ot ever forget the most trivial word.

Men, even beaux, are strangely constituted; and so it needed only
this--the sudden stark brute jealousy of one male animal for another.
That was the clumsy hand which now unlocked the dyke; and like a flood,
tall and resistless, came the recollection of their far-off past and of
its least dear trifle, of all the aspirations and absurdities and
splendors of their common youth, and found him in its path, a painted
fellow, a spendthrift king of the mode, a most notable authority upon
the set of a peruke, a penniless, spent connoisseur of stockings,
essences and cosmetics.

He got but little rest this night.

There were too many plaintive memories which tediously plucked him
back, with feeble and innumerable hands, as often as he trod upon the
threshold of sleep. Then too, there were so many dreams, half-waking,
and not only of Olivia Chichele, naive and frank in divers rural
circumstances, but rather of Olivia, Lady Drogheda, that perfect piece
of artifice; of how exquisite she was! how swift and volatile in every
movement! how airily indomitable, and how mendacious to the tips of her
polished finger-nails! and how she always seemed to flit about this
world as joyously, alertly, and as colorfully as some ornate and tiny
bird of the tropics!

But presently parochial birds were wrangling underneath the dramatist's
window, while he tossed and assured himself that he was sleepier than
any saint who ever snored in Ephesus; and presently one hand of
Moncrieff was drawing the bed-curtains, while the other carefully
balanced a mug of shaving-water.

Wycherley did not see her all that morning, for Lady Drogheda was
fatigued, or so a lackey informed him, and as yet kept her chamber.
His Araminta he found deplorably sullen. So the dramatist devoted the
better part of this day to a refitting of his wedding-suit, just come
from London; for Moncrieff, an invaluable man, had adjudged the pockets
to be placed too high; and, be the punishment deserved or no, Mr.
Wycherley had never heard that any victim of law appeared the more
admirable upon his scaffold for being slovenly in his attire.

Thus it was as late as five in the afternoon that, wearing the
peach-colored suit trimmed with scarlet ribbon, and a new French
beaver, the exquisite came upon Lady Drogheda walking in the gardens
with only an appropriate peacock for company. She was so beautiful and
brilliant and so little--so like a