That old bell, presage of a train, had just sounded through Oxford station; and the undergraduates there waiting, gay intweeded or flannelated figures, moved to the margin of the platform and gazed idly up the line. Young and careless, they seemed out of place on the worn boards they shaded from the glow of afternoon sunshine. Perhaps they were out of place, while the fading signals and grey walls of that antique station, as insignificant to them as familiar, yet whisper to the able ear the last enchantments of the Middle Age. Significance and the power to signify, how rarely these are met in the afternoon sunshine.

At the door of the first-class waiting-room, aloof and venerable, stood the Warden of Judas. A marble pillar of tradition seemed he, disguised in his garb of an old-fashioned cleric. Aloft, between the wide brim of his silk hat and the white extent of his shirt-front, appeared those eyes which hawks, that nose which eagles, had often envied. He supported his years on a well polished chinaberry stick. He alone was worthy of the background.

Came a whistle from the distance. The breast of an engine was descried, a single round opening of light adorning its upper frame and a long train curving after it, heavy, impetuous under a flight of smoke. It grew and grew. Louder and louder, its noise foreran it. Longer and longer from up close, the train became a furious, enormous monster, slick and shining under their gaze. With an instinct for safety, all men receded from the platform's margin. With it came danger far more terrible, but yet unknown to them ; and once known impossible to flee to safety from, because in its case instinct, that saviour of mankind, pushed them to sure and certain doom.

The snake came blustering into the expectant station, enveloped in cloud and clangour. Before it retreated, before it had yet even stopped proper, the door of one carriage flew open, and from it, in a white travelling dress, in a toque a-twinkle with fine diamonds, a lithe and radiant creature slipped nimbly down to the platform on her own two legs and by her own, mysterious power.

A cynosure indeed! A hundred eighteen eyes were fixed on her, and imprecisely half as many hearts lost to her. The Warden of Judas himself had mounted on his nose a pair of black-rimmed glasses. Him espying, the nymph darted in his direction. The throng made way for her. She was at his side.

"Grandpapa!" she cried, and kissed the old man on either cheek while not a youth there but would have bartered the difference of years left in his own future to obtain in exchange that salute.

"My dear Zuleika," he said, "welcome to Oxford! Have you no luggage?"

"Heaps!" she answered. "And a maid who will find it."

"Then," said the Warden, "let us drive straight to College." He offered her his arm, and they proceeded slowly to the entrance. She chatted gaily, blushing not in the long avenue of eyes she passed through. All the youths, under her spell, were now quite oblivious of the relatives they had come to meet. Parents, sisters, cousins, milled unclaimed about the platform. Undutiful, all the youths were forming a serried suite to their enchantress. In silence they followed her. They saw her leap into the Warden's landau, they saw the Warden seat himself upon her left. Nor was it until the landau was lost to sight that they turned -- how slowly, and with how bad a grace! -- to look for their relatives.

Through those slums which connect Oxford with the world, also known as "Modern England", sad twirligig of "efficiency" and "spreading -- works!", affreux end product of life that -- in a most un-English manner -- would much rather make more sons than dress the sons it already made to any kind of standard, the landau rolled on towards Judas. Not many youths occurred, for nearly all -- it was the Monday of Eights Week -- were down by the river, cheering the crews. There did, however, come spurring by, on a polo-pony, a very splendid youth. His straw hat was encircled with a riband of blue and white, and he raised it to the Warden.

"That," said the Warden, "is the Duke of Dorset, a member of my College. He dines at my table to-night."

Zuleika, turning to regard his Grace, saw that he had not reined in and was not even glancing back at her over his shoulder. She gave a little start of dismay, but scarcely had her lips pouted ere they curved to a smile -- a smile with no malice whatever in its corners.

As the landau rolled into "the Corn," another youth -- a pedestrian, and very different -- saluted the Warden. He wore a black jacket, rusty and amorphous. His trousers were too short, and he himself was too short: almost a dwarf. His face was as plain as his gait was undistinguished. He squinted behind spectacles.

"And who is that?" asked Zuleika.

The Warden cleared his throat. "That," he said, "is also a member of Judas. His name, I believe, is Noakes."

"Is he dining with us to-night?" asked Zuleika.

"Certainly not," said the Warden. "Most decidedly not."

Noakes, unlike the Duke, had stopped for an ardent retrospect. He gazed till the landau was out of his short sight; then, sighing, resumed his solitary walk.

The landau was rolling into "the Broad," over that ground which had once blackened under the fagots lit for Latimer and Ridley. It rolled past the portals of Balliol and of Trinity, past the Ashmolean. From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, high, grim busts of some Roman Emperors, as well cut into the local stone as the local hands could manage stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate had little charm for her.

A moment later, a certain old don emerged from Blackwell's, where he had been buying books. Looking across the road, he saw, to his amazement, great beads of perspiration glistening on the brows of those imperial statues. He trembled, and hurried away. That evening, in Common Room, he told what he had seen; and no amount of polite scepticism would convince him that it was but the hallucination of one who had been reading too much Mommsen. He persisted that he had seen what he described. It was not until two days had elapsed that some credence was accorded him.

Yes, as the landau rolled by, sweat started from the brows of that truly English mimicry of splendors past. The inept statues, through whatever faint link to the actual experience and actual wisdom of the historic figures they struggled to represent, a link more to be ascribed to the truly great merits of Latin men than to the altogether dubious offices of local stonecutters borne among the sheep herds, foresaw the wonder that was overhanging Oxford, and celebrated as they could. Let it be remembered to their credit, that they first saw an insignificant collection of orcs take their very first steps towards true civilisation ; and let that incline us to think ever more greatly of them. In their lives, as we know, they were perfect without exception -- what among the sewing circle is called "lechers" or "tyrants" or whatnot. They, who were godlike, godlike remain ; and even through the muddy veil of most inapt idolatry their absolute splendor to some degree still shines.

~ * ~

The sun streamed through the bay-window of a "best" bedroom in the Warden's house, and glorified the pale crayon-portraits on the wall, the dimity curtains, the old fresh chintz. He invaded the many trunks which -- all painted Z. D. -- gaped, in various stages of excavation, around the room. The doors of the huge wardrobe stood, like the doors of Janus' temple in time of war, majestically open; and the sun seized this opportunity of exploring the mahogany recesses. But the carpet, which had over the years faded under his repeated visitations, was now almost completely hidden from him, hidden under layers of fair fine linen, layers of silk, brocade, satin, chiffon, muslin. Half the colours of the rainbow were there, the half that went with Zuleika, as materialised by a legion of unknown modistes. Stacked on chairs were I know not what of sachets, glove-cases, fan-cases, basket-cases etcetera. There were innumerable packages in silver-paper and pink ribands. There was a pyramid of bandboxes. There was a virgin forest of boot-trees. And rustling quickly hither and thither, in and out of this profusion, with armfuls of finery, was a slender and very obviously French maid. Alert, unerring, like a swallow she dipped and darted. Nothing escaped her, and she never rested. She had the air of the born unpacker -- swift and firm, yet withal tender. Scarce had her arms been laden but their loads were lying lightly between shelves or tightly in drawers. To calculate, catch, distribute, seemed in her but a single process. She would have made a fine secretary.

Insomuch that ere the loud chapel-clock tolled another hour all the trunks had been sent empty away. The carpet was unflecked by any scrap of silver-paper. From the mantelpiece, photographs of Zuleika surveyed the room with a possessive air. Who but a clueless young girl will keep framed pictures of herself ? Zuleika's pincushion, a-bristle with new pins, lay on the dimity-flounced toilet-table, and round it stood a multitude of multiform small vessels, none of which glass, all of which translucent, and mostly domed with dull gold on which Z. D was variably encrusted, in precious stones, enamels and such vanities. On a small table stood a great casket of malachite, initialled in like fashion. On another small table stood Zuleika's library entire. Both books were bound in complicated covers replete of gold. On the back of one cover "Bradshaw's Guide", in beryls, was encrusted; on the back of the other, "Guide to V.", in amethysts, beryls, chrysoprases, and garnets. What fool would encrust stones in the back of a book, where the constant opening and closing of the item makes their station most untenable... unless, of course, under the firmest of assurances that the product never will be opened. More substantively, Zuleika's great cheval-glass stood ready to reflect her. Always it travelled with her, in a great case specially made for it. It was framed in ivory, and of fluted ivory were the slim columns it swung between ; of gold were its twin sconces, and four tall tapers stood in each of them.

The door opened, and the Warden, with hospitable words, left his grand-daughter at the threshold. Zuleika wandered to her mirror. "Deshabille moi, Clotilde," she said. Like all who are wont to appear by night before the public, she had the habit of resting towards sunset.

Presently Clotilde withdrew. Her mistress, in a gauzy white peignoir tied with a blue sash, lay in a great chintz chair, gazing out of the bay-window. Her breast, finally freed of the girdle of convention eagerly drank in the dying sun while diminutive, twin little crowns contracted in the light breeze. The quadrangle below was very beautiful, with its walls of rugged grey, its cloisters, its grass carpet. But to her it was of no more interest than if it had been the rattling court-yard to one of those hotels in which she mostly spent her life. She saw it, but heeded it not. She seemed to be thinking of herself, or of something she desired, or of some one she had never met. There was ennui, and there was wistfulness in her gaze ever as her left thumb and forefinger grabbed a rugged hold of her right nipple through the insubstantial gauze and pulled it roughly, inches away. As Zuleika closed her eyes the manicured nail of the thumb bit deeply into her tender flesh, yet one would have guessed these things to be transient, to be no more than the little shadows that sometimes pass between a bright mirror and the brightness it reflects, or the little sigh that crumpled Zuleika's breath.

While it was often clamored that she were, and while she herself enjoyed nothing more than that clamor, Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were not at all original but, rather like in an enduring piece of literature, derived from a gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen came the shapely tilt of the nose. The mouth was a mere replica of that famous Duchess' of Parma's. No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of her rosy cheeks. Her neck was transplanted marble ; her body altogether a poor Godward copy, with feet of very mean proportions and practically no waist to speak of.

Yet, though a Greek would have railed at her asymmetry, and an Elizabethan'd have unsurprisingly called her a gipsy, Miss Dobson now, in the midst of the Edwardian Era, was the toast of two hemispheres. Before she turned seventeen she had become an orphan by circumstance, and immediately thereafter a governess by necessity. Her grandfather, the Warden, had refused her appeal for a home or an allowance on the grounds that he would not be burdened with the upshot of a marriage which he had once forbidden and not yet forgiven. Lately, however, prompted by curiosity, or by remorse, or by who knows what genie pushes old men to do strange things, he had asked her to spend some time of his declining years with him. And she, "resting" between two engagements of which one at the Folies Bergeres in Paris and having never been in Oxford, had so far let bygones be bygones as to come and gratify the old man's whim.

It may be that she still resented his indifference to those early struggles which, even now, she shuddered to recall ; or maybe resentment is not the proper word. For a governess' life she had been, indeed, notably unfit. Hard and mean she had thought it, that penury should force her back into the school-room she was scarce out of, there to champion before fresher examples of her kind the very sums and maps and conjugations she had never in the first place tried to master on account of her own freshness and of its natural imperatives. Hating her work, she had failed signally to pick up any learning from her little pupils, and had been driven from house to house, a sullen and most ineffectual maiden. The sequence of her situations was the swifter by reason of her pretty face. Was there a grown-up son of whatever age, always he fell in love with her, and she would let his eyes trifle boldly with hers across the dinner-table. When he offered her his hand, she would refuse it -- not because she "knew her place," but because she did not love him. Even had she been a good teacher, her presence could not have been tolerated thereafter. Her corded trunk, heavier by another packet of billets-doux and a month's salary in advance, was soon carried up the stairs of some other stately house.

It chanced that she came, at length, to be governess in a large family that had Gibbs for its name and Notting Hill for its background. Edward, the eldest son, was a clerk in the city, who spent his evenings in the practice of amateur conjuring. He was a freckled youth, with hair that bristled in places where it should have lain smooth, and he fell in love with Zuleika duly, at first sight, during high-tea. In the course of the evening, he sought to win her admiration by a display of all his tricks. These were familiar to this household, and the children had been sent to bed, the mother was dozing, long before the seance was at an end. But Miss Dobson, unaccustomed to any gaieties, sat fascinated by the young man's sleight of hand, marvelling that a top-hat could hold so many goldfish, and a handkerchief turn so swiftly into a silver florin. All that night, she lay wide awake, haunted by the miracles he had wrought.

Next evening, when she asked him to repeat them, "Nay," he whispered, "I cannot bear to deceive the girl I love. Permit me to explain the tricks." So he explained them. His eyes sought hers across the bowl of gold-fish, his fingers trembled as he taught her to manipulate the magic canister. One by one, she mastered the paltry secrets. Her respect for him waned with every revelation. He complimented her on her skill. "I could not do it more neatly myself!" he said. "Oh, dear Miss Dobson, will you but accept my hand, all these things shall be yours -- the cards, the canister, the goldfish, the demon egg-cup -- all yours!" Zuleika, with ravishing coyness, answered that if he would give her them now, she would "think it over." The swain consented, and at bed-time she retired with the gift under her arm. In the light of her bedroom candle Marguerite hung not in greater ecstasy over the jewel-casket than hung Zuleika over the box of tricks. She clasped her hands over the tremendous possibilities it held for her -- manumission from her bondage, wealth, fame, power. Stealthily, so soon as the house slumbered, she packed her small outfit, embedding therein the precious gift. Noiselessly, she shut the lid of her trunk, corded it, shouldered it, stole down the stairs with it. Outside -- how that chain had grated! and her shoulder, how it was aching! -- she soon found a cab. She took a night's sanctuary in some railway-hotel. Next day, she moved into a small room in a lodging-house off the Edgware Road, and there for a whole week she was sedulous in the practice of her tricks. Then she inscribed her name on the books of a "Juvenile Party Entertainments Agency."

The Christmas holidays were at hand, and before long she got an engagement. It was a great evening for her. Her repertory was, it must be confessed, old and obvious; but the children, in deference to their hostess, pretended not to know how the tricks were done, and assumed their prettiest airs of wonder and delight. One of them even pretended to be frightened, and was led howling from the room. In fact, the whole thing went off splendidly. The hostess was charmed, and told Zuleika that a glass of lemonade would be served to her in the hall. Other engagements soon followed. Zuleika was very, very happy. I cannot claim for her that she had a genuine passion for her art. The true conjurer finds his guerdon in the consciousness of work done perfectly and for its own sake. Lucre and applause are not necessary to him. If he were set down, with the materials of his art, on a desert island, he would yet be quite happy. He would not cease to produce the barber's-pole from his mouth. To the indifferent winds he would still speak his patter, and even in the last throes of starvation would not eat his live rabbit or his gold-fish.

Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's foot-print. She was, indeed, far too human a creature to care much for art. I do not say that she took her work lightly. She thought she had genius, and she liked to be told that this was so. But mainly she loved her work as a means of mere self-display, as a means to gratify that truly deep and centrally seated need of the female mammal, to have her musk upon the winds. The frank, incensed admiration which, into whatsoever house she entered, the grown-up sons flashed on her; their eagerness to see her to the door; their impressive way of putting her into her omnibus -- these were the things she revelled in. She was a nymph to whom men's admiration was the greater part of life.

By day, whenever she went into the streets, she was conscious that no man passed her without a stare; and this consciousness gave a sharp zest to her outings. Sometimes she was followed to her door -- crude flattery which she was too innocent to fear. Even when she went into the haberdasher's to make some little purchase of tape or riband, or into the grocer's -- for she was an epicure in her humble way -- to buy a tin of potted meat for her supper, the homage of the young men behind the counter did flatter and exhilarate her. As the homage of men became for her, more and more, a matter of course, the more subtly necessary was it to her happiness. The more she won of it, the more she treasured it, and the more she treasured it, the more prodigal sums and quantities of it her soul processed in its daily machinations. Just as the more fish is to be found, the larger the fishing dock grows, just like cities scale with the trade available to them and factories ever expand as they find demand for their production, Zuleika's organs dedicated to the metabolism of male admiration grew and grew and grew to collossal proportion ; exactly in the manner a truck may scarcely notice loads which would overcome any old mule, Zuleika could pass undisturbed through agglomerations of homage that'd have brought the common damsel to her knees, weeping confused.

She was alone in the world, and it saved her from any moment of regret that she had neither home nor friends. For her the streets that lay around her had no squalor, since she paced them always in the gold nimbus of her fascinations. Her bedroom seemed not mean nor lonely to her, since the little square of glass, nailed above the wash-stand, was ever there to reflect her face. Thereinto, indeed, she was ever peering. She would droop her head from side to side, she would bend it forward and see herself from beneath her eyelashes, then tilt it back and watch herself over her supercilious chin. And she would smile, frown, pout, languish -- let all the emotions hover upon her face; and always she seemed to herself lovelier than she had ever been.

Yet was there nothing Narcissine in her spirit. Her love for her own image was not cold aestheticism. She valued that image not for its own sake, nor for the sake of the glory it always won for her. Her beauty wasn't the instrument of satisfying vanity, but on the contrary. Zuleika's deepest, most buried, unspeakable secret, unknown to herself even if vaguely intuited was that she cherished her damnation. She knew, without actually knowing, in that deeply feminine manner, that the more her merits the harder the usage to come, and she revelled, unconsciously, in that luxuriant fall awaiting her. She felt, vaguely, without being aware of the fact, that every compliment she received, every scrap of attention, every gaze is a draw on an account somewhere, and the further it draws the harder will it whiplash one day, to scourge her thoroughly, utterly, to use her everything entirely before discarding her on the scrap heap. It was a promise of future joy, and in token of that future joy she cherished the hollow promise of today.

In the remote music-hall with cracked walls and creaky floors where she was soon appearing as an "early turn," she reaped glory in a mighty, nightly harvest. She could feel that all the gallery-boys were scornful of the sweethearts they themselves had brought to wedge in between them, scornful because of her and not because of them, just as she knew that she had but to say "Will any gentleman in the audience be so good as to lend me his hat?" for the stalls to rise as one man and rush towards the platform. But greater things were in store for her. She was engaged at two halls in the West End. Her horizon was fast receding, the circle it described upon the Earth expanding. Homage became tangible, at first coming in bouquets but soon changing to rings, brooches -- all manner of things valuable that were also acceptable and (more than can be said of the donors) accepted. Even Sunday was not barren for Zuleika: modish hostesses gave her (but as a mere image, never as the actual thing) postprandially to their guests. Came that Sunday night, that shining pearl of a night, when she received certain guttural compliments which made absolute her vogue and enabled her to command, thenceforth, whatever terms she asked for.

Already, indeed, she was rich. She was living at the most exorbitant hotel in all Mayfair. She had innumerable gowns while to date had not yet encountered the necessity to buy jewels. She also had that one item which pleased her most, the fine cheval-glass before described. At the close of the Season, Paris claimed her for a month's engagement. Paris saw her and was prostrate. Boldini did a portrait of her. Jules Bloch wrote a song about her; and this, for a whole month, was howled up and down the cobbled alleys of Montmartre while all the little dandies were mad for "la Zuleika." The jewellers of the Rue de la Paix soon had nothing left to put in their windows -- everything had been bought for "la Zuleika." For a whole month, baccarat was not played at the Jockey Club -- every member had succumbed to a nobler passion. For a whole month, the whole demi-monde was forgotten for one English maiden -- or at least so did the hired publicist report the matter back in London, after the fact, on the occasion of her return. Never, even in Paris, had a woman triumphed so, thought the copywriter. When the day came for her departure, the city wore such an air of sullen mourning as it had not worn since the Prussians marched to its Elysee, said the copy.

Zuleika, quite untouched, did not linger in that nominally conquered city. Agents had come to her from every capital in Europe, and, for a year, she ranged, in triumphal nomady, from one place to another, like students in the better, long past days of University life. It is a sad comment on the decay of civilisation that even as the act of vagabondage went from being exercised by Villon and Rabelais to Miss Zuleika Dobson, its product went from Pantagruel and the most novel Testament to petty parlor tricks. It would have not been thinkable, in the fifteenth century, for a damsel to engage in the life of the road ; that is all gone now, but in exchange it is no longer thinkable for the products of that life to be worthy of much attention. This fundamental truth eternally endureth, that by the time women are to be found engaged in it, the thing's well ready to be thrown out -- much in the manner of cheese, which stays cheese whatever its aroma or composure until that day maggots turn up in it.

Nevertheless, the self proclaimed students of Berlin escorted her home with torches every night ; and prince Lattengitterkotterbeutelratterattentater-Hottentottenstottertrottelmutterattentater offered her his hand at the end of a lengthy diatribe and for the deed stood condemned by the Kaiser to six months' confinement in his disproportionately small castle. In the Malta Kiosk at Yildiz, the ruler of an ancient civilisation regarded her with experienced eye, and after consulting his most trusted sluts and private whores conferred on her the Order of Chastity, an ancient dignity in that part of the world exactly comensurate with and perfectly representative of her own thoughts, those hidden and invisible thoughts secret from all, including herself. She did not know the history of past recipients, or what proportion of them had drowned by their own hand in the golden waters of the golden Horn -- but then again the world entire consists of nothing more than what its tenants do not know.

She gave her performance in the Quirinal, and, from the Vatican, the Pope launched against her a Bull which, when compared side by side to the lady's silhouette, appeared altogether flat. In Petersburg, the Grand Duke Andrew Vladimirovich fell enamoured of her. Of every article in the apparatus of her conjuring-tricks he caused a replica to be made in finest gold. These treasures he presented to her in that great malachite casket which now stood on the little table in her room; and thenceforth it was with these that she performed her wonders, or at least the subset of them which her delicate wrists allowed her to actually lift. They did not mark the limit of the Grand Duke's generosity, which eventually led the Grand Duchess to appeal before the Tzar, and so Zuleika was conducted across the frontier by an escort of love-sick Cossacks. On the Sunday before she left Madrid, a great bull-fight was held in her honour. Fifteen bulls received the coup-de-grace, and Juan Belmonte, the stick-straight and unmoving matador of matadors died in the arena with her name on his lips (thus missing out on a whole career of hanging out with a vocal if insecure fellow from the colonies). He had tried to kill the last bull without taking his eyes off la divina senorita, which would have worked a lot better had the bull not been similarily captivated ; but as it was they ran into each other. A prettier compliment had never been paid her, and she was immensely pleased with it. For that matter, she was immensely pleased with everything. She moved proudly to the incessant music of a paean, aye! of a paean that was always crescendo. In the goring of the matador she could scarcely perceive aught beyond the image of a future goring of herself. It made her burn with an unknown warmth, whenever she thought about that, and soon enough her manicured nails would bite into her tender flesh.

All the stops of that "mighty organ, many-piped," the press, were pulled out simultaneously, as far as they could be pulled, in Zuleika's honour. She delighted in the din. She read every line that was printed about her, tasting her triumph as she had never tasted it before. And how she revelled in the Brobdingnagian drawings of her, which, printed in nineteen colours, towered between the columns or sprawled across them! There she was, measuring herself back to back with the tower of Westminster ; scudding through the firmament on a comet, whilst a crowd of tiny men in evening-dress stared up at her from the terrestrial globe; peering through a microscope held by Cupid over a diminutive John Bull; teaching the American Eagle to stand on its head; and doing a hundred-and-one other things -- whatever suggested itself to the fancy of native art. And through all this iridescent maze of symbolism were scattered many little slabs of realism. At home, on the street, Zuleika was the smiling target of all snap-shooters, and all the snap-shots were snapped up by the press and reproduced with annotations: Zuleika Dobson walking on Broadway in the sables gifted her by Grand Duke Andrew -- she says "You can bounce blizzards in them"; Zuleika Dobson yawning over a love-letter from millionaire Edelweiss; relishing a cup of clam-broth -- she says "They don't use clams out there"; ordering her maid to fix her a warm bath; finding a split in the gloves she has just drawn on before starting for the musicale given in her honour by Mrs. Suetonius X. Meistersinger; chatting at the telephone to Miss Camille Van Spook, the best-born girl in New York; laughing over the recollection of a compliment made her by George Abimelech Post, the best-groomed man in New York; meditating a new trick; admonishing a waiter who has upset a cocktail over her skirt; having herself manicured; drinking tea in bed. Thus was Zuleika enabled daily to be, as one might say, a spectator of her own wonderful life. On her departure for London, the papers spoke no more than the truth when they said she had had "a lovely time.". She was to return for a second season in the coming Fall, but at present, she was, as I have said, "resting."

As she sat here in the bay-window of her room, she was not reviewing the splendid pageant of her past. She was a young person whose reveries never were in retrospect. For her the past was no treasury of distinct memories, all hoarded and classified, some brighter than others and more highly valued. All memories were for her but as the motes in one fused radiance that followed her and made more luminous the pathway of her future. She was always looking forward. She was looking forward now -- that shade of ennui had passed from her face -- to the fortnight she was to spend in Oxford. A new city was a new toy to her, and -- for it was youth's homage that she loved best -- this city of youths was a toy after her own heart.

Aye, and it was youths who gave homage to her most freely. She was of that high-stepping and flamboyant type that captivates youth most surely. Old men and men of middle age admired her, but she had not that flower-like quality of shyness and helplessness, that look of innocence, so dear to men who carry life's secrets in their heads. Yet Zuleika was entirely innocent. She was as pure as that young shepherdess Marcella, who, all unguarded, roved the mountains and was by all the shepherds adored. Like Marcella, she had given her heart to no man, had preferred none. Youths were reputed to have died for love of her, as Chrysostom died for love of the shepherdess; and she, like the shepherdess, had shed no tear. When Chrysostom was lying on his bier in the valley, and Marcella looked down from the high rock, Ambrosio, the dead man's comrade, cried out on her, upbraiding her with bitter words -- "Oh basilisk of our mountains!" Nor do I think Ambrosio spoke too strongly. Marcella cared nothing for men's admiration, and yet, instead of retiring to one of those nunneries which are founded for her kind, she chose to rove the mountains, causing despair to all the shepherds. Zuleika, with her peculiar temperament, would have gone mad in a nunnery. "But," you may argue, "ought not she to have taken the veil, even at the cost of her reason, rather than cause so much despair in the world? If Marcella was a basilisk, as you seem to think, how about Miss Dobson?" Ah, but Marcella knew quite well, boasted even, that she never would or could love any man. Zuleika, on the other hand, was a woman of really passionate fibre. She may not have had that conscious, separate, and quite explicit desire to be a mother with which modern playwrights credit every unmated member of her sex. But she did know that she could love. And, surely, no woman who knows that of herself can be rightly censured for not recluding herself from the world: it is only women without the power to love who have no right to provoke men's love.

Though Zuleika had never given her heart, strong in her were the desire and the need that it should be given. Whithersoever she had fared, she had seen nothing but youths fatuously prostrate to her -- not one upright figure which she could respect. There were the middle-aged men, the old men, who did not bow down to her; but from middle-age, as from eld, she had a sanguine aversion. She could love none but a youth. Nor -- though she herself, womanly, would utterly abase herself before her ideal -- could she love one who fell prone before her. And before her all youths always did fall prone. She was an empress, and all youths were her slaves. Their bondage delighted her, of course, yet no empress who has any pride can adore one of her slaves. Whom, then, could proud Zuleika adore? It was a question which oft troubled her. There were even moments when, looking into her cheval-glass, she cried out against that arrangement in comely lines and tints which got for her the dulia she delighted in. To be able to love once -- would not that be better than all the homage in the world? But would she ever meet whom, looking up to him, she could love -- she, the omnisubjugant? Would she ever, ever meet him?

It was when she wondered thus, that the wistfulness came into her eyes. Even now, as she sat by the window, that shadow returned to them. She was wondering, shyly, had she met him at length? That young equestrian who had not turned to look at her; whom she was to meet at dinner to-night... was he to be? The one ? The ends of her blue sash lay across her lap, and she was lazily unravelling their fringes, exhausted of unravelling her own. "Blue and white!" she remembered. "They were the colours he wore round his hat." And she gave a little laugh of coquetry. She laughed, and, long after, her lips were still parted in expectant smile.

So did she sit, smiling, fondling, wondering, with the fringes of her sash between her fingers, while the sun sank behind the opposite wall of the quadrangle, and the shadows crept out across the grass, thirsty for the dew.

~ * ~

The clock in the Warden's drawing-room had just struck eight, and as it had the ducal feet were coming to a rest, beautiful on the white bearskin hearthrug. So slim and long were they, of instep so nobly arched, that only with a pair of glazed ox-tongues on a breakfast-table were they comparable. Incomparable quite, the figure and face and vesture of him who ended in them. The Warden was talking to him, with all the supportive, eager, almost loving deference of elderly commoner for peerage youth. The other guests -- an Oriel don and his wife -- were listening with earnest smile and submissive droop, at a slight distance. Now and again, to put themselves at their ease, they exchanged in undertone a word or two about the weather.

"The young lady whom you may have noticed with me," the Warden was saying, "is my orphaned grand-daughter." (The wife of the Oriel don discarded her smile, and sighed, with a glance at the Duke, who was himself an orphan.) "She has come to stay with me." (The Duke glanced quickly round the room.) "I cannot think why she is not down yet." (The Oriel don fixed his eyes on the clock, as though he suspected it of being fast.) "I must ask you to forgive her. She appears to be a bright, pleasant young woman."

"Married?" asked the Duke.

"No," said the Warden; and a cloud of annoyance crossed his Grace's face. "No; she devotes her life entirely to good works."

"A hospital nurse?" the Duke murmured.

"No, Zuleika's appointed task is to induce delightful wonder rather than to alleviate pain. She performs conjuring-tricks."

"Zuleika, you mean Miss Zuleika Dobson?" inquired the Duke, neutrally.

"Ah yes. I forgot that she had achieved some fame in the outer world. Perhaps she already was introduced to your Grace?"

"I've not had the pleasure," said the young man coldly. "But of course I have heard of Miss Dobson. I did not know she was related to you."

The Duke disliked unmarried girls "of good breeding". A not inconsequential portion of his retinue belaboured under the precise task of eluding them, and their chaperons, and their obnoxious airs and infuriating pretense. A cunt does not entitle the frog it grew on (like it grows on all of them) to anything, and especially not to a half of any lord's standing. That whatever idle spinsters and assorted convicts spending their time in those prisons spuriously known as "convents" (a diference without substance, introduced for no reason other than the vanity of they imprisoned therein, always eager to pretend impossible nonsense) insistently clamored to the contrary was merely an ineffectual annoyance, as far as his Grace was concerned.

Yet here he was to be confronted with one of them -- with such an one of them! -- in Oxford, and the fact seemed to him rather a sheer violation of sanctuary. The tone, therefore, in which he said "I shall be charmed," in answer to the Warden's request that he would take Zuleika into dinner, was very glacial. So was his gaze when, a moment later, the young lady made her entry.

"She did not look like an orphan," said the wife of the Oriel don, subsequently, on the way home. The criticism was a just one. Zuleika would have looked singular in one of those lowly double-files of straw-bonnets and drab cloaks which are so steadying a feature of our social system. Tall and lissom, she was sheathed from the bosom downwards in flamingo silk, and she was liberally festooned with emeralds. Her dark hair was not even strained back from her forehead and behind her ears, as an orphan's should be. Parted somewhere at the side, it fell in an avalanche of curls upon one eyebrow. From her right ear drooped heavily a black pearl, from her left a pink; and their difference gave an odd, bewildering witchery to the little face between.

The young Duke was not exactly bewitched, but a certain degree of interest could also not be denied, notwithstanding none could have guessed as much from his cold stare nor his easy and impassive bow. He was not exactly amused, but not exactly repulsed, it was some kind of curiosity, if not properly speaking scientific, or academic, that informed his perception of Miss Dobson. Zuleika herself, at the foot of the table, fondly supposed him entirely indifferent to her. Though he sat on her right, he gave her little in the way of glance and but one or two words all told, the very great majority of his conversation and attention was instead directed to the unassuming lady who sat on his other side, next to the Warden. She tried her best to hold up, flustering now and again from sheer overburden ; her husband, alone on the other side of the table, was entirely mortified by his utter failure to engage Zuleika in small-talk. Zuleika was sitting with her profile turned to him -- the profile with the pink pearl -- and gazed full at the young Duke without relentment throughout the evening. She was hardly more affable than a cameo. "Yes," "No," "I don't know," were the only answers she would vouchsafe to the poor man's questions. A vague "Oh really?" was all he got for his timid little offerings of information. In vain he started the topic of modern conjuring-tricks as compared with the conjuring-tricks performed by the ancient Egyptians. Zuleika did not even say "Oh really?" when he told her about the metamorphosis of the bulls in the Temple of Osiris. He primed himself with a glass of sherry, cleared his throat. "And what," he asked, with a note of firmness, "do you think of our cousins across the water?" Zuleika said "Yes;" and then he gave in. Nor was she conscious that he ceased talking to her. At intervals throughout the rest of dinner, she murmured "Yes," and "No," and "Oh really?" though the poor little don was now listening silently to the Duke and the Warden.

She found herself submerged in a trance of sheer happiness. At last, she thought, her hope was fulfilled -- that hope which, although she had never known it as such before, she nevertheless always intuited somewhere beyond the joy of her constant triumphs. It had been always lurking in her, lying nearest to her heart and chafing her at her tenderest, like the shift of sackcloth which that young brilliant girl, love and loss of Giacopone di Todi, wore always in secret submission to her own soul, under the fair soft robes and the rubies men saw on her. At last, here was the youth who would not bow down to her; whom, looking up to him, she could adore. She ate and drank automatically, never taking her gaze from him. She felt not one touch of pique at his behaviour. She was tremulous with a joy that was new to her, greater than any joy she had known. Her soul was as a flower in its opetide. She was in love. Rapt, she studied every lineament of the pale and perfect face -- the brow from which bronze-coloured hair rose in tiers of burnished ripples; the large steel-coloured eyes, with their carven lids; the fearless nose, and the nervous lips. She noted how long and slim were his fingers, and how slender his wrists. She noted the glint cast by the candles upon his shirt-front. The two large white pearls there seemed to her symbols of his nature. They were like two moons: cold, remote, radiant. Even when she gazed at the Duke's face, she was aware of them in her vision.

Nor was the Duke unconscious, as he seemed to be, of her scrutiny. Though he kept his head averse, he knew that always her eyes were watching him. Obliquely, he saw them; saw, too, the contour of the face, and the black pearl and the pink; could not blind himself, try as he would. And he knew that the story wasn't near an end.

Unlike Zuleika herself, this young Duke was well versed in the full hand of life. Wooed though he had been by about as many maidens as she by youths, his heart, like hers, had remained cold. But he had never felt, as she had, the desire to love ; nor did he spend the minute for every hour she spent in front of the mirror. Different from Zuleika, the Duke cared for his wardrobe and his toilet-table not as a means to making others admire him the more, but merely as a means through which he could intensify, a ritual in which to express and realise, his own idolatry. At Eton he had been called "Peacock," and this nick-name had followed him up to Oxford.

This "Peacock" was not now rejoicing, as she was, in the sensation of first love; he was merely waking up to the strangest observation, the wholly unexpected fact that apparently in the bosom of one of the thoroughly disgusting, entirely despicable "proper" girls an ability for the finer things nevertheless could be found. She, produced as she was by the slaughter and for the slaughter, could nevertheless spend, in between, a moment with him. Afore meeting Zuleika he could have sworn that women, absolutely identical to sheep, lack even the capacity, let alone any inclination to human life. Yet here she was, that fabled ewe willing to go into soup to learn the Torah.

He could read her mind, and the depths of her soul, or rather smell them. He perceived it all coming off her like the mist off a well worked mare in the eve ; and he was, if anything, in shock, the shock of he who sees displayed before his very eyes that ice, too, under certain conditions will burn, and burn thoroughly and with good flame and notwithstanding it were made of water, which does not, ever, burn itself.

The nickname was not apposite, obviously. The natural peacock is a fool even among birds, but this ducal variant had already taken (besides a particularly brilliant First in Mods) the Stanhope, the Newdigate, the Lothian, and the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse. And these things he had achieved currente calamo, "off the run of his pen," or as Scott said of Byron, "with the easy negligence of a nobleman." He was now in his third year of residence, and was reading, a little, for Literae Humaniores and there was little doubt he would be taking a particularly brilliant First in that school also.

These were altogether the smaller part of the Duke's accomplishments, however. He was adroit in the killing of all birds and fishes, stags and foxes. He played polo, cricket, racquets, chess, and billiards as well as such things can be played. He was fluent in all modern languages, or at least all of those spoken by actual human beings. He had a very real talent in water-colour, and was accounted, by those who had had the privilege of hearing him, the best amateur pianist on this side of the Tweed. Little wonder, then, that he was idolised by the undergraduates of his day. He did not, however, honour many of them with his friendship. He had a theoretic liking for them as a class, as the "young barbarians all at play" in that little antique city; but individually they jarred on him, and he saw little of them. Yet he sympathised with them always, and, on occasion, would actively take their part against the dons. In the middle of his second year, he had gone so far that a College Meeting had to be held, and he was sent down for the rest of term. The Warden placed his own landau at the disposal of the illustrious young exile, who therein was driven to the station, followed by a long, vociferous procession of undergraduates in cabs.

As it happened that was a time of political excitement in London. The Liberals, who were in power, had passed through the House of Commons a measure more than usually socialistic; and this measure was down for its second reading in the Lords on the very day that the Duke left Oxford an exile. It was but a few weeks since he had taken his seat in the Lords; and this afternoon, for the want of anything better to do, he strayed in. The Leader of the House was already droning his speech in support of the bill, and the Duke found himself on one of the opposite benches. There sat his compeers, sullenly waiting to vote for a bill which every one of them detested. As the speaker subsided, the Duke, for the fun of the thing, rose. He made a long speech against the bill. His gibes at the Government were so scathing, so utterly destructive his criticism of the bill itself, so lofty and so irresistible the flights of his eloquence, that, when he resumed his seat, there was only one course left to the Leader of the House. He rose and, in a few husky phrases, moved that the bill "be read this day six months."

All England rang with the name of the young Duke while he himself seemed to be the one person in the whole country left unmoved by his own exploit. He did not re-appear in the Upper Chamber, and was heard to speak in slighting terms of its architecture, as well as of its upholstery. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister became so nervous that he procured for him, a month later, the Sovereign's offer of a Garter which had just fallen vacant. The Duke accepted it. He was, I understand, the only undergraduate on whom this Order had ever been conferred. He was very much pleased with the insignia, and when, on great occasions, he wore them, no one dared say that the Prime Minister's choice was not fully justified. But you must not imagine that he cared for them as symbols of achievement and power. The dark blue riband, and the star scintillating to eight points, the heavy mantle of blue velvet, with its lining of taffeta and shoulder-knots of white satin, the crimson surcoat, the great embullioned tassels, and the chain of linked gold, and the plumes of ostrich and heron uprising from the black velvet hat -- these things had for him little significance save as a fine setting, a finer setting than the most elaborate smoking-suit, for that perfection of aspect which the gods had given him. This was indeed the gift he valued beyond all others.

He knew well, however, that women care little for a man's appearance, and that what they seek in a man is strength of character, and rank, and wealth. These three gifts the Duke had in a high degree, and he was much courted by plenty of women because of them. Conscious that every maiden he met was eager to be his proud Duchess rather than his abject slave he had assumed always a manner of high austerity among maidens. Consequently even if he had wished to flirt with Zuleika he would hardly have known how to do it. But he did not wish to flirt with her in any case. Ideally, he would have much preferred the earth simply opened and reclaimed its byproduct, but nevertheless he knew with that clear intuition of truly great men that this particular trouble would not so readily dispense of itself. The black pearl and the pink seemed to dangle ever nearer and clearer to him, mocking that preference, certifying that certainty.

Suddenly, something fell, plump! into the dark whirlpool of his thoughts. He started. The Warden was leaning forward, had just said something to him.

"I beg your pardon?" asked the Duke. Dessert, he noticed, was on the table, and he was paring an apple. The Oriel don was looking at him with sympathy, as at one who had swooned and was just "coming to."

"Is it true, my dear Duke," the Warden repeated, "that you have been persuaded to play at the Judas concert?"

"Ah yes, I am going to play something."

Zuleika bent suddenly forward, and unceremoniously importuned him. "Oh," she cried, clasping her hands beneath her chin, "will you let me come and turn over the leaves for you? May I ? Please ?"

He looked her full in the face, for the first time since the dinner started. It was like seeing suddenly at close quarters some great bright monument that no one had ever known other as a sun-caught speck in the distance ; it was as if the Sphinx had come off its pedestal to ask him for directions in the desert. He saw the large violet eyes open as wide as they could to him, and their lashes curling to him, and the vivid lips parting with an eagerness aside despair; and the two, perfectly white pearls hung from her tiny ears.

"You are very kind," he murmured, in a voice which sounded to him quite far away, a sharp contrast to her eager, humble pleading. "But I always play without notes."

Zuleika blushed. She looked quite like that maiden who offered herself in sacrifice, to be thrown to the lions and thereby spare a loved life, but was rebuffed. Yet Zuleika felt no shame. She felt nothing but overstretching, delirious pleasure. For that snub she would just then have bartered all the homage she had hoarded over the years. This, she felt, was the climax. She would not outstay it, decided the entertainer inside her. She rose, smiling to the wife of the Oriel don. Every one rose. The Oriel don held open the door, and the two ladies passed out of the room.

The Duke drew out his cigarette case. As he looked down at the cigarettes, he was vaguely conscious of some strange phenomenon somewhere between them and his eyes. Foredone by the agitation of the past hour, he did not at once realise what it was that he saw. His impression was of something in off taste, some discord in his costume ... a black pearl and a pink pearl in his shirt-front!

Just for a moment, absurdly over-estimating poor Zuleika's skill, he supposed himself a victim of legerdemain. Another moment's reflection brought forth the truth -- she might have planted her earrings whole in his shirt, but how would she have gone about changing merely the jewles in their monture, without any tools and without any noise ? Those were his very own studs, which had changed colors. He staggered up from his chair, covering his breast with one arm, and murmured that he was faint. As he hurried from the room, the Oriel don was pouring out a tumbler of water and suggesting burnt feathers. The Warden, solicitous, followed him into the hall. He snatched up his hat, gasping that he had spent a delightful evening -- was very sorry -- was subject to these attacks. Once outside, he took frankly to his heels.

At the corner of the Broad, he looked back over his shoulder. He had half expected a scarlet figure skimming in pursuit, afloat above the pavement. There was nothing. He halted. Before him, the Broad lay empty beneath the moon. He went slowly, mechanically, to his rooms.

The high grim busts of the Emperors stared down at him, their faces more than ever tragically cavernous and distorted. They saw and read in that moonlight the symbols on his breast. As he stood on his doorstep, waiting for the door to be opened, he must have seemed to them a thing for infinite compassion. For were they not privy to the doom that the morrow, or the morrow's morrow, held for him -- held not indeed for him alone, yet for him especially, as it were, and for him most lamentably?

~ * ~

The breakfast-things were not yet cleared away. A plate streaked with fine lines of marmalade, an empty toast-rack, a broken roll -- these and other things bore witness to a day inaugurated in the right spirit. Away from them, reclining along his window-seat, was the Duke. Blue spirals rose from his cigarette, nothing in the still air to trouble them. From their railing, across the road, the Emperors gazed at him.

For a young man, sleep is a sure solvent of distress. There whirls not for him in the night any so hideous a phantasmagoria as will not become, in the clarity of next morning, a spruce procession for him to lead. Brief the vague horror of his awakening; memory sweeps back to him, and he sees nothing dreadful after all. "Why not?" is the sun's bright message to him, and "Why not indeed?" his answer. After hours of agony and doubt prolonged to cock-crow, sleep had stolen to the Duke's bed-side. He awoke late, with a heavy sense of disaster; but lo! when he remembered, everything took on a new aspect. So she's in love. "Why not?" He mocked himself for the morbid vigil he had spent in probing the strange happenstance of the evening. So pearls change color, he laughed as he stepped into his bath. His body thrilled to the cold water, his soul as to a new sacrament. He has something to do now, there's worse fates to be had... On the dressing-table lay the two studs, visible symbols of last night's adventure. Dear to him, somehow, unexpressedly. He took them in his hand, one by one, fondling them. He wished he could wear them in the day-time; but this, of course, was impossible. His toilet finished, he dropped them into the left pocket of his waistcoat.

Piled against the wall were certain boxes of black japanned tin, which had just been sent to him from London. At any other time he would certainly not have left them unopened, for they contained his robes of the Garter. Thursday, the day after to-morrow, was the date of a high visit by a foreign king, and the full chapter of Knights had been commanded to Windsor for the ceremony. Yesterday the Duke had looked keenly forward to his excursion. It was only in those too rarely required robes that he had the sense of being fully dressed. But to-day not a thought had he of them.

Some clock clove with silver the stillness of the morning. Ere came the second stroke, another and nearer clock was striking. And now there were others chiming in. The air was confused with the sweet babel of its many spires, some of them booming deep, measured sequences, some tinkling impatiently and outwitting others which had begun before them. And when this anthem of jealous antiphonies and uneven rhythms had dwindled quite away and fainted in one last solitary note of bronze, there started somewhere another sequence; and this, almost at its last stroke, was interrupted by yet another, which went on to tell the hour of noon in its own way, quite slowly and significantly, as though none knew it. Oxford was now astir with footsteps and laughter -- the laughter and quick footsteps of youths released from lecture-rooms. The Duke shifted from the window. Somehow, he did not care to be observed, though it was usually at this hour that he showed himself for the setting of some new fashion in costume. Many an undergraduate, looking up, missed the picture in the window-frame. He could not in good conscience start a fashion for pink or black pearls, it would be the ruin of too many yeomen and thereby the detriment of their country.

The Duke paced to and fro, smiling ecstatically. He took the two studs from his pocket and gazed at them. He looked in the glass, as one seeking the sympathy of a familiar. The black pearl was not at all like the Tahitian pearls, it had a thorough inkyness about it that suggested sepia. The pink one was also thoroughly pink, so much unlike the Queen conch products seen generally. He resolved to have a talk with Mr. Guldenfrass, his trusted jeweler that same evening. Just then the heavy steps of two heavy boots rung toward his window. The Duke listened, waited irresolute. The boots passed, and already were distancing themselves when the Duke pushed open the window. "Noakes!" he cried. The boots paused. Noakes turned. Moments later the door opened and disclosed that homely figure which Zuleika had seen on her way to Judas.

Sensitive reader, start not at the apparition! Oxford is a plexus of anomalies. These two youths were (odd as it may seem to you) subject to the same Statutes, affiliated to the same College, reading for the same School; aye! and though the one had inherited half a score of noble and castellated roofs, whose mere repairs cost him annually thousands and thousands of pounds, and the other's people had but one little mean square of lead, from which the fireworks of the Crystal Palace were clearly visible every Thursday evening, in Oxford a marked brusqueness of manner and a certain discounting of form to favour function united them as an English ersatz of true camaraderie. Furthermore, there was even some measure of intimacy between them. It was the Duke's whim to condescend further in the direction of Noakes than in any other. He saw in Noakes his own foil and antithesis, and made a point of walking up the High with him at least once in every term. Noakes, for his part, regarded the Duke with feelings mingled of idolatry and disapproval. The Duke's First in Mods oppressed him (who, by dint of dogged industry, had scraped a Second) more than all the other differences between them. But the dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end. Noakes may have regarded the Duke as a rather pathetic figure, on the whole.

"Come in, Noakes," said the Duke. "You have been to a lecture?"

"Aristotle's Politics," nodded Noakes.

"And what were they?" asked the Duke. He was eager for banter and light humor, but for this purpose he couldn't have picked a worse companion. Besides, so little used was Noakes to this affable manner that he could not speak a word but sat paralyzed. He temporised. Eventually he muttered something about getting back to work, and fumbled with the door-handle.

"Oh, my dear fellow, don't go," said the Duke. "Sit down. Our Schools don't come on for another year. A few minutes can't make a difference in your Class. I want to -- to tell you something, Noakes. Do sit down."

Noakes sat down on the edge of a chair. The Duke leaned against the mantel-piece, facing him. "I suppose, Noakes," he said, "you have never been in love."

"Why shouldn't I have been in love?" asked the little man, slim anger coated in thick suspicion.

"I can't imagine you in love," said the Duke, smiling innocently.

"And I can't imagine YOU. You're too pleased with yourself," growled Noakes.

"Ah, but if the Lord our God could find it within his omnipotent plenitude to love such crooked timber as mankind..."

"... then why couldn't his Majesty the Peacock find it within himself to condescend the entertainment of some poor lady's greatest hope ?"

"Indeed!"

"You are incorigible. But, spur your imagination, your Grace. I am in love, as perfectly as the bells just tolled."

"Bells, you say ? And whom is the shining Esmeralda that has arrested your eye ?"

Noakes straightened his back and glared at the Duke.

"I would have asked you to defend those words, sir..."

"... if only you had ever spent any time practicing with the florett ?"

"... if only his majesty Elizabeth hadn't outlawed such practice."

"Oh, Good Old Bess, no less ?! My very dear Noakes, a virgin queen protects you so." Then suddenly on a more serious tone, "Who is she, Noakes ?"

"I don't know who she is," came the unexpected, but to the Duke quite amusing answer.

"When did you meet her? Where? What did you say to her?"

"Yesterday. In the Corn. I didn't SAY anything to her."

"Is she beautiful?"

"Yes. What's that to you?"

"Dark or fair?"

"She's dark. She looks like a foreigner. She looks like -- like one of those photographs in the shop-windows."

"A rhapsody, Noakes! What became of her? Was she alone?"

"She was with the old Warden, in his carriage."

The Duke glimmered a flinty smile at Noakes, who retreated from it, crumpled himself towards the corner of the door like snail escaping salt.

"Seine Spektabilitat Noakes! Would you agree with the statement that it is the business of science to produce truthful pronouncements as to the future, and thereby verify them ?"

"I would."

"But if it came to it, that you had to choose between being pricked through your very heart and soul by the venomous, burning talons of a thousand harpies or else break your word given to me, which way would you go ?"

"I'd keep my word."

"Then here's what I propose. I shall make some statements as to the immediate future, which is to say this very afternoon, and I will give you proof of them before the day is out. But you must swear before me that no matter what happens, you will remain as quiet as a grave throughout the proceedings, nor ever mention to anyone anything you witness for as long as you shall on this Earth live."

"That sounds interesting..."

"Then swear."

"I swear."

"I will hold you to that vow. And now : first, that the gypsy whom you love is none other than world-famous Zuleika Dobson, the enchantress."

"Oh..." and Noakes grew a slight shade paler.

"That she is the grand-daughter of His very Magnificence the Dean of Judas."

"Ohhh..." escaped Noakes.

"Which is why you saw her in his carriage. And she will come here, presently..."

"Oh!" cried Noakes in a sudden, blushing despair, interrupting the Duke.

"To present herself, on her knees, as the humblest of gifts to myself."

Noakes exhaled, barely audibly.

"And I shall abuse her in a manner that's been scarcely seen to date outside the vast Palaces of Oriental Tyrants."

Noakes glared, uncomprehending. He sat still, peering across at the Duke. For the first time in his life, he was resentful of the Duke's great elegance and splendid stature, his high lineage and incomputable wealth. Hitherto, these things had been too remote for envy. But now, suddenly, they seemed near to him -- nearer and more overpowering than the First in Mods had ever been. "And of course she is in love with you?" he snarled. "Did you invite her here ?"

"I did no such thing. I dined at the Warden's, she was forced upon me without any ceremony. I hardly spoke three words to the poor creature throughout the evening, and they consisted of turning down her offer to turn my leaves."

"What leaves ?"

"At the concert."

"You don't play with notes."

"No, I know."

"She doesn't, she couldn't..." Noakes' voice was feverish. "She must have taken it as a snub."

"I'm sure."

"Why do you think she will come here ? Now ?"

Just as Noakes finished, there was a knock on the door.

"Come in!" cried the Duke, and thereby entered the landlady's daughter, a young girl of almost sixteen that could never take her eyes off her charge.

"A lady downstairs," she said, "asking to see your Grace. Says she'll step round again later if your Grace is busy."

"What is her name?" asked the Duke, gazing at the girl vacantly.

"Miss Zuleika Dobson," pronounced the girl with a slight frown.

"Is she pretty ?" he inquired, nonchalantly.

"Very," came the response, and it rung like the still solid tip of an iceberg of tears.

He rose. "Show Miss Dobson up," he said. Noakes had darted to the looking-glass and was smoothing his hair with a tremulous, enormous hand.

"In there!" said the duke, pointing at the large closed door. "Go!" he insisted, and shoved the very confused Noakes into his sartorial warehouse.

A moment later the door opened, and there stood the toast of continents, shy as a filly in first snow. The Duke offered a comment on the weather; she, the hope that he was well again -- they had been so sorry to lose him last night. He looked at her amused, assured her he was fine. Then came a pause. The landlady's daughter was clearing away the breakfast-things. Zuleika glanced comprehensively at the room, and the Duke gazed at the hearthrug. The landlady's daughter clattered out with her freight. She fixed the Duke on her way out, then they were alone.

"How pretty!" said Zuleika. She was looking at his star of the Garter, which sparkled from a litter of books and papers on a small side-table.

"Yes," he answered. "It is pretty, isn't it?"

"Awfully pretty!" she rejoined.

This dialogue led them to another hollow pause. The Duke's wry smile was putting the would-be enchantress ill at ease. Why had he not asked her to take the star and keep it as a gift? Would have been worth the laugh. She was examining a water-colour on the wall, seemed to be absorbed by it. He watched her. She was even lovelier than he had remembered; or rather her loveliness had been, in some subtle way, transmuted. Something had given to her a graver, nobler beauty. Last night's nymph had become the Madonna of this morning. Despite her dress, which was of a tremendous tartan, she diffused the pale authentic radiance of a spirituality most high, most simple. The Duke wondered where lay the change in her. Suddenly she turned to him, and the proof was plain. The two white pearls, no longer black and pink, the glimmering white of maidenly surrender. He thrilled to his heart's core.

"I hope," said Zuleika, "you aren't awfully vexed with me for coming like this?"

"Not at all," said the Duke. "I am delighted to see you."

"The fact is," she continued, "I don't know a soul in Oxford. And I thought perhaps you'd give me luncheon, and take me to see the boat-races. Will you?"

"I could, miss Dobson, certainly I could. I might, also. But that is not why you have come here."

"It isn't ?" she could barely articulate.

"No, it most certainly is not." As he spoke, she looked up to him like a wounded doe, knowing, awaiting the final coup. He delivered it in measured, equal tones. "You came here to go on your knees before me, haven't you miss Dobson ?"

She glared at him, in disbelief, her whole face, neck, chest redder than cherry. She parted her lips to speak time and again but no sound would escape her throat.

"What are you waiting for ?" thundered the Duke, and she was on her knees before the echo of his words dissipated in the calm air.

The Duke pulled the bell-rope. The landlady's daughter came running.

"Help miss Dobson out of that thing" he said, and pointed. Both girls gazed at him with wider eyes, but none dared utter a word in protest. Zuleika lifted her arms, the girl undid her dress and pulled it over her head.

"The combination also." he said, and they obeyed. The chemise and the drawers were next. The girls worked towards their ordained shared goal with a sudden and somewhat strange sense of camaraderie. Soon enough Zuleika stood on the Duke's rug in boots and a very thin, gauzy veil that left nothing to the imagination. At that juncture they stopped their work and looked up at him. He gestured his satisfaction, and sent the girl for luncheon. Zuleika fell back to her knees.

"Crawl over here." he ordered, and crawl she did. He patted her on her head, and then "Do you know what a bitch is, miss Dobson ?"

"Is it... is it a... a ... female dog..." she whispered with great difficulty.

"So it is. I will feed you luncheon, miss Dobson, as my bitch, on the floor where you are. You will eat morsels from my hand, if I give them to you, and you will scurry to eat them off the floor, if I throw them for you. Is that understood ?"

"Yes milord."

"And you will do a good job of it too, is that clear ?"

"Yes milord."

"They usually address me as Your Grace."

"You are my lord." she retorted. There was nothing, not a shade of anything beyond the most abject obedience in Zuleika's voice. She had wholly abandoned herself to her newfound function. No longer Zuleika the enchantress, no longer Zuleika the famous, the admired, the beloved. Zuleika the bitch, the lap dog, ready to jump at a jot, at a gesture, her eyes fixated on the man, her lord, the only man there was. How many girls do the exact same for their part, and how few of them get to live the whole thing, fully. And how satisfactory it is! Zuleika was conquered by wave after wave after wave of the deepest, most sincere, simplest joy. She couldn't even think clearly of things that before had seemed "a climax" to her naive, simple mind. The experience of true submission exhilirated her to extinction. Her chest heaved heavily, her breast tremulous, her nipples engorged. She was serving him. Him!

The girl brought a whole cold chicken, salad, gooseberry tartlets and a Camembert sliced on a tray, her eyes streaking silent tears on her face in a constant flow. For some reason the salt didn't come in a shaker, but as a small pile in a little China tray, elegantly shaped like a tear. The Duke didn't kick her out, so she stayed while he fed his bitch bits of cold chicken. Zuleika swallowed everything ravenously, including the couple of Camembert slices that ended up on the carpet, and licked the spot intently afterwards. At some point midway he pulled the crying maid in his lap, and she spent the rest of Zuleika's humiliation kissing him feverishly while covering him in her adolescent, heartfelt tears.

"That was a horrifying tartan, by the way. What in the hells is it supposed to be, even ?"

"I don't know," came Zuleika's answer. "I got it in Paris."

"Well, it is very ugly. I have one myself, although I practically never wear it. But the Dalbraith is harmonious in comparison, and has, at least, the excuse of history."

"I am sorry milord."

"Also, I thought you had been in Paris ?"

"Yes, milord."

"What is with all that hair ?"

She looked at him, bewildered, for a moment. Did he mean... he couldn't mean... he did. She was red beyond color, she reddened into temperature, into sound. Miss Zuleika Dobson was so ashamed at her pubic mound displayed before the Duke that she nearly hummed in place.

"I... I... I wasn't ever in a bordello." she managed at least.

"Oh ?"

"No milord. I am untouched."

"Never ?! At your age ?! But my dear girl..." The Duke cut himself short and continued "You will, tonight, pluck every single hair there with your own hand. You have a tool ?"

"I do milord."

"Make it slow so it is painful, and think of me throughout."

"Yes milord."

"And yes, bitch. I will take you to the races, and other places. Hurry up and get yourself ready, the second starts at half past four." then, turning towars the girl lost in a reverie in his lap, "Get her dressed." The poor child sprang to her feet like electrocuted, and in short order miss Dobson was, outerly, exactly as she came in. Inwardly however, the difference couldn't have been greater -- for the first time in her life, Zuleika had been thoroughly satisfied by a man. She scurried out, but on her way fell on her knees and kissed the Duke's hand. He patted her on the head and next the door closed behind her.

~ * ~

The Duke poured coffee for two by his own hand, unhurriedly, then went to his closet and extracted an unspeakably pale Noakes and sat him in front of one cup. Then he proceeded to leisurely light his cigarillo, leaned back and watched his guest. Noakes was entirely dysfunctional.

"How..." he managed at a long last, "how did you know she loved you so ?"

"My dear Noakes. I, John, Albert, Edward, Claude, Orde, Angus, Tankerton, Tanville-Tankerton, thirteenth Duke of Dorset, Marquis of Dorset, Earl of Grove, Earl of Chastermaine, Viscount Brewsby, Baron Grove, Baron Petstrap, and Baron Wolock, in the Peerage of England own over three quarter million acres, an area equal to all of County Dorset and then a fifth besides. My town-residence is in St. James's Square. Tankerton, of which you may have seen photographs, is the chief of my country-seats. It is a Tudor house, set on the ridge of a valley. The valley, its park, is halved by a stream so narrow that the deer leap across. The gardens are estraded upon the slope. Round the house runs a wide paven terrace. There are always two or three peacocks trailing their sheathed feathers along the balustrade, and stepping how stiffly! as though they had just been unharnessed from Juno's chariot. Two flights of shallow steps lead down to the flowers and fountains. Oh, the gardens are wonderful. There is a Jacobean garden of white roses. Between the ends of two pleached alleys, under a dome of branches, is a little lake, with a Triton of black marble, and with water-lilies. Hither and thither under the archipelago of water-lilies, dart gold-fish -- tongues of flame in the dark water. There is also a long strait alley of clipped yew. It ends in an alcove for a pagoda of painted porcelain which the Prince Regent -- peace be to his ashes! -- presented to my great-grandfather. There are many twisting paths, and sudden aspects, and devious, fantastic arbours."

"John..." yelped Noakes, barely audible.

"Are you fond of horses, Noakes ? In my stables of pine-wood and plated-silver seventy are installed. Not all of them together could vie in power with one of the meanest of my motor-cars. At Tankerton there is a model farm which would at any rate amuse you, with its heifers and hens and pigs that are like so many big new toys. There is a tiny dairy, which is called 'Her Grace's.' A lady could make therein real butter with her own hands, and round it into little pats, and press every pat with a different device. The boudoir that would be hers is a blue room. Four Watteaus hang in it. In the dining-hall hang portraits of my forefathers -- in petto, her forefathers-in-law -- by many masters."

"John!" cried Noakes.

"Are you fond of peasants? My tenantry are delightful creatures, and there is not one of them who remembers the bringing of the news of the Battle of Waterloo."

"John!" yelled Noakes, to no apparent effect.

"I am Duke of Strathsporran and Cairngorm, Marquis of Sorby, and Earl Cairngorm, in the Peerage of Scotland. In the glens of the hills about Strathsporran are many noble and nimble stags. But I have never set foot in my house there, for it is carpeted throughout with the tartan of my clan. Did you see the horror she was wearing ?"

"I... I..." started Noakes, as if the Duke paid any mind to him.

"If I married her, she'd be entitled to wear the Dalbraith, which would probably be just as well..."

"John..." whispered Noakes, sing-songy. "I merely asked you..."

"You asked me how I knew. I have eyes, they see, what do you want from me ? Or am I not Duc d'Etretat et de la Roche Guillaume in the peerage of France ? Louis Napoleon gave the title to my father for not cutting him in the Bois. I have a house in the Champs Elysees. There is a Swiss in its courtyard. He stands six-foot-seven in his stockings, and the chasseurs are hardly less tall than he. Wherever I go, there are two chefs in my retinue. Both are masters in their art, and furiously jealous of each other. When I compliment either of them on some dish, the other challenges him. They fight with rapiers, next morning, in the garden of whatever house I am occupying. I have a third chef, who makes only souffles, and an Italian pastry-cook; to say nothing of a Spaniard for salads, an Englishwoman for roasts, and an Abyssinian for coffee."

"There's nothing Abysinian about this coffee."

"Noakes my dear boy! You well know it is a whim of mine -- I may say a point of honour -- to lead the ordinary life of an undergraduate while at Oxford. What I eat in this room is cooked by the heavy and unaided hand of Mrs. Batch, my landlady, just like yours."

"And it is set before you by the loving hand of her daughter, who will be sixteen this October."

"You have noticed ?"

"I had noticed."

"You think she has ?"

"Who, she ?"

"My bitch. Miss Kneeling-Naked Dogson."

"You are terrible. But yes, I think she noticed."

"I suppose we'd honeymoon at Baiae. I have a villa at Baiae. It is there that I keep my grandfather's collection of majolica. The sun shines there always. A long olive-grove secretes the garden from the sea. When you walk in the garden, you know the sea only in blue glimpses through the vacillating leaves. White-gleaming from the bosky shade of this grove are several goddesses. I don't much care for for Canova, but I suppose if she did those figures would appeal to her, they are in his best manner. That is of course not the only house of mine that looks out on the water. On the coast of County Clare -- am I not Earl of Enniskerry and Baron Shandrin in the Peerage of Ireland? -- I have an ancient castle. Sheer from a rock stands it, and the sea has always raged up against its walls. Many ships lie wrecked under that loud implacable froth. But mine is a brave strong castle. No storm affrights it; and not the centuries, clustering houris, with their caresses can seduce it from its hard austerity. I also have several other titles which for the moment escape me. Baron Llffthwchl I think, and... and... but you can find them for yourself in Debrett. In me you behold a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, and a Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. Look well at me! I am Hereditary Comber of the Queen's Lap-Dogs. I am young. I am handsome. My temper is sweet, and my character without blemish."

"You are an awful snob, John" proffered Noakes.

"And you are most fortunate, my dear Noakes."

"Is that so!" exlaimed the hunchback, unconvinced.

"You loved miss Dogson ?"

"I still do."

"But you were going to pursue her ?"

"As best I could, yes."

"But not anymore ?"

"No..." retorted Noakes, after a pause. "Not anymore."

"Instead, you are going to pursue your studies, are you not."

"I... I am."

"That will be a most productive course for you, my dear Noakes. The bitch wouldn't have been."

"But..."

"Yes, I know. It's what it is."

Noakes stood, unsteadily in his large boots, and lumbered towards the door. Before letting himself out, he turned towards the Duke.

"Thank you, your Grace."

The Duke waved his hand, as to say "nevermind" to Noakes, then fluently turned and beconed, as the door opened and in its frame a red eyed, whimpering girl stooped. She came in, and Noakes went out closing the door behind him. His boots could be heard falling on the stair for a flight, and then was silence.

"Come in, pretty." but she hesitated. "Would you like to kiss it ?" inquired the Duke after a short pause.

The girl nodded and mumbled "Yes, master" then stepped inside.

"Come on, then." he said, leaning back to gaze out the window.

~ * ~

A few minutes before four, the Duke was ringing the bell on the Warden's door. He needn't explain his purpose, the entire house already knew of the great honor he had bestowed upon them by agreeing to take the miss to see the races. She was already dressed and evidently awaiting him, out of her mind with worry. Will he approve of her dress ? Will he... the mind blushed at the daring leap, but leaped it nevertheless... could it be that he would like it ? Something as humble as she might wear, to be to his liking ? That'd have been her day entire, made perfect.

He didn't in any manner object, and her heart leaped with joy. As she leaned on his arm on the way out the door she whispered in his ear "I am not yet done with my task, milord" in the humblest of voices, petrified that her failure might ruin the promising beginnings.

"What task ?" he puzzled at her.

"The task, that you... the French task." she muttered.

"Oh!" he exclaimed. "No matter, it wasn't for this afternoon. Have it done before you go to sleep, is all." he said, magnaminously, and his good grace filled her all with a steady, soft happiness, like cotton candy made of joy instead of sugar and for that the sweeter.

"Shall we hurry ?" she inquired, sudden worry back in her throat.

"Ah, there is plenty of time. The Second Division is not rowed till half-past four."

"The Second Division? Why not take me to the First?"

"That is not rowed till six."

"Isn't this rather an odd arrangement?"

"No doubt. But Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics."

They walked a few steps in silence, then she dared broach the only question left in her mind.

"How did you know I love you so ?"

"Did you notice your earrings ?"

"It was when I went into the drawing-room that I noticed them. I was looking in the glass... How did you know I hadn't simply put on another pair of ear-rings?"

"I didn't know, nor for that matter did I notice them."

"So how..."

"Do you imagine me the kind of man who were emboldened by the knowledge of certain victory, and on that basis only dared sally forth from the walls of his castle ?" Her eyes were as widely open as their thin lids could bear. "How little do you know of men, my little bitch." he mused.

"I've known no man. Just boys..."

"I didn't tell you to kneel because I thought you loved me. And you didn't kneel because I told you to ; you knelt because you loved me. These are different things."

"So very different", she repeated, as in a dream. Then, suddenly, with a start "Will you get rid of me, now that I've kneeled ?"

Her question was entirely heartbroken. It fell as she had felt it spurious, the idle inquiry of "Is it time ?" dropping at daybreak from the lips of one convicted to hang at daybreak.

"No." came his response, plainly.

"I suppose you will wish to use me first." she said, matter of factly. "Sexually, I mean." She steeled herself, visibly. "I do not mind. For your pleasure, anything. Anything."

"Let me tell you a story. There is a dairy at Tankerton, it's called Her Grace's. It dates from the middle of the eighteenth century, and the reason it is so called is that my great-great-grandfather, when he was a very old man, married en troisiemes noces a dairy-maid from the Tankerton estate. Her name was Meg Speedwell. He had seen her walking across a field, not many months after the interment of his second Duchess, Maria, that great and gifted lady. I know not whether it was that her bonny mien fanned in him some embers of his youth, or that he was loth to be outdone in gracious eccentricity by his crony the Duke of Dewlap, who himself had just taken a bride from a dairy. (You have read Meredith's account of that affair? No? You should.) Whether it was veritable love or mere modishness that formed my ancestor's resolve, presently the bells were ringing out, and the oldest elm in the park was being felled (that's a tradition), in Meg Speedwell's honour, and the children were strewing daisies on which Meg Speedwell trod (also), a proud young hoyden of a bride, just like you used to be, her head in the air and her heart in the seventh heaven. The Duke had given her already a horde of fine gifts; but these, he had said, were nothing -- trash in comparison with the gift that was to ensure for her a perdurable felicity. After the wedding-breakfast, when all the squires had ridden away on their cobs, and all the squires' ladies in their coaches, the Duke led his bride forth from the hall, leaning on her arm, till they came to a little edifice of new white stone, very spick and span, with two lattice-windows and a bright green door between. This he bade her enter. A-flutter with excitement, she turned the handle. In a moment she flounced back, red with shame and anger -- flounced forth from the fairest, whitest, dapperest dairy, wherein was all of the best that the keenest dairy-maid might need. The Duke bade her dry her eyes, for that it ill befitted a great lady to be weeping on her wedding-day. 'As for gratitude,' he chuckled, 'zounds! that is a wine all the better for the keeping.' Duchess Meg soon forgot this unworthy wedding-gift, such was her rapture in the other, the so august, appurtenances of her new life. What with her fine silk gowns and farthingales, and her powder-closet, and the canopied bed she slept in -- a bed bigger far than the room she had slept in with her sisters, and standing in a room far bigger than her father's cottage; and what with Betty, her maid, who had pinched and teased her at the village-school, but now waited on her so meekly and trembled so fearfully at a scolding; and what with the fine hot dishes that were set before her every day, and the gallant speeches and glances of the fine young gentlemen whom the Duke invited from London, Duchess Meg was quite the happiest Duchess in all England. For a while, she was like a child in a hay-rick. But anon, as the sheer delight of novelty wore away, she began to take a more serious view of her position. She began to realise her responsibilities. She was determined to do all that a great lady ought to do. Twice every day she assumed the vapours. She schooled herself in the mysteries of Ombre, of Macao. She spent hours over the tambour-frame. She rode out on horse-back, with a riding-master. She had a music-master to teach her the spinet; a dancing-master, too, to teach her the Minuet and the Triumph and the Gaudy. All these accomplishments she found mighty hard. She was afraid of her horse. All the morning, she dreaded the hour when it would be brought round from the stables. She dreaded her dancing-lesson. Try as she would, she could but stamp her feet flat on the parquet, as though it had been the village-green. She dreaded her music-lesson. Her fingers, disobedient to her ambition, clumsily thumped the keys of the spinet, and by the notes of the score propped up before her she was as cruelly perplexed as by the black and red pips of the cards she conned at the gaming-table, or by the red and gold threads that were always straying and snapping on her tambour-frame. Still she persevered. Day in, day out, sullenly, she worked hard to be a great lady. But skill came not to her, and hope dwindled; only the dull effort remained. One accomplishment she did master -- to wit, the vapours: they became for her a dreadful reality. She lost her appetite for the fine hot dishes. All night long she lay awake, restless, tearful, under the fine silk canopy, till dawn stared her into slumber. She seldom scolded Betty. She who had been so lusty and so blooming saw in her mirror that she was pale and thin now; and the fine young gentlemen, seeing it too, paid more heed now to their wine and their dice than to her. And always, when she met him, the Duke smiled the same mocking smile. Duchess Meg was pining slowly and surely away... One morning, in Spring-time, she altogether vanished. Betty, bringing the cup of chocolate to the bedside, found the bed empty. She raised the alarm among her fellows. They searched high and low. Nowhere was their mistress. The news was broken to their master, who, without comment, rose, bade his man dress him, and presently walked out to the place where he knew he would find her. And there, to be sure, she was, churning, churning for dear life. Her sleeves were rolled above her elbows, and her skirt was kilted high; and, as she looked back over her shoulder and saw the Duke, there was the flush of roses in her cheeks, and the light of a thousand thanks in her eyes. 'Oh,' she cried, 'what a curtsey I would drop you, but that to let go the handle were to spoil all!' And every morning, ever after, she woke when the birds woke, rose when they rose, and went singing through the dawn to the dairy, there to practise for her pleasure that sweet and lowly handicraft which she had once practised for her need. And every evening, with her milking-stool under her arm, and her milk-pail in her hand, she went into the field and called the cows to her, as she had been wont to do. To those other, those so august, accomplishments she no more pretended. She gave them the go-by. And all the old zest and joyousness of her life came back to her. Soundlier than ever slept she, and sweetlier dreamed, under the fine silk canopy, till the birds called her to her work. Greater than ever was her love of the fine furbelows that were hers to flaunt in, and sharper her appetite for the fine hot dishes, and more tempestuous her scolding of Betty, poor maid. She was more than ever now the cynosure, the adored, of the fine young gentlemen. And as for her husband, she looked up to him as the wisest, kindest man in all the world."

"A fine story, milord."

"The blood of Meg Speedwell's lord flows in my veins. I think I may boast that I have inherited something of his sagacity. In any case, I can profit by his example. I have no intention to use you for what you are not, little bitch."

She looked up to him, a warm, half tear glistening her eye. "I have no shame, milord, not for anything you bade me do. I'll do it all, anything, I am yours to command. And even should society..."

"There's enough of that. I have no intention to use you for a wife, your breeding's not exactly right for that." Poor Zuleika's eyes grew huger still. The Duke continued, impassible "Nor have I any mind to use you for a whore. For one thing, you're evidently untalented at that, a virgin! At your age! Having taken to Paris like duck to water, and not a drop wetter for the experience! Besides, the little I require of girls unfit for the trite usage of feminity will come at no verifiable cost to your modesty."

The twin dagger stabs of his speech brought her almost to her knees. Not a wife, legitimate mother, not a mistress, illegitimate but still mother! Not a mother at all. He had no such plans for her. She felt something dying inside her breast, and a dark sea of endless sadness drained itself into her bones and behind her eyes.

"Tell me, have you ever kissed a man ?"

"Now and again, I have."

"I do not mean on the lips."

"What do you mean then ?"

"Have you ever kissed a man's manhood, the unsheathed sword, the phallus ?"

"I have never beheld one, milord."

"Were you not curious ?"

"Yes, I suppose I was... but never had I anyone to ask."

"That's a paragon of solitude," thought the Duke outloud.

"It is." she answered, or maybe he just thought she had.

As they walked, Zuleika's thoughts veered dark and brooding. The man she loved was not going to make her a mother, this way nor that. The voice of her inner, mature feminity screamed, and screamed louder by far than the voice of her inner childish pride. That, weak and inconsequential voice she had stomped silent in one single gesture, and wasn't heard hence. This other, irrepressible banshee wail already deafened her and went on in geometric crescendo. "You will never be a mother. You have failed. You should die. You..." there was no end to it, no end whatever. A turtle can go without food for months, but it will not relinquish its carpace. Such is the turtle's nature. Woman will gladly prostrate herself ; just as gladly as she'd run away or fight tooth and nail. Whatever is the fastest way to the filling of her womb. That is the woman's nature. Any manner is just as good as any other for as long as her belly swells. There is no other consideration, not really. Compared to the only true purpose any woman has, as she ever had and ever will have, anything else, taste and circumstance, constraint and requirement are nothing but artifice, pure pretense, a smoke of nothing. A man will dress in many ways and bear many tools to earn the day's bread ; and no one is a this or a that above being one who feeds himself. Once the food is out, the fisherman will become carpenter, the stonemason sailor, the farmer soldier and the soldier ballet dancer -- whatever tomorrow's slice of bread requires. Similarily woman, she will dress in many ways and bear many tools to earn the year's pregnancy, but none of them, inaccessible princess or cheapest whore, one single hair above or one single feather beyond that one true and unique purpose : to get the holy spurt within her slippery canal. Once impregnation is out of the question...

With every further step, the swirling darkness grew deeper on Zuleika's shoulders. She was going to die. For him, for love, for sadness, for... To die for love of this perfect man would be no mere measure of precaution, or counsel of despair. It would be in itself a passionate indulgence -- a fiery rapture, not to be foregone. What better could she ask than to die of his love? She couldn't die for it, dying of it is the best remainder. Poor indeed seemed to her now the sacrament of marriage, set beside the sacrament of death. Death was incomparably the greater, the finer soul. Death was the one true bridal. In dark robe, under jet sky, onyx sparkles on pitch veil to mirror the sooty stars above she will meet her fate.

A slave, humble, wholly given. In spite of all convention and of all internal reason, of any fear, that omenous portent of mishaps long past but through the blood remembered, in spite of any sort of sense, common or otherwise, she was given. Not as much as a scullery maid, hired for house and board from her family in who knows what humble village ; not as much as a Turkish slave, still bought for gold, or silver, or bronze even but still worth something. No, not her. Nothing at all, her. Deer in his rifle sights, less even, a flea in his dog Donne's ear, less than that still. A glint, a glimmer, hardly worth the mention in conversation. Kneeling when told, below the meanest tool, which at the least serves to a purpose. Less than a fool, her, pointless, purposeless, nothing... Yet she, going to die for him! Decidedly, the slave had the whip-hand.

He stole a sidelong look at her, and could not repress a smile. She smiled back. The Triumph of Death must not be handled as a cheap score. She wanted to die because she would thereby so poignantly consummate her love, express it so completely, once and for all... And he -- who could say that he, knowing what she had done, might not, illogically, come to love her? The one impediment forever removed, what is to keep his love from her ? Perhaps he would remember her ; perhaps he would fashion from her ashes an icon, to be held above, high, high above the heads of the slaves to come, an idol to be worshipped, a height they could regard but never touch, a dark star of its own. She saw them, hordes, naked, bending over her tomb in beautiful humble curves, under a starless sky, watering the violets with their tears. So what if they'll assuredly be tears for themselves ? Tears are always shared.

Shades of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel and other despicable maunderers came to her, though she had never read their words nor knew any of them by name. But poetry, eternal, is equally accessible to all those who raise their head high enough, and in her passion the pure maiden had. Yet she resolved she would be practical. The point was, when and how to die? Time: the sooner the better. Tonight, best. The manner... that was less easy to determine. She must not die horribly, nor without dignity. Dignity, that sickly old whore, the last to leave after all her sisters left. How could she die ? She had no thought, no idea, her mind was blank. How can one die ? She never heard of it. A woman ? Never. It had never happened, throughout history ? Perhaps not. How does a woman die ? Stay! There was the river. Drowning (she had once heard) was a rather pleasant sensation. And to the river they were even now on their way.

The Duke did not try to break the stony silence in which Zuleika walked. As they turned into Radcliffe Square, the Duke's ear caught the sound of a far-distant gun. He started, and looked up at the clock of St. Mary's. Half-past four! The boats had started. The previous year he had heard a certain French upstart, le Comte de Forcheville, importantly declare that whenever a woman was to blame for a disappointment, the best way to avoid a scene was to inculpate oneself. The colossal mismatch of lines and elements amused him, and so he fantastically offered "I am sorry. That gun -- did you hear it? It was the signal for the race. I shall never forgive myself."

"Then we shan't see the race at all?" cried Zuleika.

"It will be over, alas, before we are near the river. All the people will be coming back through the meadows."

"Let us meet them!"

He indulged her, and so through the square, across the High, down Grove Street, they passed. The Duke looked up at the tower of Merton. Strange that to-night it would still be standing here, in all its sober and solid beauty -- still be gazing, over the roofs and chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its rightful bride. Through untold centuries of the future it would stand thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loth to regard his mastery of the temporal as trivial.

Yet, loth or not, by all minerals we are so mocked. Vegetables, contrarily, are far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum, making lovely now the railed pathway to Christ Church meadow, were all a-swaying and a-nodding to poor Zuleika as she passed by. "Adieu, adieu, lovely girl," they were whispering. "We are very sorry for you -- very sorry indeed. We never dared suppose you would predecease us. We think your death a very great tragedy. Adieu! Perhaps we shall meet in another world -- one day. If there be days..."

She looked at him, and wondered. Does he know ? He knows so many things, he knew of her... he knew her all. Does he know this ? But he said he hadn't known, he said something about sall