ull of dreams!

CHAPTER V

'T IS OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE

Thus it was that we lunched together amid the books and birds, in an
exquisite solitude a deux; for the ringer of the silver bell had
disappeared, having left a dainty meal in readiness--for two.

"You see you were expected," said Nicolete, with her pretty laugh. "I
dreamed I should have a visitor to-day, and told Susan to lay the lunch
for two. You mustn't be surprised at that," she added mischievously;
"it has often happened before. I dream that dream every other night,
and Susan lays for two every day. She knows my whims,--knows that the
extra knife and fork are for the fairy knight that may turn up any
afternoon, as I tell her--"

"To find the sleepless princess," I added, thinking at the same time
one of those irrelevant asides that will go through the brain of
thirty, that the woman who would get her share of kisses nowadays must
neither slumber nor sleep.

A certain great poet, I think it was Byron, objected to seeing women in
the act of eating. He thought their eating should be done in private.
What a curiously perverse opinion! For surely woman never shows to
better advantage than in the dainty exercises of a dainty repast, and
there is nothing more thrilling to man than a meal alone with a woman
he loves or is about to love. Perhaps, deep down, the reason is that
there still vibrates in the masculine blood the thrilling surprise of
the moment when man first realised that the angel woman was built upon
the same carnivorous principles as his grosser self.

That is one of the first heart-beating surprises that come upon the boy
Columbus, as he sets out to discover the New World of woman; and indeed
his surprise has not seldom deepened into admiration, as he has found
that not only does woman eat, but frequently eats a lot.

This privilege of seeing woman eat is the earliest granted of those
delicate animal intimacies, the fuller and fuller confiding of which
plays not the least important part, and ever such a sweet one, even in
a highly transcendental affection. It is this gradual humanising of
the divine female that brings about the spiritualising of the
unregenerate male.

In the earliest stages of love the services are small that we are
privileged to do for the loved one. But if we are allowed to sit at
meat with her,--ever a royal condescension,--it is ours at least to
pass her the salt, to see that she is never kept waiting a mo