“Well,” said Constance, smiling, “go on.”
“I have finished.”
“Finished?”
“Yes, my fair Insatiable! What more would you have?”
“Why, this is but a country-life you have been talking of; very well in its way for three months in the year.”
“Italy, then, for the other nine,” returned Godolphin.
“Ah, Percy!—is pleasure, mere pleasure, vulgar pleasure,—to be really the sole end and aim of life?”
“Assuredly.”
“And action, enterprise—are these as nothing?”
Godolphin was silent, but began absently to throw pebbles into the water. The action reminded Constance of the first time she had ever seen him among his ancestral groves; and she sighed as she now gazed on a brow from which the effeminacy and dreaming of his life had banished much of its early chivalric and earnest expression.