Swans and sunlight. A little fishing boat with coral sails. A lake all grey and green. Beatitude intense. Consummate calm. It was nice to be at the Summer-Palace after all.
“The way the air will catch your cheek and make a rose of it,” the Countess of Tolga breathed. And as none of the company heeded her: “How sweetly the air takes one’s cheek,” she sighed again.
The post-prandial exercise of the members of the Court through the palace grounds was almost an institution.
The first half of the mourning prescribed, had as yet not run its course, but the tongues of the Queen’s ladies had long since made an end of it.
“I hate dancing with a fat man,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi was saying: “for if you dance at all near him, his stomach hits you, while if you pull away, you catch either the scent of his breath or the hair of his beard.”
“But, you innocent baby, all big men haven’t beards,” Countess Medusa Rappa remarked.
“Haven’t they? Never mind. Everything’s so beautiful,” the young girl inconsequently exclaimed: “Look at that Thistle! and that Bee! O, you darling!”
“Ah, how one’s face unbends in gardens!” the Countess of Tolga said, regarding the scene before her, with a faraway pensive glance.
Along the lake’s shore, sheltered from the winds by a ring of wooded hills, shewed many a proud retreat, mirroring its marble terraces to the waveless waters of the lake.
Beneath a twin-peaked crag (known locally as the White Mountain whose slopes frequently would burst forth into patches of garlic that from the valley resembled snow) nestled the Villa Clement, rented each season by the Ambassador of the Court of St James, while half-screened by conifers and rhododendrons, and in the lake itself, was St Helena—the home and place of retirement of a “fallen” minister of the Crown.