society
has dispensed with the arena and with the tilting jousts of chivalry, it
has nevertheless not deadened either women's passion for the tournament,
or the keenness with which they divine the merits of their respective
knights. And if argument is the only remaining form in which that clash
of arms of olden times is witnessed by them to-day, it is with no
diminished interest or perspicuity that they register its results.
Ordinary games hardly meet all the demands of the true joust; for, in
the first place, they do not include to the same extent as argument,
that formidable element in modern knightly equipment, the intellect;
and, secondly, because to the most thick-skinned there is something so
much more mortifying, ignominious, and humiliating in being beaten in
argument than in losing a game, that argument still retains, though in
an attenuated and spiritualised form, something of the excitement and
gravity of armed conflict.

Denis Malster was well aware of all this,--indeed had he not thrown
down his gauntlet every night to the Incandescent Gerald precisely
because he knew how well he himself looked in the lists, and how well he
tilted? But perhaps Lord Henry was even better aware than Denis of the
important part played by intellectual male conflict in the presence of
women; and he moreover realised more certainly than Denis could possibly
have guessed, the precise effect on the female mind of repeated
victories in this modern and polite form of tournament.

Certainly as Leonetta, Vanessa, Agatha, and Mrs. Tribe hastened their
footsteps to catch every word that fell from Lord Henry's lips, they
were largely animated by the natural curiosity provoked by the presence
of a distinguished stranger; but in their eagerness to get close up to
him and to be in constant earshot of his voice, there was also the tacit
admission, possibly unrealised by any of them as yet, that in him they
had recognised a knight of peculiar power and of brilliant style.

They had not concerned themselves with the merits of the actual point
that had been at issue. All they felt was that a certain speaker had
spoken, not as one of the scribes, but as one having authority, and that
the former champion of the lists had for once been worsted in their
presence.

All this was in the air, unuttered, and even imperfectly present in
unconsciousness. Only Denis Malster, a little uneasy and a little
resentful, and Lord Henry, as usual perfectly ser