'You look your very best this evening, Delicia,' he said.
She made him a sweeping curtsey, and smiled.
'My lord, your favouring praise doth overwhelm me!' she answered. 'Is it not meet and right that I should so appear as to be deemed worthy of the house of Carlyon!
He put his arm round her waist and drew her to him. It was curious, he thought, how fresh her beauty seemed! And how the men in his 'set' would have burst into a loud guffaw of coarse laughter if any of them had thought that such was his opinion of his wife's charm—his own wife, to whom he had been fast wedded for over three years! According to the rules of 'modern' morality, one ought in three years to have had enough of one's lawful wife, and find a suitable 'soul' wherewith to claim 'affinity.'
'Delicia,' he said, playing idly with the lilies of her fan, 'I am sorry you were vexed about the Marina woman—'
She interrupted him by laying her little white-gloved fingers on his lips.
'Vexed? Oh, no, Will, not vexed. Why should I be? Pray don't let us talk about it any more; I have almost forgotten the incident. Come! It's time we started!'
And in response to the oddly penitent, half-sullen manner of the 'naughty boy' he chose to assume, she kissed him. Whereupon he tried that one special method of his, which had given him the victory in his wooing of her, the Passionate Outbreak; and murmuring in his rich voice that she was always the 'one woman in the world,' the 'angel of his life,' and altogether the very crown and summit of sweet perfection, he folded her in his arms with all a lover's fervour. And she, clinging to him, forgot her doubts and fears, forgot the austere observations of Marcus Aurelius, forgot the triumphs of her own intellectual career, forgot everything, in fact, but that she was the blindly-adoring devotee of a six-foot Guardsman, whom she had herself set up as a 'god' on the throne of the Ideal, and whom she worshipped through such a roseate cloud of sweet self-abnegation that she was unable to perceive how poor a fetish her idol was after all—made of nothing but the very commonest clay!
CHAPTER III
The smoking-room of the 'Bohemian' was full of a motley collection of men of the literary vagabond type—reporters, paragraphists, writers of penny dreadfuls, reeled off tape-wise from the thin spools of smoke-dried masculine brains; stray actors, playwrights anxious to translate the work of some famous foreigner and so get fastened on to his superior coat-tails, 'adapters' desirous of dramatising some celebrated novel and pocketing all the profits, anxious 'proposers' of new magazines looking about for 'funds' to back them up, and among all these an extremely casual sprinkling of the brilliant and successful workers in art and literature, who were either honorary members, or who had allowed their names to stand on the committee in order to give 'prestige' to a collection which would otherwise be termed the 'rag-tag and bob-tail' of literature. The opinions of the 'Bohemian,'—the airily idiotic theories with which the members disported themselves, and furnished food for laughter to the profane—were occasionally quoted in the newspapers, which of course gave the club a certain amount of importance in its own eyes, if in nobody else's. And the committee put on what is called a considerable amount of 'side'; now and then affecting to honour some half-and-half celebrity by asking him to a Five-Shilling dinner, and dubbing him the 'guest of the evening,' he meantime gloomily taking note of the half-cold, badly-cooked poorness of the meal, and debating within himself whether it would be possible to get away in time to have a chop 'from the grill' somewhere on his way home. The 'Bohemian' had been a long time getting started, owing to the manner in which the gentlemen who were 'in' persistently black-balled every new aspirant for the honours of membership. The cause of this arose from the chronic state of nervous jealousy in which the 'Bohemians' lived. To a certain extent, and as far as their personal animosities would permit, they were a 'Mutual Admiration Society,' and dreaded the intrusion of any stranger who might set himself to discover 'their tricks and their manners.' They had a lawyer of their own, whose business it was to arrange the disputes of the club, should occasion require his services, and they also had a doctor, a humorous and very clever little man, who was fond of strolling about the premises in the evening, and taking notes for the writing of a medical treatise to be entitled 'Literary Dyspepsia, and the Passion of Envy considered in its Action on the Spleen and Other Vital Organs,' a book which he justly considered would excite a great deal of interest among his professional compeers. But in spite of the imposing Committee of Names, the lawyer and the doctor, the 'Bohemian' did not pay. It struggled on, hampered with debts and difficulties, like most of its members. It gave smoking-concerts occasionally, for which it charged extra, and twice a year it admitted ladies to its dinners, during which banquets speeches were made distinctly proving to the fair sex that they had no business at all to be present. Still, with every advantage that a running fire of satirical comment could give it in the way of notoriety, the 'Bohemian' was not a prosperous concern; and no Yankee Bullion-Bag seemed inclined to take it up or invest in the chances of its future. A more sallow, sour, discontented set of men than were congregated in the smoking-room on the particular evening now in question could hardly be found anywhere between London and the Antipodes, and only the little doctor, leaning back in a lounge-chair with his neatly-shaped little legs easily crossed, and a smile on his face, seemed to enjoy his position as an impartial spectator of the scene. His smile, however, was one of purely professional satisfaction; he was making studies of a 'subject' in the person of a long-haired 'poet,' who wrote his own reviews. This son of the Muses was an untidy, dirty-looking man, and his abundant locks irresistibly reminded one of a black goat-skin door-mat, worn in places where reckless visitors had wiped their muddy boots thereon. No doubt this poet washed occasionally, but his skin was somewhat of the peculiar composition complained of by Lady Macbeth—'All the perfumes of Arabia' would neither cleanse nor 'sweeten' it.