no hand would stoop to pick up, but which the favoured one it should have fallen to would silently and gratefully receive into her heart.

Knowing what his fair audience expected, you will now be able to realize the utterly unexpected thunderclap he called down on all those listening heads.

IV

‘I have often heard moralists declare—men who have had deep experience of life,’ began the Comte de Ravila, ‘that the strongest of all our loves is neither the first nor yet the last, as many think, but the second. But in these matters everything is uncertain, and at any rate it was not so with me.…What you ask me about, ladies, the story I am about to tell you to-night, dates from the best period of my youth. I was not then what is technically called a “young man”, but I was young, albeit I had already, as an old uncle of mine, a knight of Malta, used to say to describe this epoch of life, sown my wild oats.¹

At this the look which each of the group simultaneously cast at all the rest, one and all eagerly drinking in the old serpent’s honeyed words, was a thing to have seen—for, indeed, it is indescribable.

‘The woman in question’, Ravila went on, ‘had every element of “distinction” you can imagine, in every sense of the word. She was young, rich, of noble name, beautiful, witty, and artistic—simple, too, and unaffected, with the genuine unaffectedness to be found only in well-bred circles, and not always there—to crown all, without another thought or inspiration but to please me, to be my devoted slave, at once the fondest of mistresses, and the best of comrades.

‘I was not, I have reason to believe, the first man she had loved.…She had given her affections once before—and it was not to her husband; but the whole affair had been virtuous, platonic, utopian—the sort of love that practises rather than satisfies a woman’s heart, that trains its powers for another and fuller passion, which is bound to supervene ere long. It is prentice love, in fact, something like the messe blanche young priests repeat by way of rehearsal, that they may not blunder in the genuine solemn Mass that is to follow.…When I came into her life she was only at the “white Mass”; I was her genuine Mass—and she went through it with every circumstance of pomp and ceremony, like a very cardinal.’

At this the prettiest smile flashed out on the twelve sweet mouths that listened round, like a circling eddy on the limpid surface of a pool.…It was gone in an instant, but entrancing while it lasted.

‘She was indeed one in a thousand!’ the comte resumed. ‘Rarely have I known more real good-heartedness, more gentle compassion, more justness of feeling—and this, even in love, which is, you know, a passion made up of evil as well as good.…Nowhere have I seen less manœuvring, or less prudishness and vanity, two things so often entangled in the web of feminine character, like a skein clawed over by a mischievous cat.…The cat had no part in her composition.…She was what those confounded romance-writers who poison our minds with phrases would call a “simple, primitive nature, complicated and embellished by civilization”; but she had borrowed of it only the pretty luxury of her habits, and not one of those little vices that sometimes seem even more alluring than the luxuries.’

‘Was she dark or fair?’ suddenly interrupted the duchesse, with a startling directness, tired out with so much metaphysics…

‘Ah! you miss my point!’ exclaimed Ravila keenly. ‘Well, I will tell you; her hair was dark, black as the blackest jet, the most perfect ebony mirror I have ever seen flash back the light from a woman’s head, but her complexion was fair—and it is by complexion, not hair, you should pronounce a woman brunette or blonde,’ added this student of the sex, who had observed women for something else than just to paint their portraits afterwards.…‘She was blonde with black hair.…’