"I could not say exactly what our conversation tended to at the banquet; I believe I talked better than I ever talked before. A good listener can inspire conversation. I do not know if an extraordinary desire to please fosters or chills it; I found myself talking on about myself. Perhaps the general tendency of our conversation was at first directed to the models in history upon which I had based my strategy and endeavoured to mould my conduct. "From this the conversation must have wandered to an interchange--a recognition, almost an enumeration of signs of sympathy between us. I never found a woman so sympathetic, so completely the ideal of the feminine influence which should inspire a man. In this part of the conversation I do not remember that we actually used many words--it was more as if atoms were flying between us; and all the time there were those eyes looking like a Madonna's from that saintly head, and that wonderful smile with half-parted lips. "After the banquet, when we were in the reception-room with Her Majesty and the rest of the company, she went to the window, and flinging open the shutters, painted in the new Pompejan way, let in a flood of moonlight, and stepped out on to the broad terrace, looking in her white robes (Emma is fond of white) like a statue of a goddess against the glittering amethyst of the sky. I followed her, and gazed where she pointed over the black shining mirror of sea on which the moonlight lay in a great silver shaft; but I had barely time to note the little red glow in the rifted head of Vesuvio, and the great cone of Monte St. Angelo, when she said--'Not now, Nelson, with all these magnetic human hearts so near us. I could walk for ever with you in a scene like this, but I feel the Mesmer attraction broken by those disturbing currents.' Then she tripped quickly back into the presence-chamber, with the girlishness which is so much part of her. And then we joined my officers, who, in spite of the very marked friendliness of Her Majesty, were all collected in the exact centre of the room, at the point farthest from the Queen and her ladies, at one end, and the politicians, who ruin the country, at the other. They were better at the French than at court: they did not take naturally to this hobby-nobbying with Royalty. They were not like Emma, who up to this had never--except when we were for a brief visit to Naples--had any great acquaintance with His Majesty's officers, but now it seemed as if she were talking privately to every single man of them at the same time. She is a host in herself. "We stayed on late; for, going up to the Queen to pay our respects before leaving, we were by her detained, though my officers took their leave earlier, and when we entered My Lady's coach to drive back to the Embassy the moon was down. "We regretted the more our detention, because when we arrived at home we were met at the door by the news that Sir William was almost in a high fever.