ke the
Mormons, and Brandolin is so odd that he may possibly belong to a sect,
or may have founded one, like Laurence Oliphant. She remembers the black
women that they talked of, and does not like to ask, being a sensitive
person, very delicate-minded, and perfectly proper, except her one
little affair with Sir Hugo, which everybody says is most creditable to
her, Arthur Audley being the scamp that he is.

Dinner over, Brandolin finds a pleasant seat on a low chair behind the
bigger chair on which Madame Sabaroff is reclining; other men devoted to
other women look longingly at her, some approach; Brandolin comprehends
why she is not beloved in her generation by her own sex.

After a time she is induced to sing; she has a very sweet voice, of
great power, with much pathos in it; she sings volkslieder of her own
country, strange yearning wistful songs, full of the vague mystical
melancholy of the Russian peasant. She ceases abruptly, and walks back
to her seat; her diamonds gleam in the light like so many eyes of fire.
Brandolin has listened in silence, conscious of a troubled pleasure
within himself, which is invariably the herald of one of those
attachments which have so often at once embellished and disturbed his
existence.

Like all romantic people, his heart is much younger than his years. It
has not been scarred by any one of those tragic passions which, like
fire on a hill-side, wither up all green things, so that not a blade of
grass will grow where it has passed. He has usually found love only the
most agreeable of pastimes. He has always wondered why anybody allowed
it to tear their life to tatters, as a bad actor tears a fine piece of
blank verse. An uncle of his possessed an Aphrodite in Paphian marble
which had been dug up in a vineyard at Luna, and a work of great beauty
of the second period of Greek art. A lover of pleasure, but withal a
philosopher, his uncle treasured and adored this statue, and whenever he
felt that any living woman was getting more power over him than he
liked, he compared her in his mind with the Luna Venus, and found that
the human creature's defects outbalanced her charms, and thus reduced
the potency of the latter to more reasonable dimensions.

Instead of his uncle's Luna goddess, Brandolin keeps in some remote and
sealed-up nook of his mind a certain ideal; now and then he remembers
it, takes it out and looks at it, and it has usually served with him at
such moments the purpos