He raised himself with a laugh, but his lips looked white as death as he drank down a draught of the Hermitage. "Well! what say you: is the maxim right, _y-a-t-il femmes et femmes_? Caramba! why need you have pitched upon that portfolio?--There are the lights in the Acqua d'Oro's palace; we must go, or we shall get into disgrace." We went, and Beatrice Acqua d'Oro talked very ardent Italian to him, and the Comtesse Bois de Sandal remarked to me what a brilliant and successful man Lord ---- was, but how unimpressionable!--as cold and as glittering as ice. Nothing had ever made him _feel_, she was quite certain, pretty complimentary nonsense though he often talked. What would the Marchesa and the Comtesse have said, I wonder, had I told them of that little grave under the Pyrenean beech-woods? So much does the world know of any of us! In the lives of all men are doubled-down pages written on in secret, folded out of sight, forgotten as they make other entries in the diary, and never read by their fellows, only glanced at by themselves in some midnight hour of solitude. Basta! they are painful reading, my friends. Don't you find them so? Let us leave the skeletons in the closet, the pictures in the portfolio, the doubled-down pages in the locked diary, and go to Beatrice Acqua d'Oro's, where the lights are burning gayly. What is Madame Bois de Sandal, _née_ Dashwood, singing in the music room? The tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me! That is the burden of many songs sung in this world, for some dead flowers strew most paths, and grass grows over myriad graves, and many leaves are folded down in many lives, I fear. And--retrospection is very idle, my good fellow, and regret is as bad as the tic, and flirting is deucedly pleasant; the white Hermitage we drank to-night is gone, we know, but are there no other bottles left of wine every whit as good? Shall we waste our time sighing after spilt lees? Surely not. And yet--ah me!--the dead fragrance of those vines that yielded us the golden nectar of our youth! THE BEAUTY OF VICQ D'AZYR; OR, "NOT AT ALL A PROPER PERSON."