"You mistake me,—I am but a spectator."
"Yes; but you desire to go behind the scenes; and he who once grows familiar with the green-room, longs to be an actor."
With Madame de Ventadour and the De Montaignes Maltravers passed the chief part of his time. They knew how to appreciate his nobler and to love his gentler attributes and qualities; they united in a warm interest for his future fate; they combated his Philosophy of Inaction; and they felt that it was because he was not happy that he was not wise. Experience was to him what ignorance had been to Alice. His faculties were chilled and dormant. As affection to those who are unskilled in all things, so is affection to those who despair of all things. The mind of Maltravers was a world without a sun!
CHAPTER III.
COELEBS, quid agam?*—HORACE.
* "What shall I do, a bachelor?"
IN a room at Fenton's Hotel sat Lord Vargrave and Caroline Lady
Doltimore,—two months after the marriage of the latter.
"Doltimore has positively fixed, then, to go abroad on your return from
Cornwall?"
"Positively,—to Paris. You can join us at Christmas, I trust?"
"I have no doubt of it; and before then I hope that I shall have arranged certain public matters, which at present harass and absorb me even more than my private affairs."