rudely inexact--it was in honour of youth and freshness that we
had all been convened. The fiancailles of the last--unless
it were the last but one--unmarried daughter of the house had
just been brought to a proper climax; the contract had been
signed, the betrothal rounded off--I'm not sure that the civil
marriage hadn't, that day, taken place. The occasion then had in
fact the most charming of heroines and the most ingenuous of
heroes, a young man, the latter, all happily suffused with a fair
Austrian blush. The young lady had had, besides other more or
less shining recent ancestors, a very famous paternal
grandmother, who had played a great part in the political history
of her time and whose portrait, in the taste and dress of 1830,
was conspicuous in one of the rooms. The grand-daughter of this
celebrity, of royal race, was strikingly like her and, by a
fortunate stroke, had been habited, combed, curled in a manner
exactly to reproduce the portrait. These things were charming and
amusing, as indeed were several other things besides. The great
Venetian beauty of our period was there, and nature had equipped
the great Venetian beauty for her part with the properest sense
of the suitable, or in any case with a splendid generosity--
since on the ideally suitable character of so brave a
human symbol who shall have the last word? This responsible agent
was at all events the beauty in the world about whom probably,
most, the absence of question (an absence never wholly
propitious) would a little smugly and monotonously flourish: the
one thing wanting to the interest she inspired was thus the
possibility of ever discussing it. There were plenty of
suggestive subjects round about, on the other hand, as to which
the exchange of ideas would by no means necessarily have dropped.
You profit to the full at such times by all the old voices,