"What fools we are to sit shut up with gas-lights and tobacco on such a night as this!—a night for Lorenzo and Jessica, for Romeo and Juliet," he thinks, as he stands awhile at the open window of his own bedroom.
It is three o'clock: there is a faint suggestive light which means the dawn, young birds are twittering, there is a delicious scent of green leaves, of full-blown roses, of dewy mosses; the air is damp and warm, he can hear the feet of blackbirds scraping and turning over the mould and the grass; it is dark, yet he can distinguish the masses of the great woods beyond the gardens, the outlines of the trees near his casement, the shape of the clouds as they move slowly southward. He wonders in what part of the old house, whose fantastic roofs and turrets and gargoyles and ivy-colored buttresses are hidden in the dusk of the summer night, they have given the Princess Sabaroff her chamber. He remains some time at the open window, and goes to his bed as the dawn grows rosy.
"Lord Brandolin is in a very bad temper," says Mr. Wootton, when the smoking-room door has closed on the object of his detestation; then he pauses, and adds, significantly, "The Brandolins, you know, were always a little—just a little—clever family, very clever, but we all know to what great wits are sadly often allied. And this man has never done anything, with all his talent and opportunities; never done anything at all!"
"He has written first-rate books," says Usk, angrily, always ready to defend a friend in absence.
"Oh, books!" says "Mr. Wootton, with bland but unutterable disdain. Mr. Wootton is a critic of books, and therefore naturally despises them.
"What would you have him do?" growls Usk, pugnaciously.
Mr. Wootton stretches his legs out, and gazes with abstracted air at the ceiling. "Public life," he murmurs. "Public life is the only possible career for an Englishman of position. But it demands sacrifices; it demands sacrifices."
"You mean that one has to marry?" says the young Duke of Queenstown, timidly.
Mr. Wootton smiles on him loftily. "Marry? yes, undoubtedly; and avoid scandals afterwards; avoid, beyond all, those connections which lend such a charm to existence, but are so apt to get into the newspapers."
There is a general laugh.