His performance fairly started General Frayling furtively vanished in search of a mild siesta.  It inflated his uxorious breast with pride to have his Henrietta shine in hospitality thus.  But his lean shanks wearied, keeping time to the giddy music.  Wistfully he feared he must be going downhill, wasn’t altogether the man he used to be, since he found the business of pleasure so exhaustingly strenuous.  And that was beastly unfair to his lovely wife—­wouldn’t do, would not do at all, by Gad!  Therefore did he vanish into a diminutive and rather stuffy smoking-room, under the stairs, unfasten his nankeen waistcoat, unfasten his collar-stud, doze and finally, a little anxiously, sleep.

Whatever Marshall Wace’s diffidence in ordinary intercourse, it effectually disappeared so soon as he began to declaim or to recite.  The histrionic in him declared itself, rising dominant.  Given a character to impersonate, big swelling words to say, fine sentiments to enunciate, he changed to the required colour chameleon-like.  You forgot—­at least the feminine portion of his audience, almost without exception, forgot—­that his round light-brown eyes stared uncomfortably much; that his nose, thin at the root and starting with handsome aquiline promise, ended in a foolish button-tip.  Forgot that his lips were straight and compressed, wanting in generous curves and in tenderness—­an actor’s mouth, constructed merely for speech.  Forgot the harsh quality of the triangular redness on either cheek, fixed and feverish.  Ceased to remark how the angle of the jaw stood away from and beyond the sinewy, meagre neck, or note the rise and fall of Adam’s apple so prominent in his throat.—­No longer were annoyed by the effeminate character of the hands, their retracted nails and pink, upturned finger-tips, offering so queer a contrast to the rather inordinate size of his feet.

For the voice rarely failed to influence its hearers, to carry you indeed a little out of yourself by its variety of intonation, its fire and fervour, its languishing modulations, broken pauses, yearning melancholy of effect.  The part of the neurotic hero of the—­then—­Laureate’s poem, that somewhat pinch-beck Victorian Hamlet, suited our young friend, moreover, down to the ground.  It offered sympathetic expression to his own nature and temperament; so that he wooed, scoffed, blasphemed, orated, drowned in salt seas of envy and self-pity, with a simulation of sincerity as convincing to others as consolatory to himself.

And Damaris, being unlearned in the curious arts of the theatre, listened wide-eyed, spellbound, until flicked by the swishing skirts of fictitious emotion into genuine, yet covert, excitement.  As the reading progressed Henrietta Frayling’s presence increasingly sank into unimportance.  More and more did the poem assume a personal character, of which, if the reader were hero, she—­Damaris—­became heroine.  Marshall Wace seemed to read not to,