“In the case of a Countess, sir, the imagination is more excited,” says Dr. Johnson, who had, I suppose, little opportunity of putting that doctrine for amatory intrigues to the test in actual practice.  Bertie, who had many opportunities, differed with him.  He found love-making in his own polished, tranquil circles apt to become a little dull, and was more amused by Laura Lelas.  However, he was sworn to the service of the Guenevere, and he drove his mail-phaeton down that day to another sort of Richmond dinner, of which the lady was the object instead of the Zu-Zu.

She enjoyed thinking herself the wife of a jealous and inexorable lord, and arranged her flirtations to evade him with a degree of skill so great that it was lamentable it should be thrown away on an agricultural husband, who never dreamt that the “Fidelio-III-TstnegeR,” which met his eyes in the innocent face of his “Times” referred to an appointment at a Regent Street modiste’s, or that the advertisement—­“White wins—­Twelve,” meant that if she wore white camellias in her hair at the opera she would give “Beauty” a meeting after it.

Lady Guenevere was very scrupulous never to violate conventionalities.  And yet she was a little fast—­very fast, indeed, and was a queen of one of the fastest sets; but then—­O sacred shield of a wife’s virtue—­she could not have borne to lose her very admirable position, her very magnificent jointure, and, above all, the superb Guenevere diamonds!

So, for the sake of the diamonds, she and Bertie had their rendezvous under the rose.

This day she went down to see a dowager Baroness aunt, out at Hampton Court—­really went, she was never so imprudent as to falsify her word; and with the Dowager, who was very deaf and purblind, dined at Richmond, while the world thought her dining at Hampton Court.  It was nothing to anyone, since none knew it to gossip about, that Cecil joined her there; that over the Star and Garter repast they arranged their meeting at Baden next month; that while the Baroness dozed over the grapes and peaches—­she had been a beauty herself, in her own day, and still had her sympathies—­they went on the river, in the little toy that he kept there for his fair friends’ use; floating slowly along in the coolness of evening, while the stars loomed out in the golden trail of the sunset, and doing a graceful scene a la Musset and Meredith, with a certain languid amusement in the assumption of those poetic guises, for they were of the world worldly; and neither believed very much in the other.

When you have just dined well, and there has been no fault in the clarets, and the scene is pretty, if it be not the Nile in the afterglow, the Arno in the moonlight, or the Loire in vintage-time, but only the Thames above Richmond, it is the easiest thing in the world to feel a touch of sentiment when you have a beautiful woman beside you who expects you to feel it.  The evening was very hot and soft.