The intimacy existing between the two young men had suffered no immediate dislocation from the circumstance that they were tacitly paying court to the same lady.  It was an intimacy founded not in the least on friendship or community of tastes and ideas, but owed its existence to the fact that each was amused and interested by the other.  Youghal found Comus, for the time being at any rate, just as amusing and interesting as a rival for Elaine’s favour as he had been in the role of scapegrace boy-about-Town; Comus for his part did not wish to lose touch with Youghal, who among other attractions possessed the recommendation of being under the ban of Comus’s mother.  She disapproved, it is true, of a great many of her son’s friends and associates, but this particular one was a special and persistent source of irritation to her from the fact that he figured prominently and more or less successfully in the public life of the day.  There was something peculiarly exasperating in reading a brilliant and incisive attack on the Government’s rash handling of public expenditure delivered by a young man who encouraged her son in every imaginable extravagance.  The actual extent of Youghal’s influence over the boy was of the slightest; Comus was quite capable of deriving encouragement to rash outlay and frivolous conversation from an anchorite or an East-end parson if he had been thrown into close companionship with such an individual.  Francesca, however, exercised a mother’s privilege in assuming her son’s bachelor associates to be industrious in labouring to achieve his undoing.  Therefore the young politician was a source of unconcealed annoyance to her, and in the same degree as she expressed her disapproval of him Comus was careful to maintain and parade the intimacy.  Its existence, or rather its continued existence, was one of the things that faintly puzzled the young lady whose sought-for favour might have been expected to furnish an occasion for its rapid dissolution.

With two suitors, one of whom at least she found markedly attractive, courting her at the same moment, Elaine should have had reasonable cause for being on good terms with the world, and with herself in particular.  Happiness was not, however, at this auspicious moment, her dominant mood.  The grave calm of her face masked as usual a certain degree of grave perturbation.  A succession of well-meaning governesses and a plentiful supply of moralising aunts on both sides of her family, had impressed on her young mind the theoretical fact that wealth is a great responsibility.  The consciousness of her responsibility set her continually wondering, not as to her own fitness to discharge her “stewardship,” but as to the motives and merits of people with whom she came in contact.  The knowledge that there was so much in the world that she could buy, invited speculation as to how much there was that was worth buying.  Gradually she had come to regard her mind as a sort of appeal court before whose secret