"Most men at the beginning, and very often ever after, are ignoble creatures. Yet I should confer the patents of nobility, if it were my prerogative; for some would succeed in living up to them. Vanity would accomplish that much. Vanity is the secret of noblesse oblige; not radical virtue—since we are beginning to be bookish again."
"To what do you reduce honour and right?" returned I.
"As I said to you on a memorable occasion," she answered very drily, "to a code."
"That is," rejoined I, "a man does a good action, lives an honourable life, to satisfy a social canon—to gratify, say, a wife or mother, who believes in him, and loves him?"
"Yes." She was watching Belle Treherne promenading with her father. She drew my attention to it by a slight motion of the hand, but why I could not tell.
"But might not a man fall by the same rule of vanity?" I urged. "That he shall appear well in their eyes, that their vanity in turn should be fed, might he not commit a crime, and so bring misery?"
"Yes, it is true either way—pleasure or misery. Please come to the saloon and get me an ice before the next dance."
I was perplexed. Was she altogether soulless? Even now, as we passed among the dancers, she replied to congratulations on her make-up and appearance with evident pleasure.
An hour later, I was taking Belle Treherne from the arm of Hungerford for the last waltz, and, in reply to an inquiring glance from him, I shook my head mournfully. His face showed solicitude as he walked away. Perhaps it did not gratify my vanity that Belle Treherne, as her father limped forward at the stroke of eight bells to take her below, said to me: "How downright and thorough Mr. Hungerford is!" But I frankly admitted that he was all she might say good of him, and more.
The deck was quickly dismantled, the lights went out, and all the dancers disappeared. The masquerade was over; and again, through the darkness, rose the plaintive "All's well!" And it kept ringing in my ears until it became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free. It was like the voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: "Never, never, never, never, never!"