His politics, his hunting, this address to the Queen, his horses, his guns, his father’s wealth, and his own rank,—­what were they all to Isabel Boncassen?  In meeting her he had net the one human being in all the world who could really be anything to him either in friendship or in love.  When she had told him what she would do for him to make his home happy, it had seemed to him that all other delights must fade away from him for ever.  How odious were Tifto and his racehorses, how unmeaning the noise of his club, how terrible the tedium of those parliamentary benches!  He could not tell his love as she had told hers!  He acknowledged to himself that his words could not be as her words,—­nor his intellect as hers.  But his heart could be as true.  She had spoken to him of his name, his rank, and all his outside world around him.  He would make her understand at last that there were nothing to him in comparison with her.  When he had got round to Hyde Park Corner, he felt that he was almost compelled to go back again to Brook Street.  In no other place could there be anything to interest him;—­nowhere else could there be light, or warmth, or joy!  But what would she think of him?  To go back hot, and soiled with mud, in order that he might say one more adieu,—­that possibly he might ravish one more kiss,—­would hardly be manly.  He must postpone all that for the morrow.  On the morrow of course he would be there.

But his word was before him!  That prayer had to be made to his father, or rather some wonderful effort of eloquence must be made by which his father might be convinced that this girl was so infinitely superior to anything of feminine creation that had ever hitherto been seen or heard of, that all ideas as to birth, country, rank, or name ought in this instance to count for nothing.  He did believe himself that he had found such a pearl, that no question of seeing need be taken into consideration.  If the Duke would not see it the fault would be in the Duke’s eyes, or perhaps in his own words,—­but certainly not in the pearl.

Then he compared her to poor Lady Mabel, and in doing so did arrive at something near the truth in his inward delineation of the two characters.  Lady Mabel with all her grace, with all her beauty, with all her talent, was a creature of efforts, or, as it might be called, a manufactured article.  She strove to be graceful, to be lovely, to be agreeable and clever.  Isabel was all this and infinitely more without any struggle.  When he was most fond of Mabel, most anxious to make her his wife, there had always been present to him a feeling that she was old.  Though he knew her age to a day,—­and knew her to be younger than himself, yet she was old.  Something had gone of her native bloom, something had been scratched and chipped from the first fair surface, and this had been repaired by varnish and veneering.  Though he had loved her he had never been altogether satisfied with her.  But Isabel was as young as Hebe.  He knew nothing of her actual years, but he did know that to have seemed younger, or to have seemed older,—­to have seemed in any way different from what she was,—­would have been to be less perfect.