ips quivering.
"Can't I do anything?--I would do so much, would love so much--beyond
anything--to make you unsad."

The man with the blue eyes shook his head.

"Impossible, alas! Your intervention, in this case, is finally ruled out,
my sweet lamb," he affectionately, but conclusively said.

CHAPTER IX

WHICH FEATURES VARIOUS PERSONS WITH WHOM THE READER IS ALREADY ACQUAINTED

Some are born great, some attain greatness, and some have it thrust upon
them to the lively embarrassment of their humble and retiring little
souls. To his own notable surprise, General Frayling, on the morning
following his wife's Cinderella dance, awoke to find himself the centre
of interest in the life of the pretty pavilion situated in the grounds of
the Hotel de la Plage. He owed this unaccustomed ascendency to physical
rather than moral or intellectual causes, being possessed of a
temperature, the complexion of the proverbial guinea, and violent pains
in his loins and his back.

These anxious symptoms developed--one cannot but feel rather unjustly--as
the consequence of his own politeness, his amenity of manner, and the
patient attentions he paid on the previous evening to one of his wife's
guests. He had sat altogether too long for personal comfort in a draughty
corner of the hotel garden, with Mrs. Callowgas. Affected by the poetic
influences of moon, stars, and sea, affected also conceivably by pagan
amorous influences, naughtily emanating from the neighbouring Venus
Temple--whose elegant tapering columns adorn the facade of the local
Mairie--Mrs. Callowgas became extensively reminiscent of her dear dead
Lord Bishop. Protracted anecdotes of visitations and confirmation tours,
excerpts from his sermons, speeches and charges, arch revelations of his
diurnal and nocturnal conversation and habits--the latter tedious to the
point of tears when not slightly immodest--poured from her widowed lips.
The good lady overflowed. She frankly babbled. General Frayling listened,
outwardly interested and civil, inwardly deploring that he had omitted
to put on a waistcoat back-lined with flannel--waxing momentarily more
conscious, also, that the iron--of the hard cold slats composing the seat
of his garden chair--if not entering into his soul, was actively entering
a less august and more material portion of his being through the slack of
his thin evening trousers. He endured both tedium and bodily suffering
with the fortitude of a saint and m