“It’s very simple,” declared Paul.  “In this century the thirties, forties, and fifties don’t exist.  You’re either twenty or sixty.”

“I hope I shall always be twenty,” said the Princess lightly.

“Do you find your youth so precious, then?” asked Count Lavretsky.

“More than I ever did!” She laughed and again met Paul’s eyes.

This time she flushed faintly as she held them for a fraction of a second.  He had time to catch a veiled soft gleam intimate and disquieting.  For some time he did not look again in her direction; when he did, he met in her eyes only the lazy smile with which she regarded all and sundry.

Later in the evening she said to him:  “I’m glad you opposed Lavretsky.  He makes me shiver.  He was born old and wrinkled.  He has never had a thrill in his life.”

“And if you don’t have thrills when you’re young, you can’t expect to have them when you’re old,” said Paul.

“He would ask what was the good of thrills.”

“You don’t expect me to answer, Princess.”

“We know because we’re young.”

They stood laughing in the joy of their full youth, a splendid couple, some distance away from the others, ostensibly inspecting a luminous little Cima on the wall.  The Princess loved it as the bright jewel of her collection, and Paul, with his sense of beauty and knowledge of art, loved it too.  Yet, instead of talking of the picture, they talked of Lavretsky, who was looking at them sardonically from beneath his heavy eyelids.

CHAPTER XII

A few days afterwards you might have seen Paul dashing through the quiet main street Of Morebury in a high dog-cart, on his way to call on the Princess.  A less Fortunate Youth might have had to walk, risking boots impolitely muddy, or to hire a funereal cab from the local job-master; but Paul had only to give an order, and the cart and showy chestnut were brought round to the front door of Drane’s Court.  He loved to drive the showy chestnut, whose manifold depravities were the terror of Miss Winwood’s life.  Why didn’t he take the cob?  It was so much safer.  Whereupon he would reply gaily that in the first place he found no amusement in driving woolly lambs, and in the second that if he did not take some of the devil out of the chestnut it would become the flaming terror of the countryside.  So Paul, spruce in hard felt hat and box-cloth overcoat, clattered joyously through the Morebury streets, returning the salutations of the little notabilities of the town with the air of the owner not only of horse and cart, but of half the hearts in the place.  He was proud of his popularity, and it scarcely entered his head that he was not the proprietor of his equipage.  Besides, he was going to call on the Princess.  He hoped that she would be alone:  not that he had anything particular to say to her, or had any defined idea of love-making; but he was eight-and-twenty, an age at which desire has not yet failed and there is not the sign of a burdensome grasshopper anywhere about.