scarcely better treated.
Close by, at another table, was another young girl, rather younger than
the first, and equally pretty. She too was dark haired, with a delicate
oval face and velvet black eyes, but without any of the passionate
distinction, the fire and flame of the other. She was German,
evidently. She wore a plain white dress with a red sash, and her little
feet in white shoes were lightly crossed in front of her. The face and
eyes were all alive, it seemed to him, with happiness, with the mere
pleasure of life. She could not keep herself still for a moment. Either
she was sending laughing signals to an elderly man near her, presumably
her father, or chattering at top speed with another girl of her own
age, or gathering her whole graceful body into a gesture of delight as
the familiar Rheingold music passed from one lovely _motif_ to another.
"You dear little thing!" thought the Englishman, with an impulse of
tenderness, which passed into foreboding amusement as he compared the
pretty creature with some of the matrons sitting near her, with one in
particular, a lady of enormous girth, whose achievements in eating and
drinking at meals had seemed to him amazing. Almost all the middle-aged
women in the hotel were too fat, and had lost their youth thereby,
prematurely. Must the fairy herself--Euphrosyne--come to such a muddy
vesture in the end? Twenty years hence?--alack!
"Beauty that must die." The hackneyed words came suddenly to mind, and
haunted him, as his eyes wandered round the room. Amid many coarse or
commonplace types, he yet perceived an unusual number of agreeable or
handsome faces; as is indeed generally the case in any Austrian hotel.
Faces, some of them, among the very young girls especially, of a
rose-tinted fairness, and subtly expressive, the dark brows arching on
white foreheads, the features straight and clean, the heads well
carried, as though conscious of ancestry and tradition; faces, also, of
the _bourgeoisie_, of a simpler, Gretchen-like beauty; faces--a few--of
"intellectuals," as he fancied,--including the girl with the
novel?--not always handsome, but arresting, and sometimes noble. He
felt himself in a border land of races, where the Teutonic and Latin
strains had each improved the other; and the pretty young girls and
women seemed to him like flowers sprung from an old and rich soil. He
found his pleasure in watching them--the pleasure of the Ancient
Mariner when he blessed the water-snakes. Sex had little to say to it;
and personal desire nothing. Was he not just over forty?--a very busy
Englishman, snatching a hard-earned holiday--a bachelor, moreover,
whose own story lay far behind him.
"_Beauty that must die_" The words reverberated and would not be
dismissed. Was it because he had just been reading an article in a new
number of the _Quarterly_, on "Contemporary Feminism," with mingled
amazement and revolt, roused by some of the strange facts collected by
the writer? So women everywhere--many women at any rate--were turning
indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes, affections,
servitudes, demanding "self-realisation," freedom for the individuality
and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and life-long
marriage; clamouring for easy divorce, and denouncing their own
fathers, brothers and husbands, as either tyrants or fools; casting
away the old props and veils; determined, apparently, to know
everything, however ugly, and to say everything, however outrageous? He
himself was a countryman, an English provincial, with English public
school and university traditions of the best kind behind him, a mind
steeped in history, and a natural taste for all that was ancient and