. We laiigh at him very much. It makes him 
 so angry, because really he never thought twice about her. But 
 ai'tists are always like that." 
 
 So she would say, with a broad smile and a frank laugh, a 
 hundred times a week, and going homeward, casting off her 
 mask, would lock herself in lier own chamber, and weep, and 
 rave, and moan in all the fury and the feebleness of a woman 
 that knows herself betrayed and forsaken. 
 
 But she was stubbornly brave and coldly wise. The fit over, 
 the storm passed ; she picked up the mask and put it on again ; 
 and when she saw loris still met him as though she knew 
 nothing, and was full of eagerness and news about the brood 
 mares at Fiordelisa and the coral of the South Sea Isles. 
 
 Meanwhile Etoile paced up and down her old grey terraces 
 under the evening skies with a bitter sense of Inimiliation and of 
 bewilderment; though passion had bound its bands upon her 
 eyes and kept them so long closed, she had seen prevarication 
 and trouble upon his face as he had listened to her, and had not 
 seen the frank, firm indignation of a man wrongfully accused. 
 
 For calumny she cared nothing. 
 
 It was like a hot wind, bringing sand and pestilence, no 
 doubt, but she had never heeded it ; she had kept the doors of 
 the house of her life closed against it, and had always thought 
 that it had only power to harm the feeble. But calumny that 
 he had stood by and heard ! — that hi;rt her like a blow ; nor for 
 itself, but to think that he could let it pass unpunished, that 
 he could let the woman he despised utter it unrebuked. 
 
 A sudden consciousness fell on her with a heavy weight of 
 pain that all unwillingly she had failed to loosen the bauds 
 about his fate, and had only bound the chains about her own ; 
 failed, as high natures and dreamful lives so often fail where 
 the harder, shrewder, meaner temper aims aright, and conquers. 
 
400 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 She looked at her canvas and her marble and smiled very 
 wearily. 
 
 " Any fool had been wiser than I ! " she thought, and her 
 heart ached with sad derision of itself. 
 
 CHAPTER XL VIII. 
 
 Between them from that day there fell a certain shadow of 
 restraint. 
 It began — 
 
 " That drifting slow apart, 
 All unresisted, unrestrained, 
 Wiiicli comes to some when they have gained 
 
 The dear endeavour of their soul 
 As two light skilTs that sailed together, 
 Through days and nights of tranquil weather, 
 
 Adown some inland stream might be 
 Drifted asunder each from each, 
 When, floating with the tide, they reach 
 
 The hoped-for end, the promised goal, 
 The sudden glory of the sea." 
 
 In him the consciousness of error was a daily burden ; into 
 her the anguish of doubt had entered like an injected poison. 
 When they met there was a name they could not speak; a 
 memory they strove in vain to exorcise. Uneasily he affected a 
 serenity he could not command ; vainly she tried to show a faith 
 she could not feel. The restlessness of conscious disloyalty was 
 in him ; the restlessness of perpetual apprehension was with her. 
 The infiaite charm of perfect freedom and of perfect faith was 
 gone. He knew that he was not wholly true, and she feared it. 
 
 " I am a coward in her eyes ! " he thought ; and the thought 
 stung him because of the truth there was in it ; and he felt 
 angered against her because she had been courageous always, 
 and could not comprehend the hesitations and vacillations of his 
 nature which unnerved him and kept him halting and mute 
 before his tyrant. To say the truth simply because the truth it 
 was, seemed to her so easy, and to him so hard. 
 
 "You do not understand," he would say to her irritably; 
 and she would be silent, wishing not to wound him; and so "the 
 riit within the lute " was made, and its music became mute. 
 
FBIENDSniP. 401 
 
 Circo brewed her simples and changed men into swine. His 
 destroyer was no sorceress, but she had a brntalisiug and ener- 
 vating power, as every grosser nature lias when once it fastens 
 on what is at once loftier, yet weaker, than itself. 
 
 He would leave Etoile vowing to himself to see his tyrant no 
 more, to let her take lands, and repute, and everything she chose 
 from him, but to force her to leave him free. Then that all- 
 l^ervading, all-destroying influence that was in his life, as tho 
 smell of the camphor-wood in the chamber, would seek him out, 
 and environ him, and emasculate him, and he would be once 
 more untrue to his fairest faith, and once more heartsick of him- 
 self and of the woman who mastered him, and ashamed before 
 himself and before the woman that he loved. 
 
 " She shall never go to my home again " — so he had vowed ; 
 yet as the spring stole on and the old ways were trodden by her 
 with sure feet, and she laughed and talked of Fiordelisa and the 
 summer and the future, his nerves seemed paralysed ; he kept 
 silent. 
 
 What more did she want? Nothing. 
 
 Silence gives consent. 
 
 Feebler women would have read his aversion in his glance, 
 known his desire from his absence, understood his reluctance 
 from his silence, but she cared for none of these things. She 
 knew all that they meant, but she had shaped her course and 
 abided by it. Long before, hanging her cashmere in his 
 entrance-hall, she had resolved to stay there for ever and aye. 
 Should so mere a reed as his own wish combat the stubborn 
 steel of her will 1 Never ! 
 
 He was silent, and she took her course. 
 
 Great is the power of stubbornness, and greater yet that of 
 violence. 
 
 Love shall fail, honour shall droop, manliness shall cower, 
 dignity and uprightness shall perish, but these powers shall 
 endure and conquer ; the powers of tho brazen brow and of tho 
 brazen tongue. 
 
 " You are above me ; why did you ever stoop to me ? " he 
 muttered once to Etoile, and felt the thing he said. 
 
 He hated the lower life, the grosser aims, the coarser 
 thoughts, the looser creeds, of the other life that had been so 
 long by his ; and yet the higher in its turn oppressed and 
 troubled him. 
 
 " You are like the edelweiss : one must climb so high to 
 grasp you," he said, smiling; yet though he smiled he felt a 
 sense of strain upon him, and of an atmosphere too clear for 
 eyes long used to the mistier air of lower levels. 
 
 In the first hours of all passion there is a supreme exaltation 
 which sustains and intoxicates; but, these hours passed, tho 
 
 2d 
 
402 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 force of habit and of old association reassert tliemselves, and, if 
 they be of gross fibre, will draw grossly downward the nature 
 which temporarily escaped them. 
 
 With Etoile he had been hapj)ier than he had ever been in 
 all his years ; but had she been a lower woman than she was, 
 she would have kept him more constant, more content, and, 
 measuring the forces against her better, would better have 
 defeated them. 
 
 As it was she loved him, gave all to him, trusted him, and 
 lost him — perhaps by her own fault. She thought it her 
 own fault always. Who does not that loves ? 
 
 Once more the flowers grew thick in the grassy ways ; the 
 grape-blossom was once more on the vine, and once more the 
 Campagna was a tossing sea of flowers, with white acacia for 
 the foam. Shut in her gardens of Eocaldi, Etoile left the world 
 to say of her what it might, what it would ; and in the warmth 
 and the oppression of the city her rival, warier, wiser, colder, 
 and more cautious, smiled on the world and said : — 
 
 " I shall soon be at Fiordelisa ; my husband is so fond of 
 Fiordelisa : we all are. Yes, I have saved it for poor lo — really 
 I may say I have saved it. It is so pleasant to be of use to a 
 friend." 
 
 The world cast a stone at the shut gates of Eocaldi ; it 
 nodded cheerfully to the open gates of Fiordelisa. The world 
 does not like to be ignored ; and it never forgives a closed door. 
 Lady Joan knew that well, and she threw her doors open. 
 
 " Look how frank and careless she is ! As if there could be 
 any sin in a woman so candid as that ! " said the world iu 
 return for her concession ; but of Etoile, aloof, indifferent, going 
 by with mute disdain and absent thoughts, it was willing to 
 believe any evil. Why not? She did nothing to amuse it ; she 
 did not even pay it the compliment of fear. 
 
 Meanwhile, as the keen grey eyes of his tyrant flashed in the 
 eyes of that yet harder tyrant, the world, and her clear, ringing, 
 rough tones cried twenty times a day to Society, " We are going 
 to Fiordelisa — yes ! — you must all come to Fiordelisa," the heart 
 of loris as he heard sank as a stone sinks under the waves. 
 
 At any hesitation, any anxiety, any interrogation from her, 
 he would have hurled the truth at her and have let her do her 
 worst; but in the cool assumption of right as a matter of course 
 there lies an irresistible power; it makes a conqueror of the 
 mortal, as of the nation, that knows aright all its force. 
 
 She never gave him the chance of any moment of doubt in 
 her own perfect title ; she spoke, she wrote, she worked, she 
 schemed, she planned, she projohesied, sweeping all the future 
 into the measure of her sight, as one conscious of a kingdom 
 that no enemy could invade nor any accident diminish. 
 
FRIENDSHir. 403 
 
 In its small way it was an almost superb insolence of pos- 
 session ; in her own heart she was on fire with rage, thrilled 
 through and through with dread, and knew that any instant 
 her tliroue might fall and her exile might begin, but she never 
 let one sign of this knowledge ever escape her. 
 
 Hour on hour, day after day, she smiled steadily at him, and 
 at the world, and said : — 
 
 " Fiordelisa ! dear Fiordelisa ! yes, we are going there. We 
 think we shall winter there; we mean to live and die there. It 
 is a dear old i^lace." 
 
 " She knew all that he did, every hour that he spent else- 
 where, every letter that was written to him ; she found means 
 to know everything, being once on the track of his infidelity ; 
 but no single sign of all she knew ever escaped her ; she had 
 even self-command enough to hold her peace and never reproach 
 him for his absence, never upbraid him for his coldness, but go 
 on steadily in her old ways, with her scales and her stud-book, 
 her ledgers and her steam-engines, her noisy economies and her 
 showy extravagances. 
 
 Love ? She knew its feebleness well. It will burst through 
 a tempest and break down a wall of ice, but against the dull, 
 impenetrable, common-place sand-heap of a changeless routine 
 it falls back powerless as the lofty, impetuous waves of the sea 
 fall back from the massed earth of a level dyke. 
 
 The waves fret themselves in vain : the dyke conquers. 
 In her own strange way she still loved him ; in her own 
 sullen way she now hated him ; but hate and love both subsided 
 before her resolve to keep her hold on his life and on Fiordelisa. 
 Besides, it was a form of vengeance : the widest and the heaviest 
 vengeance she could take ; and even in her fury she was shrewd 
 and wise. 
 
 So the oxen began to drag the household gods once more 
 towards the old grey walls on the hillside, and once more she 
 began to prepare for her summer sojourn ; and loris, hearing 
 and knowing, felt his heart stand still as he remembered that 
 he had sworn that no more should she ever dwell under his 
 dead mother's desecrated roof. 
 
 " That at least, if you love me ! " had said Etoile. And he 
 loved her ; yet ho stood by and saw the oxen go, the exodus 
 begin. 
 
 "My wife!" he murmured to Etoile, still with his arms 
 about her, when once more the nightingales began their song ; 
 and in all honesty he meant still to vindicate her honour to the 
 world, and give her all ho had to give in answer for her sacrifice 
 to him of peace, and fame, and use, and art. 
 
 But meanwhile the wife of another pursued her shameless 
 and guilty way, and went across his threshold and sat by his 
 
404 FRIENDSHIP, 
 
 hearth, and laughed, and claimed his future. And the courage 
 •was lacking in him that was needed to thrust her from his 
 doors ; and the courage was also lacking in him to lift w^ before 
 the world as his nearest and dearest the life that through him 
 the world had calumniated. 
 
 For the courage thus needed was of another fibre than that 
 which faces the duel and fears no battle. 
 
 Though there were many times when he longed to let the 
 world know how he, and he alone, had had power to " break the 
 nautilus shell" and make a captive of what other men had 
 found beyond their reach, there were other times when the base, 
 noxious vapours of slander found their way to him and stifled 
 his higher resolves. He never doubted that they were more 
 than vapour; but he knew that such vapour is the world's 
 breath, and he had not courage to thrust his hand down the 
 dragon's throat and tear out its pestilential tongue. 
 
 The triumph of being beloved by a woman whom the world 
 had crowned, was precious to him ; but the courage of being 
 true to a woman whom the world also slandered, was not in his 
 nature. 
 
 Morning, noon, and night, wherever he went, wherever he 
 moved, wherever a group was gathered together, or a dispute of 
 voices fell on his ear, she whose interest it was to divorce him 
 from Etoile contrived, with her many echoes, that he should 
 perpetually hear some innuendo, some falsehood, some foulness 
 set afloat by her, and living the lusty life that a lie does live in 
 common with other blatant poisonous things. He knew that 
 lies they were, and yet he recoiled from meeting them with an 
 open scorn, a fierce denial. His love had always been rather 
 triumph than tenderness. Love that is chiefly triumph is 
 usually captious and exacting, and apt to quarrel with the very 
 food it craves. 
 
 So he hesitated, so he waited, so he trusted to chance to cut 
 the knots into which his fate had entangled itself, and he forgot 
 that chance only favours those strong enough to compel it. And 
 meantime he let the bronzed, frank face of his destroyer smile 
 wp to his, and let her fierce voice cry unchallenged : — 
 
 " We go to Fiordelisa ! " 
 
 He did not mean to let her go ; with the hand of Etoile in 
 his he dreamed of another life for his old home ; but meantime 
 the moments and the hours and the days slipped away, and ho 
 only reached a double infidelity, a dual treason, and began to 
 turn uneasily from the clear gaze of the eyes he had kissed into 
 blindness. Perhaps no crime, no sin, no fault, no folly, brings 
 so much woe as does the one terrible error of irresohition. 
 
 It is an acid that eats away all the gold of life, imperceptibly 
 but surely, till we are left with empty hands, quite beggared ; 
 and only know our loss when to know it is all too late. 
 
FItlENDSniP. 403 
 
 loris stood irresolute, -n-ith strong force of desire but no 
 strong force of action, wisliing, -R-aiting, playing witli liis fate; 
 and fate fell on him and crushed him, as it always crushes those 
 ■who do not seize and make it bless tliem. 
 
 Then came one hot and sickly day, when, though it was in 
 springtime, tliero wero dearth and sickness iu the heavy grey- 
 ness of the air. 
 
 Etoile stood alone in her studio. 
 
 The Sordcllo remained still incomplete, but ])ure and brilliant 
 in its colour, as though it had been conceived in Venice in days 
 of the Republic and the Eenaissance. There were other studies ; 
 there were casts in clay ; there was a head in marble— they all 
 had the same features. 
 
 " My beloved, you have made me a woman, but you have 
 killed me as an artist," she said half-aloud as she looked on 
 them, too true an artist not to know her loss, and that her art 
 was now not vision but only remembrance. 
 
 Her eyes were wet as she looked. 
 
 The loss of the power of fancy to the artist, is like the loss 
 of its wings to the bird. 
 
 She walked restlessly to and fro the stones of the floor. 
 
 Once — was it yesterday, or was it a score of years away ? — 
 she had flown to her work, when the day broke, with such 
 strong joy in it that she never felt physical fatigue or solitude 
 or any flight of time. Now— she only listened for one step. 
 When she heard it not, the long, j)ale, weary day seemed cold 
 as death, empty as a rifled grave. 
 
 This day he had not come ; it had passed and gone without 
 one moment that recorded joy or use : she was ashamed at her own 
 apathy and feebleness, but they were stronger than she : she 
 could not strive against them ; she felt an unspeakable depres- 
 sion and foreboding that deepened as the days wore on. Why 
 would he not speak? Why would he not be true? Together 
 they were happy— yes ; but behind them, like a sullen shadow, 
 always stood the memory of that fierce and furious passion that 
 was betrayed. 
 
 "HI told her the truth ? " she thought ; and then her heart 
 misgave her, and she was afraid the mere thought had been 
 disloyal to him, as if doubtful of his good faith. 
 
 It was not for her to speak when he kept silent ; and yet 
 
 _ She felt humiliated and stung with a sense of outrage, to 
 tliink that he would not rise and say of herself, " This is where 
 my love lies now, and all my trust and honour." 
 
 Now and then, seeing far off in a street crowd or at a 
 chamber window the face of her foe, she had felt a sickening 
 thrill of pain ; not jealousy, as he thought ; not jealousy ; who 
 can be jealous of what they know is scorned ? — but some such 
 
406 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 imioetuoiis hatred and disgust that she ^voiild have felt at seeing 
 a snake wind up about his limbs, and she, herself, doomed to 
 look on the while, and powerless to stir. 
 
 He did not understand that ; he only thought her jealous. 
 Men see but a little way into the hearts of women. 
 
 When he sat at her feet, and leaned his head on her knees, 
 he thought he understood her, because he did only too fatally 
 understand that he was the master of her life, the single thought 
 of her entire existence ; but he did not understand her aright, 
 because he thought the feeling which moved her against her 
 foe was the mere restless jealousy of her sex, whereas it was the 
 far deeper, and far more noble, hatred of the nature that was 
 true and bold for the nature that was false and base. 
 
 " If she had ever loved you truly once I could have forgiven 
 her from my heart, even if she had killed me," she had said to 
 him. 
 
 He had smiled and kissed her, but he had not understood. 
 
 He had thought it a mere pretty poetic exaggeration of 
 words. He had said to himself that no women ever forgive each 
 other to whom the same lover is dear. 
 
 This day he did not come ; the morrow passed, and he was 
 still absent. It was grey, heavy, sickly weather, that not even 
 the outburst of blossom and flower could beautify. She counted 
 the hours till her heart grew sick. 
 
 The nightingales began their earliest notes in the palms at 
 evening ; she closed the casements against the song ; she could 
 not bear to hear it — alone. It seemed to her that the time grew 
 very long, that his silence lasted till it became dishonour to 
 them both. 
 
 " If I were to tell her ? " she thought again and again ; and 
 still the thought seemed to her to be a base one, to be like a 
 betrayal of him ; and she rejected it, and felt ashamed of it. 
 
 Another day came and there was no word of him. She 
 wrote, and then tore up all she wrote, being unwilling to seem 
 to imitate the exactions and the persecutions of her rival. "With 
 her he should be always free. 
 
 She would not cage her nightingale. 
 
 The sun was low and red, the air was dull ; she walked 
 through the blue flag lilies that once more filled the grass, and 
 her heart was sick with foreboding. 
 
 It seemed to her that any fool would have been wiser than 
 she had been. 
 
 He was not changed ; when with her he was passionate and 
 tender as when the blue lilies had bloomed in the year before, 
 but she had learned that cruel truth which all women who 
 themselves love greatly do learn, that a victorious love is not as 
 eager nor as suppliant as a love that hopes yet fears. 
 
FlilENDSIIIR 407 
 
 Slio had had no strength, and with him she should have been 
 very strong. 
 
 From her terraces she could see in the distance the old grey 
 towers of Fiordclisa amidst the dark cypress and ilex woods of 
 its hillside. Slic looked at the dusky clouds that she knew were 
 those of his own woods, and she felt comforted. 
 
 "There at least she will never go," she thought; "and when 
 he forbids her Fiordelisa, she will know the rest." 
 
 And she plucked one of the azure irises and put it in tlio 
 white folds of her dress. Just so had he set one there last year, 
 and he would surely come, she thought, this evening. 
 
 She walked to and fro, while the sun sank out of sight, and 
 the mists of the falling night hid Fiordelisa from her. 
 
 A servant brought her a message — one of those brief messages 
 that flash the woe of a life in a few curt, bald words. 
 
 The message told her that her old home in Paris had, by an 
 accident, been burned to the ground ; nothing saved from it but 
 her own bust by Clesinger ; and, since misfortunes never come 
 alone, there were other tidings that a man of business in 
 Belgium who had conducted her affau's had robbed her and 
 fled. 
 
 Her iirst thought was of lor is. 
 
 "Will he mind very much?" she thought. It made her 
 much poorer. She stood awhile with the message in her hand, 
 thinking always of him. 
 
 Her old treasures had been dear to her, and the things of 
 her art dearer still, and the place had been full of them, but it 
 was only of him that she thought. She awoke as from a trance 
 and saw the servant waiting there. 
 
 " Tell them to get the horses," she said quickly. It was 
 evening ; in ten minutes more it would be night. She threw 
 some black laces around her head, and when the horses were 
 ready drove down into Rome. 
 
 It was already dark. 
 
 To tell her lover was her first impulse; to do what he 
 thought best ; also not to let him for one moment deem her 
 richer than she was. 
 
 A woman who is the mistress of a great fame is never alto- 
 gether poor; but she had lost much that she had saved; she had 
 little left save the power of her hand. 
 
 The horses flew on through the dark, down into the heart of 
 Home, to the banks of the river, where the lamps were all lit, and 
 lights were gliding to and fro on the bridges. 
 
 loris was not at his house. 
 
 She asked where he had gone— the first time that she had 
 ever asked a question respecting him. The man, who knew a 
 little and guessed more, and hated the woman for whom for 
 
408 FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 many years be had had to do so much unpaid service^ threw his 
 hands towards the stars and laughed. 
 
 " Where should he be, madama mia, but at the Casa Challo- 
 ner ? He came in with milady about five o'clock and they went 
 out together." 
 
 Etoile said nothing; she leaned back on the cushions pale 
 riiid cold ; she felt as if the speaker had stabbed her. 
 
 " To the Casa Challoner/' she said, in a cold, clear voice to 
 /;er coachman. 
 
 The servant standing in the doorway heard and was fright- 
 cncd; the horses trotted onwards towards the Corso in the moon- 
 light and gaslight and the deep shadows of Eome. 
 
 All memory of the losses that had befallen her faded out of 
 her mind; all she was conscious of was that he was there — 
 there ! — with all his oaths forsworn. 
 
 A very sickness of disgust came on her ; the fierce steel-Iikc 
 eyes, the smoke-tainted lij^s, the twanging guitar, the large firm 
 hands, the loud rough laugh, all that he abhorred, rose before 
 her, in imagination, till all her blood leaped to a scornful hatred 
 she had never known ; and the deep blue of the skies above her 
 seemed to her full of fire. She had lost much, she had been 
 robbed, half-ruined; what of that? She forgot it. She only 
 remembered that her lover was faithless. 
 
 It was one of those moments for which the world blames women 
 bitterly, yet for which they are not to blame, for in their pain 
 they are scarce conscious what they do, and are driven on by sheer 
 swift instincts that they have no i^ower to control. 
 
 To go there, to find him there, to cast the truth down between 
 them and see which he would cleave to, to fling at her foe all the 
 scorn, all the disdain, all the knowledge kept down so long in 
 silence— this one impulse alone governed her as she let her horses 
 trot through the still night towards the Temple of the Virtues. 
 
 In the moonlight, before the doorway of the house, there were 
 two waggons with teams of low grey oxen, and the waggons were 
 piled high. There was a pause and some altercation, the waggons 
 stopped the way. 
 
 " We are loading them with milady's boxes and other things," 
 the servant of the house said to her coachman. " We all go vip 
 to Fiordelisa to-morrow. Docs your mistress wish to call at this 
 time of night? Well, I do not know; I can ask. There is 
 aiobody up there but the Prince loris." 
 
 Then the man laughed, as servants laugh at such things in 
 Italy, and signed the oxen back, and went into the doorway. 
 
 " Drive away ! " said Etoile ; then she stopped her horses 
 again in a by-street and descended from the carriage, and walked 
 on alone under the stars. 
 
 The coarse laugh of the serviug-mau had checked the impulse 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 409 
 
 that had brought hcv to this place; she felt hcart-.sick with 
 sljaino ; ho was there — he ! lier own, her idol, her treasure that 
 outweighed the world ; — ho was there, at the feet of the woman 
 he had renounced. 
 
 Even in that moment of bitterest anguish she did not deceive 
 herself; she knew well that nothing that need move her to 
 jealousy drove him there, but only the hesitation of tempera- 
 ment, the ]}abit of dominion, the dread of a virago's rage. But 
 all the courage of her own nature leaped uj) in scorn. He loved 
 her, yet he had spent the starry hours of the early night in 
 reluctant submission to the unholy bonds he had abjured, in 
 cowardly counterfeit of a passion ho had renounced, despised, 
 and lived to loathe. 
 
 And her rival was to go to Fiordelisa ! 
 
 The insult entered her very soul like iron. 
 She was to go to Fiordelisa, this woman whom he had forsaken 
 and contemned ; to live in his home, to be near him all the sum- 
 mer through, to reign there at her will! The outrage of it 
 seemed to her past all endurance. 
 
 If the woman ho had renounced were to be thus allowed to 
 rule him, what was she herself? less than the very dust in his 
 eyes, surely, or never would he thus insult her. 
 
 In the moment of that intense pain, that intense humiliation, 
 Etoile lost her serenity, her patience, her long-suffering tenderness 
 for him. She felt fooled and dishonoured. For the first time 
 since she had felt his lips touch hers she thought of herself and 
 not of him. 
 
 Such moments of profound self-abasement come to all w];o 
 have loved too well. She had been jiroud and loyal and of infinite 
 truthfulness and faith ; she felt betrayed and stung beyond 
 endurance. 
 
 She walked up and down in the clear moonlight that had 
 succeeded to the grey and oppressive day. She had utterly for- 
 gotten the losses that had fallen on her. The dark and quiet 
 corner where the house of her foe stood, was quite deserted now. 
 The oxen had gone away, and their loads with them. The arched 
 doors stood open. The porter had also gone down the street. 
 The lamj^s gleamed in the entrance. The casements above were 
 all lighted ; there came from them the echo of a guitar and the 
 sound of a voice humming amorous songs of the populace. 
 
 Etoile stood in the moonlight, v/ithout, by the open doors and 
 hesitated. If she were to find them together, and fling the truth 
 down between them like a gaunlet ? . . . . Would it be freedom 
 for him ; or would it bo merely vengeance, a vulgar vengeance, 
 worthy of her foe, and not of her ? 
 
 She stood by the door in the shadow, swayed now by one 
 impulse, and now by another; yielding at one moment to the 
 
410 FBIENDSEIP. 
 
 natural, common instinct of a passion that was wrougcd, 
 restrained at the other by the liigher temper of a love that 
 shrank from base contention of its rights. 
 
 The night was very still ; there was no one near ; above the 
 steep overhanging walls the stars shone. On the stillness the 
 thrnm and thrill of the guitar struck clearly from the chambers 
 above; then even that ceased. On the silence she heard a little 
 laugh, and then a murmuring voice ; the laugh was her rival's; 
 the voice was his. 
 
 She shuddered and moved from the threshold, and felt de- 
 famed, and dishonoured. 
 
 He could laugh there ;— he ! who had said to her, " Make me 
 what you think me, what you wish me ;- — —I am yours ! " 
 
 She walked up and down the stones of tlic little square before 
 the doors that still stood open, yet she did not enter : it seemed 
 to her so vile, so poor a thing to do ; the house was cursed, 
 the very air of it was hateful ; she, who had all right and title 
 of a great and loyal love, could not stoop to dispute him, as an 
 avaricious wanton disjiutes her prey. Yet she could not tear 
 herself from the place. The very silence that had followed on 
 the song and the laugh enthralled her with a horrible sorcery. 
 
 He was there — faithless to both. 
 
 Eleven o'clock struck ; the hours had fled uncounted by her. 
 Her horses waited out of sight ; the shadow of some passer-by 
 fell now and then across the white breadths of the moonlight ; 
 she did not notice it, nor hear the step. 
 
 A heavy sense of bitter humiliation oppressed her, and under 
 it burned the smouldering tires of her scorn. She wandered and 
 waited there alone, as though she were the guilty wife, the wanton 
 paramour ; and above, laughing and singing, was that craven sin 
 the world forgave as friendship ! — a sin so craven, that not even 
 to itself could it be true. 
 
 She did not reason ; she only felt heart-sick, outraged, indig- 
 nant, humbled, stung to a delirious pain. 
 
 Suddenly in the stillness there came the jarring sound of a 
 closing door : she was near the house ; out of it she saw loris 
 pass into the moonlight. 
 
 The porter, returning hastily from his wineshop, hurried in 
 and drew the bolts and bars for the night's safety ; loris came 
 leisurely forward along the pavement, in the shadow of the walls ; 
 then he saw her, and paused, with a cry, half of pleasure, half 
 of anger. 
 
 " Dear, what has happened ? " he murmured hurriedly, and 
 cast a glance around, and saw that there was no one near, and 
 would have taken her hands ; but she thrust him quickly from 
 her, and gazed up in his face, the whiteness of her skirts trailing 
 on the dusty stones, the stars shining above them. 
 
FniENDSIIlP. 411 
 
 " Is tin's liow you keep fiiiith to mo? " she said, and her voice 
 was very low. 
 
 His face changed ; he took refngc in anger. 
 
 "Is this how yon watch me? what arc yon doing here, alone, 
 at such an hour? Are you waiting for me? I will not have you 
 wait so." 
 
 " You let her go to your home, to-morrow ? " 
 
 lie was silent. 
 
 " You let her go ? Is it true ? " 
 
 He made no answer; he was very pale; ho strove to take her 
 hands again. 
 
 " You are excited and angry ; you are unlike yourself ; how 
 do you come in the streets at such an hour ? where are your 
 servants ? Do you do it to watch me? I will not be watched ; I 
 have had enough of that elsewhere, and too mucli. "Why are 
 you here ? Answer me. I do not understand ; I will not be 
 watched. If you want to upbraid me " 
 
 He spoke with all the petulance, the offended waywardness, 
 that took a grace in him like that of a spoiled proud child; he 
 was stung by his own conscience, and impatient that he had 
 been seen where all the manhood in him told him that it was 
 against all manliness to go. 
 
 " I would not upbraid you," said Etoile, her voice still very 
 low and broken. "Come a little farther— farther from that 
 house." 
 
 He walked beside her down the shadow of the street, till 
 they were in the white breadth of the moon-rays once more. 
 
 " Are you going to lay in wait for me any night that I am 
 not with you ? " he said, with a sombre irritation, more affected 
 than real ; " I fancied I was free from such things as that, with 
 you ; you have said you trust me ; what is trust, if it doubt 
 every act, if it measure every moment. I have had too much 
 of this from another. " 
 
 " Have you had too miich, since you still go to that other? " 
 
 " Oh, you would reproach me ! you are like other women 
 after all ; after all you are no higher than they are ; you suspect ; 
 you accuse." 
 
 " I suspect nothing ; I see you coming from her house ; you 
 cannot deny that she is to live in your own home, even now after 
 your promise?" 
 
 " I made no promise," 
 
 " No promise ! " 
 
 He was silent, the colour faded from his face. 
 
 "I asked you for ixaticnce," he muttered a little later, "I 
 asked you to trust me and to wait; yes, I promised; but one is 
 not master of one's self. She is nothing to me : cannot that content 
 you ? " 
 
412 FItlENDSEIP. 
 
 " No ! " 
 
 She threw the laces off her head, and the moon-rays shone in 
 her wet eyes as they gazed into his. 
 
 " Dear, I am tired ! are you angry ? cannot yon understand ? 
 I am not of marble or of clay ; I am only a woman that loves 
 yon, and that yon love. How can I bear it day after day, to 
 know myself first with you, yet live as though I were nothing 
 to you before the world, and see you in the world's sight pass 
 as hers ? Oh, my love ! my love ! I have had patience, I have 
 kept silence, till my heart is half broken ; do you know anything 
 of what I suffer, when I see you by her, when I hear your voice 
 in her chamber, as I heard to-night ? Do you know ? I think 
 you cannot. It is not that I am jealous as you think, it is that 
 I am ashamed." 
 
 " Yozi ashamed ! " he muttered, and Ms pale cheek grew red. 
 
 " Yes, I am ashamed ! ashamed of my own feebleness, of my 
 own lack of power, of my own incompetency to save you from 
 the lower life that holds you. Ah, you cannot understand! 
 What use are fame, and praise and power : I have to give place 
 to her!" 
 
 All the immeasurable scorn that there was in her launched 
 itself out in that one word. 
 
 He moved uneasily, and looked away. 
 
 " You do not know what you say," he muttered. " You are 
 feverish and agitated ; let us go from here. To-morrow " 
 
 " To-morrow she goes to Fiordelisa." 
 
 He was silent. 
 
 " Does she go to Fiordelisa ? " 
 
 He was silent. 
 
 She laughed a laugh that chilled and terrified him, unlike 
 any he had ever heard upon her lips. 
 
 "And you bewailed your slavery to me in almost the iir.st 
 hours that we met ! What use was that, since you live on in it 
 by choice; what use to wake my pity, to come to me and 
 lament ? . . . . Who is blinded ? who is betrayed ? who is 
 befooled ? Is it she ? or is it I? What have you meant of all 
 that you have said ? Was all your pain a falsehood ? " 
 
 Every word entered his soul, as thorns into a wound ; his 
 conscience smote him bitterly, but for that very cause his anger 
 rose. 
 
 " You insult me ! perhaps I merit it. Who can know what 
 to do, where two women claim every moment, and watch every 
 word ? I lead the life of a hound ! Falsehood ? yes, without 
 liberty there is always falsehood. But you leave me no more 
 freedom than she does." 
 
 " I leave you all freedom ; are you not free to go to her ? " 
 
 The blood beat in her temples, the stars swam before her 
 
FBIEND8IIIP. 413 
 
 eyes; intense bitterness, intense humiliation, intense anguisli, 
 Avcrc all at war in her; she scarcely knew what she said. 
 
 " Are you not free to go to her? " she repeated, " free to drng 
 my name through the dust for her diversion ; free to let me be 
 mocked and slandered by her, you silent all the while ? " 
 
 " She never names you." 
 
 " That is untrue. She taunts me with au unanswered love, 
 and you stand by and let the shameful lie be said." 
 
 " If you choose to believe the lies of others " 
 
 Her unwonted passion broke into a low sob. 
 
 " Oh, my love, whom would I believe against you ? Not all 
 the world. But can you say to me on your honour that she 
 knows the truth ? " 
 
 " No," he said with a fierce roughness most uncommon in 
 him, "No, she does not know the truth. I have not told her. 
 I am a coward. You have been pleased to say so." 
 
 She made no answer. 
 
 She would have sooner heard him tell her she must die. 
 
 " It is the temple of lies," he said bitterly, with a backward 
 gesture of contempt towards the house that stood in the gloom 
 liehind them. " I have lived amongst them till they are part of 
 me. What docs she know ? She knows nothing. If she could 
 tell that I had even kissed your lips she would kill me." 
 
 " Are you afraid ? " 
 
 She turned and looked at him with a cold disdain that hurt 
 him more than all her rival's wildest savagery of wrath. 
 
 " You insult me ! " he said under his breath ; and his eyes 
 grew sombre and full of fire, but they wandered from her own. 
 
 Suddenly she took his hands and held them in her own 
 against her breast. 
 
 " My beloved, I will ask your forgiveness for such insult on 
 my knees if you will tell me, with your eyes on mine, that you 
 will go back to that house now and tell her all. All !— before 
 another hour goes." 
 
 She felt his heart beat quickly. 
 
 He looked on the ground and not at her. 
 
 " You are but a woman like the rest," he said w-ith evasive 
 irritation. " It is not my love you want ; it is triumph over a 
 rival." 
 
 She dropped his hands and turned away from him. After all 
 the hours of their perfect love, was this all that he knew of her ! 
 
 " Go to her," she said as she put him from her with a 
 gesture. " Go to her : it is she who is fit mate for you — not I ! " 
 
 The words severed them, as steel cuts the skein of life in 
 twain for ever. 
 
 The moonlight fell betw'ccn them in a chill, pale space of 
 joyless light. 
 
414 FBIEND8HIP. 
 
 Not looking back once she went away from him into the 
 shadow where her horses were waiting. 
 
 He stood like a man who has had a mortalblow, but keeps 
 erect from pride. 
 
 He did not follow her. 
 
 Their lives were divided for ever, as the chill moonlight 
 severed their shadows. 
 
 A casement above, a stone's throw off in the gloom, closed 
 quietly, and behind it, in the darkness, another woman laughed 
 to herself — well content. 
 
 All things come to those who know how to wait. She had 
 only had to wait, in patience and darkness, without seeming to 
 stir a hand, and the end she desired had come. 
 
 To hold without mercy, and to be deaf and blind to all that 
 told her the truth: this had been her strength, and it had 
 conquered. 
 
 With the morrow to Fiordelisa ! 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX. 
 
 That night Etoile wrote the truth to her. 
 
 When she had told it, she wrote on : — 
 
 " You need fear me no more ; he and I are parted, so you 
 naay listen to me for a moment. You are stronger tlian I ; you 
 have known how to keep him against his will, and how to ruin 
 his strength and his peace and his fortunes ; will you not have 
 pity now ? Pity on him. He does not love you ; he was weary 
 of you so long, long ago. When I met him first, his captivity 
 was bitter and dreary to him ; you must see this — if you would 
 see it — in a hundred signs and ways. I now ask you to set him 
 free. Not for me. I swear to you that we can never again bo 
 anything to one another, because there is the black pit of a cruel 
 lie set like a gulf between him and me. I only ask you for his 
 sake. What is the life you lead him? A life joyless, galliug, 
 jaded, tmworthy of manhood, robbed of all effort and all hope. 
 You hurt his honour, you stain his name, you make him a 
 byword and a jest. You call this friendship — to the world. I 
 tell you that it is the basest and most cruel passion that ever fed 
 its vanity on the ruin of another soul. I have surrendered him, 
 and I will never claim him if you will set him free— free to find 
 purer faiths and happier tics than mine or yours ; free to bo ablo 
 
FBIENDSniP. 415 
 
 to look his future iii the face and feel it his own — not mine nor 
 yours. What can I say to yon ? liow can I move you ? You are 
 a base woman, and you have never loved him in any noble sense 
 of love one hour ; but, sacrifice me as you like, jest at mc, jeer 
 at me, drag my name in the dust, do anything you will of 
 vengeance on me, — only set him free." 
 
 The tears fell from her eyes and scorched and blurred the 
 paper. 
 
 Then she tore it up and burnt it. 
 
 What use was it to cry to the dead wall, to beat the gates of 
 brass ? Sooner will the wall hear, sooner will the brass melt, 
 than the heart of a cruel woman have pity. 
 
 CHAPTEK L. 
 
 It is five o'clock on a summer afternoon at Fiordelisa. 
 
 In the old grey court there is the tinkle of teacups, the smell 
 of cigar smoke, the sounds of a guitar ; the red bignonia on the 
 south wall is all aglow with blossom; the peacock is strutting 
 amongst the long grass ; the bees are humming above the straw- 
 berry flowers. Lady Joan is laughing and singing and thrum- 
 ming the chords of the guitar : she is lying back on a low 
 cane chair ; she feels happy. 
 
 Peoj^le have been lunching with her, a few good decorous 
 people who are now strolling about in and out the cortile and 
 gardens one with another ; amidst them Mr. Silverly Bell is mur- 
 muring to Mrs. Macscrip : — 
 
 " Oh, yes : it is quite an old story now, but only too true, un- 
 fortunately, only too true." 
 
 " What really? That she lay in wait for him after mid- 
 night?" 
 
 " Ah, quite true ! and by dear Lady Joan's house, too, 
 making such a scandal ! As if Lady Joan had anything — any- 
 thing — of an incorrect interest in her friend." 
 
 " Shameful ! " echoes a chorus of the small gentilities and 
 the free-born republicans, the consuls' wives and the bankers' 
 daughters. 
 
 " And she tried to stab him, didn't she, with a dagger out of 
 her studio ? " cries that sprightly lady, Mrs. Henry V. Clams, 
 plucking some heliotrope. 
 
 Mr. Silverly Bell sighs and is pained. 
 
 " Oh, no, that is exaggerated— at least I trust it is exaggerated. 
 
416 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 loris is such a gentleman, he never says a word ; it is difficult to 
 know the truth, but some j^eoiile were ])assing and saw, it seems ; 
 .... it is very painful. I used to like her, I really did at one 
 time like her. Yes ! she has a charm of manner ; yes, imtil one 
 
 knows But no character, you know, and no capital ! 
 
 .... I believe she has had great losses ; that she wanted loris 
 that nigbt to assist her in some great money trouble, but that 
 kind of thing only makes it very much Avorse." 
 
 " Very much worse," says Mrs. Macscrip ; " myself I never 
 will know artists; I am thankful that I did not infringe on my 
 rule for her." 
 
 " You may be so, indeed ! " says Mr. Silverly Bell, and he 
 sighs. 
 
 " My ! she arn't hard up for money ; that I'll bet some." says 
 ]\Irs. Henry V. Clams, casting cake to the peacock. " She's took 
 Eocaldi to shut herself up in for good and all, and she won't sell 
 that queer picture Sordello, though they'd give her long chalks 
 for it if she would." 
 
 Mr. Silverly Bell sighs again, and as he stoops over the 
 daisies, murmurs — 
 
 " Infatuation— aberration ! " 
 
 "You don't call on her never now?" asks Mrs. Henry V. 
 Clams. 
 
 Mr. Silverly Bell feels his silvery hair rise erect from his 
 head. 
 
 ' ' Call ! Call ? My dear madam ! " 
 
 " You are so almighty virtuous, Mr. Bell, you'd have saved 
 Sodom and changed Lot into salt," cries that giddy soul with a 
 fine Scriptural confusion of memories. "Alberto, bring the 
 break round, and go and get my shawl." 
 
 " Dear Mr. Bell feels as we all do," said Miss Marjory Scrope- 
 Stair. " Any friend of dear Joan's must hold htr as an enemy : 
 and any friend of poor lo's also. Besides, any woman must feel 
 skocked and grieved. Why is talent always allied to a deficient 
 moral character ? " 
 
 No one replies to this general interrogation, but Mrs. Henry 
 V. Clams clinches the matter. 
 
 " She's a downright silly not to give it all the go-by, and run 
 back and lark around in her own Paris. Nobody can't ever 
 
 understand artists though, they're that queer Eiddle-me- 
 
 ree and double acrostics is nothing to 'em. Is Alberto gone to 
 get that drag ? " 
 
 Meanwhile loris hears what the Lady Joan is saying. 
 
 Some one has asked her if she stays the summer here, and 
 she answers, with a smile : — 
 
 " Oh, yes ; you know I have so much to do here ; they would 
 miss me so. I even think we shall winter here. It is so much 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 417 
 
 ^^•a^me^ than the city, and we are all so happy together. Besides, 
 you know, poor lo is ruined, or very nearly. We shall help him 
 if we live here ; you know how great my husband's friendship is 
 for him, and mine too. We mind no sacri6ce for a friend. I am 
 going to build four new rooms, by the way ; there are ninety-six 
 rooms in the house, but a hundred will be nicer. I shall leave 
 the walls bare till dear Tom Tonans and Pietra Inferuale come 
 to stay with me in the autumn ; they will paint them for me. 
 Perhaps lo will be away by then. I do hope tve shall get some- 
 thing good for him through Theodore." 
 
 loris, standing by, hears ; and he has lost the power and 
 the right to avenge. 
 
 The drag comes round and other equipages. They troop 
 away joyously, leaving only Burletta, who is casting xip accounts 
 in a memorandum book, in the midst of the strawberries : and 
 Marjory Scrope-Stair, who, as she passes her friend, kisses the 
 hand that is toying with the guitar, and kisses it gushingly but 
 loyally. It is the hand that has fast-locked the fresh fetters. 
 
 Mrs. Henry V. Clams, who is shrewd in her own way, and has 
 brought a gleam of the national Yankee humour with her out of 
 the land of wooden nutmegs, is tickled at what she has heard, 
 and laughs to herself as she departs. 
 
 " My word ! " she murmurs as she drives through the gates. 
 " If Alberto were to go and fall in love with anybody I wonder if 
 I'd be as clever as that, and be able to turn the tables on the 
 other one and make her look like the good-for-nought ? My 
 word ! no, I shouldn't have patience — I should just go and slap 
 her face." 
 
 And she feels her own inferiority to the Temple of the 
 Virtues. 
 
 The afternoon sun sinks lower; the colour deepens; the 
 scent of the blossoms grow stronger, Burletta shuts up his 
 account-book and comes and sits on a stool beside the guitar. 
 Mr. Challoner reclines in a rocking chair. 
 The little girl plays with a shuttlecock. 
 Lady Joan laughs, and now and then she sings. 
 She has condemned him to perpetual bondage,' to lifelong 
 weariness, to endless degradation; she has taken his life like a 
 pressed fruit and wrung it to the core; she has exiled from him 
 all joy, all hope, all peace. Never shall his ofispriug laugh ia 
 the old home of his fathers ; never shall any child smile in his 
 eyes with the smile of a woman he loved; never shall any 
 gladness of liberty rise for him in his barren years; never shall 
 any human happiness be his! 
 
 Never : never any more, so long as her life shall last and feed 
 on his, and sit by his, and wait and watch, as the tigress waits 
 and watches by the creature it has slain. 
 
 2e 
 
418 FBIENDSHIP. 
 
 She has killed him more cruelly than those do, who slaughter 
 the body. 
 
 But what of that ? She is well-content. 
 
 She shoots her cats and robins, she garners her grain, she 
 fills her purse; she rules at Fiordelisa. 
 
 Honour is gone from him, and peace, and hope, and God. 
 
 But what of that ? She rules at Fiordelisa. 
 
 In his chamber alone sits loris, having escaped the scene 
 for a moment. 
 
 His heart is sick, his life is weary. 
 
 For lack of an hour's courage he has surrendered all his 
 future to bondage. 
 
 One single falsehood at the first has sprung up into a giant 
 tree, poisonous as the upas, and spreading in fetid darkness for 
 evermore betwixt him and the light of heaven. 
 
 He sits in his solitude — so rare a blessing is this solitude, 
 which she perpetually denies him — and the smell of the smoke 
 and the tinkle of tho guitar rise in the air to him, and he 
 loathes them. 
 
 "lo! lo!" cries a voice, shrill, loud, imperious. "lo! come 
 down directly, or I shall come up to you! " 
 
 Of the two evils he takes the lesser. 
 
 He goes down, with a heavy sigh and a slow step. 
 
 It is for this woman that he has lost the world, and lost the 
 thing that is greater and deeper than all the world — a love that 
 never dies. 
 
 He descends his old stone staircase wearily and listlessly ; 
 sullenly and silently he enters the court, and throws himself into 
 a garden-seat in the shadow of an arched doorway. 
 
 She strikes her guitar sharply. 
 
 " You look as glum as an owl, lo ! How ungrateful of you, 
 when we are going to make your fortune out of the Coral 
 Isles!" 
 
 " I am tired," he mutters wearily. 
 
 She laughs : she does not care whether he is tired or not. 
 she has him safe, her prey for ever, through one sad untruth. 
 
 The red sun sinks, the red flowers blaze. The child is at 
 play. The smoke curls lightly up amongst the blossoms. It is 
 dreamy and warm. Mr. Challoner, stretched peacefully in his 
 chair, dozes, with a handkerchief over his closed eyes, ancl 
 thinks. . . . The Coral Isles are distant. loris is poor. A little 
 more speculation, like the piles in the Syrens' Sea, and who 
 knows? Old lands are soon ruined and old names soon 
 tarnished. Fiordehsa is a nice place. loris is not very strong. 
 It would make a pretty dower for Effie in years to come ; and is 
 there not a title that goes with the estate ? 
 
 Mr. Challoner in his mind's eye sees the children of EflBo 
 reigning here, where the children of loris will be never born. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 419 
 
 The Watchdog sits humbly in the shade by the glass doors, 
 and works at a cushion that her friend has begun and has tired 
 of, and ever and again fastens thirsty, longing, anxious eyes 
 upon loris, and thinks to herself, Festina lente ! Pazienza ! Who 
 knows? Sometimes a sick and sorrowful soul, jaded and 
 indifferent, falls to the watcher that waits for it, as the 
 beautiful moth with broken wing falls into the web of the 
 patient and crafty spider spinning in the dust : who knows ? 
 
 Mr. Challoner's wife, with the riband of the guitar lying loose 
 in her hands, shuts her watchful eyes also, and only does not 
 dream because she so seldom commits such a folly. She is a 
 woman of action, not a simpleton. She thinks instead ; thinks, 
 and smiles as she thinks. 
 
 She has got all she wants, has done all she wished, she is 
 luxuriously content ; she feels victorious as the great Napoleon. 
 She will reign alone at Fiordelisa. Meanwhile, if they become 
 needful, there are Theodore and the Coral Isles. If loris prove 
 restive she will send him to the Coral Isles, and go into society 
 and smile and be smiled at, and say, " Ah, poor lo ! so sad ; but 
 we are doing all we can to save his property." 
 
 And she and Society will smile on each other more sweetly 
 than ever ; and as she thinks of all this, the picture pleases her 
 so that for once her busy brain grows sleepy, and she also 
 dreams, till the guitar glides off her knee, and the chords that 
 have hymned her amorous songs, so often, to so many ears, are 
 broken. 
 
 loris alone dares not dream, because for him hope is dead and 
 liberty has perished. 
 
 At the same hour as the sun sinks low Etoile prays in her 
 chamber. 
 
 " Forgive me that I erred in haste and pain. Forgive me 
 that I had neither wisdom nor strength. Ah, God, forgive me 
 and make him happy, though I for ever suffer 1 " 
 
 Is prayer only a dream too ? 
 
 THE KKD. 
 
 TRINTED AT THE CAXTON PRESS, BECCLES. 
 
May, 1879. 
 
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 ggjPgSj JgLMHi 
 
 CHATTO 6- WINDUS'S 
 
 Htst of Books. 
 
ON BOOKS AND BOOK-BUYERS. 
 
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CHATTO &• WINDUS, PICCADILLY. 27 
 
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28 BOOKS PUBLISHED BY. 
 
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CHATTO 6- WIND US, PICCADILLY. 29 
 
 The Piccadilly Novels — conthmed. 
 
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 JUM^ 1955 I :i 
 
 REC'D 
 
 jAH10'66»iO/\*/| 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 
 FEB2 2I3G8 
 
 JAN I 6 2009