with significance. When the ladies were looking on at the fencers,
Morsfield's perfect coxcombry had been noticeable. He knew the art of
airing a fine figure. Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had spoken of it, and
Aminta had acquiesced; in the gravely simple manner of women who may be
thinking of it much more intently than the vivacious prattler. Aminta
confessed to an admiration of masculine physical beauty; the picador,
matador, of the Spanish ring called up an undisguised glow that English
ladies show coldly when they condescend to let it be seen; as it were, a
line or two of colour on the wintriest of skies. She might, after all,
at heart be one of the leisured, jewelled, pretty-winged; the spending,
never harvesting, world she claimed and sought to enter. And what a
primitive world it was!--world of the glittering beast and the not too
swiftly flying prey, the savage passions clothed in silk. Surely desire
to belong to it writes us poor creatures. Mentally, she could hardly be
maturer than the hero-worshipping girl in the procession of Miss
Vincent's young seminarists. Probably so, but she carried magic. She
was of the order of women who walk as the goddesses of old, bearing the
gift divine. And, by the way, she had the step of the goddess. Weyburn
repeated to himself the favourite familiar line expressive of the
glorious walk, and accused Lord Ormont of being in cacophonous accordance
with the perpetual wrong of circumstance, he her possessor, the sole
person of her sphere insensible to the magic she bore! So ran his
thought.

The young man chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly. He was,
in truth, often casting about for the chances of his meeting on some
fortunate day the predestined schoolmaster's wife: a lady altogether
praiseworthy for carrying principles of sound government instead of
magic. Consequently, susceptible to woman's graces though he knew
himself to be, Lady Ormont's share of them hung in the abstract for him.