He supped, too, with these houris--and felt himself a
man of the world.
He had stayed about in country houses for perhaps a year, and had
danced through the whole of a season with all the prettiest
_debutantes_. And one or two of the young married women of forty
had already marked him out for their prey.
By all this you can see just the kind of creature Paul was. There are
hundreds of others like him, and perhaps they, too, have the latent
qualities which he developed during his episode--only they remain as
he was in the beginning--sound asleep.
That fall out hunting in March, and being laid up with a sprained
ankle and a broken collar-bone, proved the commencement of the
Isabella Waring affair.
She was the parson's daughter--and is still for the matter of
that!--and often in those days between her games of golf and hockey,
or a good run on her feet with the hounds, she came up to Verdayne
Place to write Lady Henrietta's letters for her. Isabella was most
amiable and delighted to make herself useful.
And if her hands were big and red, she wrote clearly and well. The
Lady Henrietta, who herself was of the delicate Later Victorian
Dresden China type, could not imagine a state of things which
contained the fact that her god-like son might stoop to this daughter
of the earthy earth!
Yet so it fell about.
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