The Seraph, with the clarion roll of his gay laughter, flung a hautboy at him.

“Hang you, Beauty!  If I didn’t think you were going to tell one how you really got out of a serious thing; it is so awfully difficult to keep clear of them nowadays.  Those before-dinner teas are only just so many new traps!  What became of her—­eh?”

“She married a Scotch laird and became socially extinct, somewhere among the Hebrides.  Served her right,” murmured Cecil sententiously.  “Only think what she lost just through hungering for a chicken; if I hadn’t proposed for her,—­for one hardly keeps the screw up to such self-sacrifice as that when one is cool the next morning,—­I would have made her the fashion!”

With which masterly description in one phrase of all he could have done for the ill-starred debutante who had been hungry in the wrong place, Cecil lounged out of the club to drive with half a dozen of his set to a water-party—­a Bacchanalian water-party, with the Zu-Zu and her sisters for the Naiads and the Household for their Tritons.

A water-party whose water element apparently consisted in driving down to Richmond, dining at nine, being three hours over the courses, contributing seven guineas apiece for the repast, listening to the songs of the Cafe Alcazar, reproduced with matchless elan by a pretty French actress, being pelted with brandy cherries by the Zu-Zu, seeing their best cigars thrown away half-smoked by pretty pillagers, and driving back again to town in the soft, starry night, with the gay rhythms ringing from the box-seat as the leaders dashed along in a stretching gallop down the Kew Road.  It certainly had no other more aquatic feature in it save a little drifting about for twenty minutes before dining, in toy boats and punts, as the sun was setting, while Laura Lelas, the brunette actress, sang a barcarolle.

“Venice, and her people, only born to bloom and droop.”

          “Where be all those
     Dear dead women, with such hair too; what’s become of all the gold
     Used to hang and brush their bosoms?  I feel chilly and grown old;”

It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning’s fashion, because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to think at all; in the second, if put to it he would have averred that he knew nothing of Venice, except that it was a musty old bore of a place, where they worried you about visas and luggage and all that, chloride of lim’d you if you came from the East, and couldn’t give you a mount if it were ever so; and, in the third, instead of longing for the dear dead women, he was entirely contented with the lovely living ones who were at that moment puffing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his eyes, making him eat lobster drowned in Chablis, or pelting him with bonbons.