The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments; brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs, pouts, shifts of posture:  she was married to a centaur; out of the saddle a man of wood, ’an excellent man.’  For the not colloquial do not commit themselves.  But one wants a little animation in a husband.  She called on bell-motion of the head to toll forth the utter nightcap negative.  He had not any:  out of the saddle, he was asleep:—­’next door to the Last Trump,’ Colney Durance assisted her to describe the soundest of sleep in a husband, after wooing her to unbosom herself.  She was awake to his guileful arts, and sailed along with him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one; prankishly exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a grinding world, among maskers, to the horrification of the prim.  So to refresh ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath in the truth while we shock our hearers enough to be discredited for what we reveal, was a dexterous merry twist, amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice than her nature that she indulged, ‘A woman must have some excitement.’  The most innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange.  The opinions of husbands who are not summoned to pay are hardly important; they vary.

Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond her stride, but if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together they appalled the decorous, it was great gain.  Her supple person, pretty lips, the style she had, gave a pass to the wondrous confidings, which were for masculine ears, whatever the sex.  Nataly might share in them, but women did not lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the contracted class:  Miss Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at the Radnor Concerts.  She had a special consideration for Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her exquisite French, as she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the young Frenchwoman’s air of high breeding that won her esteem.  Girls were spring frosts to her.  Fronting Nesta, she put on her noted smile, or wood-cut of a smile, with its label of indulgence; except when the girl sang.  Music she loved.  She said it was the saving of poor Dudley.  It distinguished him in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family; and it gave him a subject of assured discourse in company; and oddly, it contributed to his comelier air.  Flute [This would be the German Blockeflute or our Recorder.  D.W.] in hand, his mouth at the blow-stop was relieved of its pained updraw by the form for puffing; he preserved a gentlemanly high figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken of all likeness to the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor’s punctuating trunk of the puffing frame at almost every bar—­an Apollo brilliancy in energetic pursuit of the nymph of sweet sound.  Too methodical one, too fiery the other.