“No, no; loose me.  You do not love me, I do not love you; this is merely vice.”

He pleaded she was mistaken.  They spoke of indifferent things, and soon after went in to supper.

“What a beautiful piece of tapestry!” said Lady Helen.

“Yes, isn’t it.  But how strange!” he said, stopping in the doorway.  “See how exquisitely real is the unreal—­that is to say, how full of idea, how suggestive!  Those blue trees and green skies, those nymphs like unswathed mummies, colourless but for the red worsted of their lips,—­that one leaning on her bow, pointing to the stag that the hunters are pursuing through a mysterious yellow forest,—­are to my mind infinitely more real than the women bending over their plates.  At this moment the real is mean and trivial, the ideal is full of evocation.”

“The real and the ideal; why distinguish as people usually distinguish between the words?  The real is but the shadow of the ideal, the ideal but the shadow of the real.”

The table was in disorder of cut pineapple, scattered dishes, and drooping flowers.  Muchross, Snowdown, Dicky the driver, and others were grouped about the end of the table, and a waiter who styled them “most amusing gentlemen,” supplied fresh bottles of champagne.  Muchross had made several speeches, and now jumping on a chair, he discoursed on the tapestry, drawing outrageous parallels, and talking unexpected nonsense.  The castle he identified as the cottage where he and Jenny had spent the summer; the bleary-eyed old peacock was the chicken he had dosed with cayenne pepper, hoping to cure its rheumatism; the pool with the white threads for sunlight was the water-butt into which Tom had fallen from the tiles—­“those are the hairs out of his own old tail.”  The nymphs were Laura, Maggie, Emily, &c.  Mike asked Lady Helen to come into the dancing-room, but she did not appear to hear, and her laughter encouraged Muchross to further excesses.  The riot had reached its height and dancers were beginning to come from the drawing-room to ask what it was all about.

“All about!” shouted Muchross; “I don’t care any more about nymphs—­I only care about getting drunk and singing.  ’What cheer, ‘Ria!’”

“Don’t you care for dancing?” said Lady Helen, with tears running down her cheeks.

“Ra-ther; see me dance the polka, dear girl.”  And they went banging through the dancers.  Snowdown and Dicky shouted approval.

  “What cheer, ’Ria! 
     ’Ria’s on the job. 
   What cheer, ’Ria! 
     Speculate a bob. 
   ’Ria is a toff, and she is immensikoff—­
   And we all shouted,
   What cheer, ’Ria!”

Amid the uproar Lady Helen danced with Lily Young.  Insidious fragilities of eighteen were laid upon the plenitudes of thirty!  Pure pink and cream-pink floated on the wind of the waltz, fading out of colour in shadowy corners, now gliding into the glare of burnished copper, to the quick appeal of the ‘Estudiantina.’  A life that had ceased to dream smiled upon one which had begun to dream.  Sad eyes of Summer, that may flame with no desire again, looked into the eyes of Spring, where fancies collect like white flowers in the wave of a clear fountain.