er, that I can see. All great ladies gamble in
stocks nowadays under the rose, and women are for the most part as cold,
clear, hard, and practical as their adorers believe them the contrary;
and a femme incomprise is so charming, when she avows herself
comprehended by you, that you would never risk spoiling the confidence
by hinting a doubt of its truth. If she and Bertie only played at love;
if neither believed much in the other; if each trifled with a pretty
gossamer soufflet of passion much as they trifled with the soufflets at
dinner; if both tried it to trifle away ennui much as they tried staking
a Friedrich d'Or at Baden, this light, surface, fashionable, philosophic
form of a passion they both laughed at, in its hot and serious follies,
suited them admirably. Had it ever mingled a grain of bitterness in her
ladyship's Souchong before dinner, or given an aroma of bitterness to
her lover's Naples punch in the smoking room, it would have been out of
all keeping with themselves and their world.

Nothing on earth is so pleasant as being a little in love; nothing on
earth so destructive as being too much so; and as Cecil, in the idle
enjoyment of the former gentle luxury, flirted with his liege lady that
night; lying back in the softest of lounging-chairs, with his dark,
dreamy, handsome eyes looking all the eloquence in the world, and his
head drooped till his mustaches were almost touching her laces, his
Queen of Beauty listened with charmed interest, and to look at him he
might have been praying after the poet:

How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

In real truth he was gently murmuring:

"Such a pity that you missed to-day! Hounds found directly; three of the
fastest things I ever knew, one after another; you should have seen the
'little ladies' head him just above the Gorse! Three hares crossed us
and a fresh fox; some of the pack broke away after the new scent, but
old Bluebell, your pet, held on like death, and most of them kept after
her--you had your doubts about Silver Trumpet's shoulders; they're not
the thing, perhaps, but she ran beautifully all day, and didn't show a
symptom of rioting."

Cecil could, when needed, do the Musset and Meredith style of thing to
perfection, but on the whole he preferred love a la mode; it is so much
easier and less exhausting to tell your mistress of a ringing run, or a
close finish, than to turn perpetual periods on the luster of her eyes,
and