Such fancy, may be, in her too fond heart Had led Griselda--with her friend--apart, Yet not apart, from the world's curious gaze, To this secluded, ill-frequented place: A compromise of wills and varying moods, His for gay crowds, her own for solitudes. Manton knew Paris well, and loved its noise, Its mirthful parody of serious joys, Its pomp and circumstance. His wish had been To flaunt the boulevards with his captured queen, And make parade of a last triumph won In the chaste field of prudish Albion, Outscandalising scandal. Love and he In any sense but of male vanity, And the delirium of adventures new In the world's eye--the thing he next should do-- Were terms diverse and incompatible. Griselda, to his eyes, was Lady L., The fair, the chaste, the unapproached proud name Men breathed in reverence, woman, all the same, And not as such, and when the truth was said, Worth more than others lightlier credited. It all had been a jest from the beginning, A _tour de force_, whose wit was in the winning, A stroke of fortune and of accident, The embrace he had told of for another meant, While she stood grieving for a first grey hair (A psychologic moment) on the stair, And, kneeling down, he had adored her foot, The one weak spot where her self-love had root, And laughed at her, and told her she was old, Yet growing tenderer as he grew more bold; And so from jest to jest, and chance to chance, To that last scene at the mad country dance Where she had played the hoyden, he the swain, Pretending love till love was in their brain, And he had followed to her chamber door, And helped her to undo the dress she wore. Then the elopement. That had been her doing, Which he accepted to make good his wooing, And careless what to both the result might be, So it but served his end of vanity. It all had been to this vain boy a whim, Something grotesque, a play, a pantomime, Where nothing had been serious but her heart, And that was soon too tearful for its part. He wearied in a week of her mature Old maidish venturings in ways obscure, Her agony of conscience dimly guessed, The silences she stifled in her breast, Her awkwardness--it was his word--in all That love could teach; her sighs funereal, And more the unnatural laughter she essayed To meet the doubtful sense of things he said. She was at once too tender and too prim, Too prudish and too crazed with love and him. At a month's end his flame had leaped beyond Already to friends frailer and less fond, The light Parisian world of venal charms Which welcomed him with wide and laughing arms: There he was happier, more at home, more gay, King of the "high life," hero of the day.