Is it not always so? We take incalculable pains to prepare for our festivities; how anxious we are that they should _go off_ well; how engrossed is the butler with his plate-basket and his ice-pail; how concerned the host that my lord’s venison should not be overdone. Every plait must be laid to a hair’s-breadth in the glistening tresses of the lady of the house. Two mirrors satisfy her, at last, that folds and flounces and flowers are still adjusted to a nicety, but still there weighs on her mind the list of precedence, and the probable contingency that the most important guest may not turn up at all. Perhaps it may come across even her conventional mind that there are games for which it is scarce worth while to purchase such expensive candles, and that a two o’clock dinner with the children is a more agreeable repast, after all. Ay! even at the best, there is a speck on the _épergne_, an earwig in the flower-basket, a flavour of wormwood in the liquid amber called champagne. _Surgit amari_ over and over again! Perhaps it was not so in that banquet of which the halt and the maimed and the blind were invited to partake. Perhaps there are no insects in a dinner of herbs; no heart-burnings in the crust we share with hunger; no bitter drop in that cup, though it be but cold water, wherewith we pledge celestial charity, and ‘entertain an angel unawares.’
Chastelâr was flushed and preoccupied; thus much was apparent to the eyes that watched him with such eager interest. Ever and anon he glanced uneasily towards the royal table, but ere long something he noticed there seemed to give him intense satisfaction, and filling his goblet to the brim, he devoted himself, like an accomplished gallant, to his fair neighbour. Such is the nature of his sex. A woman always feels a little humbled when she thinks she has been too gracious, even towards a favourite; a man, on the contrary, though his affections may be fixed elsewhere, considers it due to himself to be as captivating as he can. And then they talk of female vanity and female love of admiration.
‘I was sorry for my young knight to-day,’ said Mary Hamilton, not, it must be confessed, very truthfully, and without raising her eyes to her companion’s face. ‘Poor boy! he would have been so pleased to win. I wish he had carried off the prize.’
