“You have said the word, sir. ’Tis because it is so fleeting I must needs take care of my beauty. We poor women are like the butterflies and the roses. We have as brief a summer. You men, who value us only for our outward show, should pardon some vanity in creatures so ephemeral.” “Ephemeral scarce applies to a sex which owns such an example as your grandmother, who has lived to reckon her servants among the grandsons of her earliest lovers.” “Not lived, sir! No woman lives after thirty. She can but exist, and dream that she is still admired. La Marquise has been dead for the last twenty years, but she won’t own it. Ah, sir, c’est un triste supplice to _have been_! I wonder how those poor ghosts can bear that earthly purgatory which they call old age? Look at Madame de Sablé, par exemple, once a beauty, now only a tradition. And Queen Anne! Old people say she was beautiful, and that Buckingham risked being torn by wild horses—like Ravaillac—only to kiss her hand by stealth in a moonlit garden; and would have plunged England in war but for an excuse to come back to Paris. Who would go to war for Anne’s haggard countenance nowadays?” Even in Lady Fareham’s household the Cavalier soon began to fancy himself an inhabitant too much; a dull, grey ghost from a tragical past. He could not keep himself from talking of the martyred King, and those bitter years through which he had followed his master’s sinking fortunes. He told stories of York and of Beverley; of the scarcity of cash which reduced his Majesty’s Court to but one table; of that bitter affront at Coventry; of the evil omens that had marked the raising of the Standard on the hill at Nottingham, and filled superstitious minds with dark forebodings, reminding old men of that sad shower of rain that fell when Charles was proclaimed at Whitehall, on the day of his accession, and of the shock of earthquake on his coronation day; of Edgehill and Lindsey’s death; of the profligate conduct of the Cavalier regiments, and the steady, dogged force of their psalm-singing adversaries; of Queen Henrietta’s courage, and beauty, and wilfulness, and her fatal influence upon an adoring husband. “She wanted to be all that Buckingham had been,” said Sir John, “forgetting that Buckingham was the King’s evil genius.”