er
the very moments I passed under the foliage of the great beeches and
lay down to dream. I used to wander to the outskirts of the wood as
near as I dared to the pleasure-grounds, and looking on the towers
strove to imagine the life there. The bitterest curses lie in the
hearts of young men who, understanding refinement and elegance, see
it for ever out of their reach. I used to watch the parade of dresses
passing on the summer lawns between the firs and flowering trees.
What graceful and noble words were spoken!--and that man walking into
the poetry of the laburnum gold, did he put his arm about her? And I
wondered what silken ankles moved beneath her skirts. My brain was on
fire, and I was crazed; I thought I should never hold a lady in my
arms. A lady! all the delicacy of silk and lace, high-heeled shoes,
and the scent and colour of hair that a _coiffeur_ has braided."

"I think you are mad!"

Mike laughed and continued--

"I was so when I was sixteen. There was a girl staying there. Her
hair was copper, and her flesh was pink and white. Her waist, you
could span it. I saw her walking one day on ..."

"You must mean Lady Alice Hargood, a very tall girl?"

"Yes; five feet seven, quite. I saw her walking on the terrace with
your uncle. Once she passed our house, and I smarted with shame of it
as of some restless wound, and for days I remembered I was little
better than a peasant. Originally we came, as you know, of good
English stock, but nothing is vital but the present. I cried and
cursed my existence, my father and the mother that bore me, and that
night I climbed out by my window and roved through the dark about the
castle so tall in the moonlight. The sky that night was like a soft
blue veil, and the trees were painted quite black upon it. I looked
for her window, and I imagined her sleeping with her copper hair
tossed in the moonlight, like an illustration in a volume of Shelley.

"You remember the old wooden statue of a nymph that stood in the
sycamores at the end of the terraces; she was the first naked woman I
saw. I used to wander about her, sometimes at night, and I have often
climbed about and hung round those shoulders, and ever since I have
always met that breast of wood. You have been loved more truly; you
have been possessed of woman more thoroughly than I. Though I clasp a
woman in my arms, it is as if the Atlantic separated us. Did I never
tell you of my first love affair? That was the romance