inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of them.

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

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

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

She serenely understood. Artistes are licenced people, with a Bohemian
instead of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as paste