第27章 CHAPTER X(2)

SHE, at any rate, could wait for YEARS.' Upon the whole the result was comforting - especially as the 'years' dispensed with the necessity of any immediate step more desperate than dinner. This we enjoyed like men who had earned it; and long before I deposited my dear friar in his cell both of us were snoring in our respective corners of the chaise.

A word or two will complete this romantic episode. The next long vacation I spent in London, bent, needless to say, on a happy issue to my engagement. How simple, in the retrospect, is the frustration of our hopes! I had not been a week in town, had only danced once with my FIANCEE, when, one day, taking a tennis lesson from the great Barre, a forced ball grazed the frame of my racket, and broke a blood vessel in my eye.

For five weeks I was shut up in a dark room. It was two more before I again met my charmer. She did not tell me, but her man did, that their wedding day was fixed for the 10th of the following month; and he 'hoped they would have the pleasure of seeing me at the breakfast!' [I made the following note of the fact: N.B. - A woman's tears may cost her nothing; but her smiles may be expensive.]

I must, however, do the young lady the justice to state that, though her future husband was no great things as a 'man,' as she afterwards discovered, he was the heir to a peerage and great wealth. Both he and she, like most of my collaborators in this world, have long since passed into the other.

The fashions of bygone days have always an interest for the living: the greater perhaps the less remote. We like to think of our ancestors of two or three generations off - the heroes and heroines of Jane Austen, in their pantaloons and high-waisted, short-skirted frocks, their pigtails and powdered hair, their sandalled shoes, and Hessian boots. Our near connection with them entrances our self-esteem. Their prim manners, their affected bows and courtesies, the 'dear Mr. So-and-So' of the wife to her husband, the 'Sir' and 'Madam' of the children to their parents, make us wonder whether their flesh and blood were ever as warm as ours; or whether they were a race of prigs and puppets?

My memory carries me back to the remnants of these lost externals - that which is lost was nothing more; the men and women were every whit as human as ourselves. My half-sisters wore turbans with birds-of-paradise in them. My mother wore gigot sleeves; but objected to my father's pigtail, so cut it off. But my father powdered his head, and kept to his knee-breeches to the last; so did all elderly gentlemen, when I was a boy. For the matter of that, I saw an old fellow with a pigtail walking in the Park as late as 1845. He, no doubt, was an ultra-conservative.

Fashions change so imperceptibly that it is difficult for the historian to assign their initiatory date. Does the young dandy of to-day want to know when white ties came into vogue?