First came the cornet—a sunny-haired Apollo, a gilded youth, graceful and magnificent to the eye—careless, fearless, but stupid, harsh, and proud—an English Phébus de Châteaupers—the son of a great contractor; I remembered him well, and that he loved me not. Then the rank and file in stable jackets, most of them (but for a stalwart corporal here and there) raw, lanky youths, giving promise of much future strength, and each leading a second horse; and among them, longest and lankiest of them all, but ruddy as a ploughboy, and stolidly whistling "On revient toujours à ses premiers amours," rode my former self—a sight (or sound) that seemed to touch some tender chord in Mary's nature, where there were so many, since it filled her eyes with tears.
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To describe in full a honey-moon filled with such adventures, and that lasted for three years, is unnecessary. It would be but another superficial record of travel, by another unskilled pen. And what a pen is wanted for such a theme! It was not mere life, it was the very cream and essence of life, that we shared with each other—all the toil and trouble, the friction and fatigue, left out. The necessary earthly journey through time and space from one joy to another was omitted, unless such a journey were a joy in itself.
For instance, a pleasant hour can be spent on the deck of a splendid steamer, as it cleaves its way through a sapphire tropical sea, bound for some lovely West Indian islet; with a good cigar and the dearest companion in the world, watching the dolphins and the flying-fish, and mildly interesting one's self in one's fellow-passengers, the captain, the crew. And then, the hour spent and the cigar smoked out, it is well to shut one's eyes and have one's self quietly lowered down the side of the vessel into a beautiful sledge, and then, half smothered in costly furs, to be whirled along the frozen Neva to a ball at the Winter Palace, there to valse with one's Mary among all the beauty and chivalry of St. Petersburg, and never a soul to find fault with one's valsing, which at first was far from perfect, or one's attire, which was not that of the fashionable world of the day, nor was Mary's either. We were aesthetic people, and very Greek, who made for ourselves fashions of our own, which I will not describe.
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Where have we not waltzed together, from Buckingham Palace downward? I confess I grew to take a delight in valsing, or waltzing, or whatever it is properly called; and although it is not much to boast of, I may say that after a year or two no better dancer than I was to be found in all Vienna.
And here, by the way, I may mention what pleasure it gave me (hand in hand with Mary, of course, as usual) to renew and improve my acquaintance with our British aristocracy, begun so agreeably many years ago at Lady Cray's concert.
Our British aristocracy does not waltz well by any means, and lacks lightness generally; but it may gratify and encourage some of its members to hear that Peter Ibbetson (ex-private soldier, architect and surveyor, convict and criminal lunatic), who has had unrivalled opportunities for mixing with the cream of European society, considers our British aristocracy quite the best-looking, best-dressed, and best-behaved aristocracy of them all, and the most sensible and the least exclusive—perhaps the most sensible because the least exclusive.
It often snubs, but does not altogether repulse, those gifted and privileged outsiders who (just for the honor and glory of the thing) are ever so ready to flatter and instruct and amuse it, and run its errands, and fetch and carry, and tumble for its pleasure, and even to marry such of its "ugly ducklings" (or shall we say such of its "unprepossessing cygnets?") as cannot hope to mate with birds of their own feather.
For it has the true English eye for physical beauty.