Bemused, too, did Etheredge find the Duke as they drove back together to Wallingford House.
“Almost, I think,” said he, smiling, “that already you find my despised prescription to your taste. Persevered with it may even restore you your lost youth.”
“What I ask myself,” said Buckingham, “is why you should have prescribed her for me instead of for yourself.”
“I am like that,” said Etheredge,—“the embodiment of self-sacrifice. Besides, she will have none of me—though I am ten years younger than you are, fully as handsome and almost as unscrupulous. The girl’s a prude, and I never learnt the way to handle prudes. Faith, it’s an education in itself.”
“Is it?” said Buckingham. “I must undertake it, then.”
And undertake it he did with all the zest of one who loved learning and the study of unusual subjects.
Daily now he was to be seen in a box at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and daily he sent her, in token of his respectful homage, gifts of flowers and comfits. He would have added jewels, but that the wiser Etheredge restrained him.
“Ne brusquez pas l’affaire,” was the younger man’s advice. “You’ll scare her by precipitancy, and so spoil all. Such a conquest as this requires infinite patience.”
His grace suffered himself to be advised, and set a restraint upon his ardour, using the greatest circumspection in the visits which he paid her almost daily after the performance. He confined the expressions of admiration to her histrionic art, and, if he touched upon her personal beauty and grace, it was ever in association with her playing, so that its consideration seemed justified by the part that he told her he was conceiving for her.