Wrapped in her new pale languor, still breathing deeply from the waltz, she seemed to Courtier too utterly moulded out of loveliness.  To what end should a man frame speeches to a vision!  She was but an incarnation of beauty imprinted on the air, and would fade out at a touch-like the sudden ghosts of enchantment that came to one under the blue, and the starlit snow of a mountain night, or in a birch wood all wistful golden!  Speech seemed but desecration!  Besides, what of interest was there for him to say in this world of hers, so bewildering and of such glib assurance—­this world that was like a building, whose every window was shut and had a blind drawn down.  A building that admitted none who had not sworn, as it were, to believe it the world, the whole world, and nothing but the world, outside which were only the nibbled remains of what had built it.  This, world of Society, in which he felt like one travelling through a desert, longing to meet a fellow-creature.

The voice of Harbinger behind them said: 

“Lady-Babs!”

Long did the punkahs waft their breeze over that brave-hued wheel of pleasure, and the sound of the violins quaver and wail out into the morning.  Then quickly, as the spangles of dew vanish off grass when the sun rises, all melted away; and in the great rooms were none but flunkeys presiding over the polished surfaces like flamingoes by some lakeside at dawn.

CHAPTER III

A brick dower-house of the Fitz-Harolds, just outside the little seaside town of Nettlefold, sheltered the tranquil days of Lord Dennis.  In that south-coast air, sanest and most healing in all England, he raged very slowly, taking little thought of death, and much quiet pleasure in his life.  Like the tall old house with its high windows and squat chimneys, he was marvellously self-contained.  His books, for he somewhat passionately examined old civilizations, and described their habits from time to time with a dry and not too poignant pen in a certain old-fashioned magazine; his microscope, for he studied infusoria; and the fishing boat of his friend John Bogle, who had long perceived that Lord Dennis was the biggest fish he ever caught; all these, with occasional visitors, and little runs to London, to Monkland, and other country houses, made up the sum of a life which, if not desperately beneficial, was uniformly kind and harmless, and, by its notorious simplicity, had a certain negative influence not only on his own class but on the relations of that class with the country at large.  It was commonly said in Nettlefold, that he was a gentleman; if they were all like him there wasn’t much in all this talk against the Lords.  The shop people and lodging-house keepers felt that the interests of the country were safer in his hands:  than in the hands of people who wanted to meddle with everything for the good of those who were only anxious to be let alone.  A man too who could so completely forget he was the son of a Duke, that other people never forgot it, was the man for their money.  It was true that he had never had a say in public affairs; but this was overlooked, because he could have had it if he liked, and the fact that he did not like, only showed once more that he was a gentleman.