to reconnoitre the charms of a ballet.  And if it looked aside at youth and was pierced by the sword of tragedy, yet it was too well bred or too conventional to let even one of the world around witness the wound.  There is much secret bravery in social life.  But these elderly figure-heads were fewer than usual to-night.  Youth seemed to have usurped the playing-grounds of pleasure, to have driven old age away into the shadows.  With flag flying, with trumpet and drum, it gaily held the field.  The lady of the feathers, Valentine, and Julian leaned out from their box as from the car of a balloon and saw below them a world of youth hand in hand with the world of pleasure the gods offer to youth as wine.  It was yet early in the evening, and the hours were only tripping along, as women trip in the pictures of Albert Moore.  They had not begun to dance, although the band was playing a laughing measure from an opera of Auber that foams with frivolity.  Men kept dropping in, cigar in mouth, walking to their seats with that air of well-washed and stiff composure peculiar to British youth, grim with self-consciousness, but affecting the devil-may-care with a certain measure of success.  Some of them escorted ladies, but by far the greater number were in couples, or in parties of three or four.  The rose of health, or, in many cases, of repletion, sat enthroned upon their cheeks; on the upper lips of many the moustaches were budding delicately.  These were just getting up on the box and gripping the reins for the great coach-drive.  Little wonder if the veins in their eager hands stood out.  Little wonder if they flourished the whip with an unnecessary vehemence.  But for them, too, so far the hours were only tripping, a slow and a dainty measure, a formal minuet.  And they were but watching.  Only later would they rise up and join the great dance of the hours, large, complicated, alluring, through whose measures the feet of eventual saints have trod, whose music rings in the ears of many who, long after, try to pray and to forget.  Some who were with women made conversation jocosely, putting on travesties of military airs, and a knowingness of expression that might have put the wisdom of the Sphinx to shame.  Nor did they hesitate to appear amorous in the public eye.  On the contrary, their attitudes of attention were purposely assumed silently to utter volumes.  They lay, to all intents and purposes, at the feet of their houris, as Samson lay shorn at the feet of Delilah.  In loud young voices they told the secrets of their hearts, until even the clash of the music could scarcely keep them hidden.  And Delilah, who had shorn the locks of so many Samsons, and who had heard so many secrets, gave ear with a clever affectation of interested surprise that deceived these gay deceivers and set them high on the peaks of their own estimation.  Two or three family parties, one obviously French, seemed out of place, indecently domestic in the midst of such a throng,