"Incedit dea aperta," he murmured to himself, and wondered whether he had got the quotation right.  Being a weak young gentleman, he straightway yearned to lead a Beautiful Life so as to be worthy to live in the same world with her, and did it—­for a little while.  He became a teetotaller, he went to bed at ten and rose at five—­going forth into the innocent pure morning and hugging his new Goodness to his soul as he composed odes and sonnets to Mrs. Pat Dearman.  So far so excellent—­but in Augustus was no depth of earth, and speedily he withered away.  And his reformation was a house built upon sand, for, even at its pinnacle, it was compatible with the practising of sweet and pure expressions before the glass, the giving of much time to the discovery of the really most successful location of the parting in his long hair, the intentional entangling of his fingers with those of the plump and pretty young lady (very brunette) in Rightaway & Mademore’s, what time she handed him “ties to match his eyes,” as he requested.

It was really only a change of pose.  The attitude now was:  “I, young as you behold me, am old and weary of sin.  I have Passed through the Fires.  Give me beauty and give me peace.  I have done with the World and its Dead Sea Fruit.  There is no God but Beauty, and Woman is its Prophet.”  And he improved in appearance, grew thinner, shook off a veritable Old Man of the Sea in the shape of a persistent pimple which went ill with the Higher Aestheticism, and achieved great things in delicate socks, sweet shirts, dream ties, a thumb ring and really pretty shoes.

In the presence of Mrs. Pat Dearman he looked sad, smouldering, despairing and Fighting-against-his-Lower-Self, when not looking Young-but-Hopelessly-Depraved-though-Yearni
ng-for-Better-Things.  And he flung out quick epigrams, sighed heavily, talked brilliantly and wildly, and then suppressed a groan.  Sometimes the pose of, “Dear Lady, I could kiss the hem of your garment for taking an interest in me and my past—­but it is too lurid for me to speak of it, or for you to understand it if I did,” would appear for a moment, and sometimes that of, “Oh, help me—­or my soul must drown.  Ah, leave me not.  If I have sinned I have suffered, and in your hands lie my Heaven and my Hell.”  Such shocking words were never uttered of course—­but there are few things more real than an atmosphere, and Augustus Clarence could always get his atmosphere all right.

And Mrs. Pat Dearman (who had come almost straight from a vicarage, a vicar papa and a vicarish aunt, to an elderly, uxorious husband and untrammelled freedom, and knew as much of the World as a little bunny rabbit whom its mother has not brought yet out into the warren for its first season), was mightily intrigued.

She felt motherly to the poor boy at first, being only two years his junior; then sisterly; and, later, very friendly indeed.