rancement, to be
interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from
a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality
in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since.
I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and
her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance.
The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis
Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano.
Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what
negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across
to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.

There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the difference
between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord
Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before
mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of
my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy,
men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they
are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their
trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human
wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and
even their folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties
enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of
all luxuries--pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare
man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening
unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of
English printing.

As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude,
elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me.
And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out.
He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air
of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so,
and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.

'Pallor suits you,' he piped gallantly, and then added: 'But do not carry
it to extremes.'

'Am I so pale, then?' I faltered, trying to smile naturally.

I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined
it like a connoisseur.

'Yes,' he said at length. 'What is the matter?'

Lord Francis charged t