He knew of a certainty that he had not yet exhausted the surprises prepared for him by Destiny. There had been fairies at his christening (in St. James’s, Piccadilly). And now the memories of that unforgettable night at the Régale were drumming in his veins like some insidious and urgent poison. A new consciousness was dawning upon him, and he gazed on its unfolding contours, like stout Darien in the sonnet, in the mute silence of amazement.
Recovering himself, “New term, new life,” he murmured neatly. And the train picked up the rhythm of the words as it rolled relentlessly onwards.…
That evening Gaveston sat alone in his room, amusedly aware that in another Gothic chamber an eager assemblage of Mongoons were gulping their barley-water in tenterhooked anticipation of his momently arrival. But far different were his thoughts from what those polished Philistines would have expected in their hero.
Sipping in carefully calculated rotation glasses of crême de cacao and vodka and mavrodaphne—somehow the interblend of their hues and aromas seemed that night to chime in tune with the interplay of his own emotions—Gaveston was planning the redecoration of his rooms and his personality. “Each mirrors the other,” he reflected sagaciously. And a becoming blush illumined his cheeks as he realized how insular and barbarian his life had been so far, despite that long childhood of foreign table d’hôtes—how English and ingenuous, despite the many stories long current in Society of his authentic artistic temperament.
“Myths!” he cried aloud. “Myths!”
And with a sort of dull despair he thought how poorly read he really was, how Philistinish the stuff that had so long delighted him—Hope and Hay, Haggard and Merriman, Doyle and Dell.
“Zut!” as he had heard a voice say in the Régale.
And what a gallery of pictures was his! He looked round his walls with eyes very aghast. Those photogravures that had been his pride! Love Locked Out and The Laughing Cavalier and Dante’s Meeting With Beatrice—Watts—Meissonier—Rossetti. Quel galère indeed.…
And just at that moment David Paunceford rushed in, his eyes atwinkle, his Norfolk jacket flying open in his boyish haste to see his friend, and tell him, pell-mell, of vacation exploits in the Oberland and glorious skiing races up the Cresta run. For a moment he hardly realized that his zest was not à propos to Gaveston’s mood.