Carriages were in flow for an hour:  pedestrians formed a wavy coil.  Judgeing by numbers, the entertainment was a success; would the hall contain them?  Marvels were told of the hall.  Every ticket entered and was enfolded; almost all had a seat.  Chivalry stood.  It is a breeched abstraction, sacrificeing voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a restoring of the balance between the sexes, that the division of good things be rather in the fair ones’ favour, as they are to think:  with the warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for equality puts an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats.  Women must be mad, to provoke such a warning; and the majority of them submissively show their good sense.  They send up an incense of perfumery, all the bouquets of the chemist commingled; most nourishing to the idea of woman in the nose of man.  They are a forest foliage—­rustle of silks and muslins, magic interweaving, or the mythology, if you prefer it.  See, hear, smell, they are Juno, Venus, Hebe, to you.  We must have poetry with them; otherwise they are better in the kitchen.  Is there—­but there is not; there is not present one of the chivalrous breeched who could prefer the shocking emancipated gristly female, which imposes propriety on our sensations and inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of them.

Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme.  He is a colonel of Companies.  But those are his diversion, as the British Army has been to the warrior.  Puellis idoneus, he is professedly a lady’s man, a rose-beetle, and a fine specimen of a common kind:  and he has been that thing, that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years, necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving him, to conceal the muster.  He has to be fascinating, or he would look outworn, forlorn.  On one side of him is Lady Carmine; on the other, Lady Swanage; dames embedded in the blooming maturity of England’s conservatory.  Their lords (an Earl, a Baron) are of the lords who go down to the City to sow a title for a repair of their poor incomes, and are to be commended for frankly accepting the new dispensation while they retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient.  Thus gently does a maternal Old England let them down.  Projectors of Companies, Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric’s blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; Bankers and wives of Bankers.  Victor passed among them, chatting right and left.

Lady Carmine asked him:  ‘Is Durandarte counted on?’

He answered:  ‘I made sure of the Luciani.’

She serenely understood.  Artistes are licenced people, with a Bohemian instead of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as paste will pass for diamonds where the mirror is held up to Nature by bold supernumeraries.