And then the colour! Great heaven, can
anything be lovelier than this shadowy tint which is neither yellow nor
green; faint, faint as the dawn of newly-awakened day? After the siege
of blood-bedabbled Delhi, Baron Rothschild sent a special agent to India
to buy him a little jade tea-pot which had been the joy of Eastern
Kings. Only a tea-pot. Yet Rothschild deemed it worth a voyage from
England to India. That is what the love of the beautiful means, in Jew
or Gentile,' concluded the bard, smiling on the company, as they
gathered round the Florentine table on which the jade specimens were set
out, Lady Kirkbank looking at the little cups and basins as if she
thought they were going to do something, after all this fuss had been
made about them. It seemed hardly credible that any reasonable being
could have given thirty guineas for one of those bits of greenish-yellow
clouded glass, unless the thing had some peculiar property of expansion
or contraction.
After this breakfast in Park Lane Lady Lesbia and her admirer met daily.
He went to all her parties; he sat out waltzes with her, in
conservatories, and on staircases; for Horace Smithson was much too
shrewd a man too enter himself in the race for dancing men, handicapped
by his forty years and his fourteen stone.
Pages:
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518