Féraz made a slight sign in the negative.
“She does not speak sincerely,” he said in a low tone.
El-Râmi laughed.
“My dear boy, you mustn’t expect any one to be ‘sincere’ in society. You said you wanted to ‘see life’—very well, but it will never do to begin by viewing it in that way. An outburst of actual sincerity in this human mêlée”—and he glanced comprehensively over the brilliant throng—“would be like a match to a gunpowder magazine—the whole thing would blow up into fragments and be dispersed to the four winds of heaven, leaving nothing behind but an evil odour.”
“Better so,” said Féraz dreamily, “than that false hearts should be mistaken for true.”
El-Râmi looked at him wistfully;—what a beautiful youth he really was, with all that glow of thought and feeling in his dark eyes! How different was his aspect from that of the jaded, cynical, vice-worn young men of fashion, some of whom were pushing their way past at that moment,—men in the twenties who had the air of being well on in the forties, and badly preserved at that—wretched, pallid, languid, exhausted creatures who had thrown away the splendid jewel of their youth in a couple of years’ stupid dissipation and folly. At that moment Lord Melthorpe, smiling and cordial, came up to them and shook hands warmly, and then introduced with a few pleasant words a gentleman who had accompanied him as,—“Roy Ainsworth, the famous artist, you know!”
“Oh, not at all!” drawled the individual thus described, with a searching glance at the two brothers from under his drowsy eyelids.—“Not famous by any means—not yet. Only trying to be. You’ve got to paint something startling and shocking nowadays before you are considered ‘famous’;—and even then, when you’ve outraged all the proprieties, you must give a banquet, or take a big house and hold receptions, or have an electrically-lit-up skeleton in your studio, or something of that sort, to keep the public attention fixed upon you. It’s such a restless age.”
El-Râmi smiled gravely.
“The feverish outburst of an unnatural vitality immediately preceding dissolution,” he observed.
“Ah!—you think that? Well—it may be,—I’m sure I hope it is. I, personally, should be charmed to believe in the rapidly-approaching end of the world. We really need a change of planet as much as certain invalids require a change of air. Your brother, however”—and here he flashed a keen glance at Féraz—“seems already to belong to quite a different sphere.”