ell him that they make you jealous." And
she drew from a case cigarettes covered with inscriptions in gold, in
a foreign language. "Why, yes," she began again suddenly. "Of course I
have met this young man's father with you. Isn't he your nephew? How on
earth could I have forgotten? He was so nice, so charming to me," she
went on, modestly and with feeling. But when I thought to myself what
must actually have been the rude greeting (which, she made out, had been
so charming), I, who knew my father's coldness and reserve, was shocked,
as though at some indelicacy on his part, at the contrast between the
excessive recognition bestowed on it and his never adequate geniality.
It has since struck me as one of the most touching aspects of the part
played in life by these idle, painstaking women that they devote
all their generosity, all their talent, their transferable dreams of
sentimental beauty (for, like all artists, they never seek to realise
the value of those dreams, or to enclose them in the four-square frame
of everyday life), and their gold, which counts for little, to the
fashioning of a fine and precious setting for the rubbed and scratched
and ill-polished lives of men. And just as this one filled the
smoking-room, where my uncle was entertaining her in his alpaca coat,
with her charming person, her dress of pink silk, her pearls, and the
refinement suggested by intimacy with a Grand Duke, so, in the same
way, she had taken some casual remark by my father, had worked it up
delicately, given it a 'turn,' a precious title, set in it the gem of a
glance from her own eyes, a gem of the first water, blended of humility
and gratitude; and so had given it back transformed into a jewel, a work
of art, into something altogether charming.

"Look here, my boy, it is time you went away," said my uncle.

I rose; I could scarcely resist a desire to kiss the hand of the lady
in pink, but I felt that to do so would require as much audacity as a
forcible abduction of her. My heart beat loud while I counted out to
myself "Shall I do it, shall I not?" and then I ceased to ask myself
what I ought to do so as at least to do something. Blindly, hotly,
madly, flinging aside all the reasons I had just found to support such
action, I seized and raised to my lips the hand she held out to me.

"Isn't he delicious! Quite a ladies' man already; he takes after his
uncle. He'll be a perfect 'gentleman,'" she went on, setting her teeth
so as