‘I daresay she feels pretty much as Astarte, or Baal, or any of those ancient parties would have felt, if they had been capable of feeling, when they were propitiated with human sacrifices. She won’t answer my letters, or afford me a ray of encouragement, but likes to know that there is an honest fool breaking his heart for her. No matter. I would rather break my heart for her than live happy ever afterwards, as the story-books say, with any one else. So courage, Geoffrey; let us show her how much ill-usage true lovers can bear, and still love on, and hope on, till love and hope are extinguished together in one untimely grave.’ And Geoffrey, whose philosophic mind was wont thus to relieve the tedium of the toilet, would contemplate his visage in the glass as he arranged his white tie, and wonder that ill-starred passion had not made greater ravages in his countenance; that he had not grown pale and wan, and seamed with premature wrinkles. ‘I wonder I’m not as grim-looking as Count Ugolino, by this time,’ he said to himself; and then went down to his private sitting-room at the Royal George, to eat a dinner of five courses in solitary state, for the benefit of that old-established family hotel. Love as yet had not affected his appetite. He did excellent justice to the _cuisine_ of the _chef_ at the George, an artist far above the common type of hotel cooks. This young worldling was not without expedients. Inaccessible as his bright particular star might be, he yet contrived to scrape acquaintance with one of the lesser lights in that planetary system of which she was a part. A little finesse and a good deal of brandy-and-soda obtained for him the friendship of a youthful pianist, whose duty it was to accompany the singers. From this youth, who wore his hair long, affected the dreamily classical school, and believed himself a mute inglorious Chopin, Geoffrey heard all that was to be heard about Mrs. Bertram. But, alas, this all was little more than the musicsellers had already told him. No one knew any more about her than the one fact of her supreme isolation, and that reserve of manner which was, perhaps unjustly, called pride. She lived alone; received no one, visited no one, kept her fellow performers at the farthest possible distance. If she took a lodging, it was always remote from the quarter affected by the rest of the little company; if she stayed at an hotel, it was never the hotel chosen by the others. So much as this Geoffrey contrived to hear—not once only, but many times—without committing himself to the faintest expression of his feelings. He would have perished sooner than degrade his passion by making it the subject of vulgar gossip. ‘If I cannot win her without a go-between,’ he said to himself, ‘I am not worthy of her.’