One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
think: with the warning to them, that the establishment of
their claim for equality puts an end to the priceless privileges
of petticoats. Women must be mad, to provoke such a warning;
and the majority of them submissively show their good
sense. They send up an incense of perfumery, all the bouquets
of the chemist commingled; most nourishing to the
idea of woman in the nose of man. They are a forest foliage—rustle
of silks and muslins, magic interweaving, or the
mythology, if you prefer it. See, hear, smell, they are Juno,
Venus, Hebe, to you. We must have poetry with them; otherwise
they are better in the kitchen. Is there—but there is
not; there is not present one of the chivalrous breeched who
could prefer the shocking emancipated gristly female, which
imposes propriety on our sensations and inner dreams, by
petrifying in the tender bud of them.
Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme. He is a
colonel of Companies. But those are his diversion, as the
British Army has been to the warrior. Puellis idoneus, he is
professedly a lady’s man, a rose-beetle, and a fine specimen
of a common kind: and he has been that thing, that shining
delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years, necessitating a
certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving him, to
conceal the muster. He has to be fascinating, or he would
look outworn, forlorn. On one side of him is Lady Carmine;
on the other, Lady Swanage; dames embedded in the blooming
maturity of England’s conservatory. Their lords (an Earl,
a Baron) are of the lords who go down to the City to sow a
title for a repair of their poor incomes, and are to be commended
for frankly accepting the new dispensation while
they retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient.
Thus gently does a maternal Old England let them down.
Projectors of Companies, Directors, Founders; Railway magnates,
actual kings and nobles (though one cannot yet persuade
old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity
to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere);
holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric’s blue mud
of the glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in
the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; Bankers and wives of Bankers.
Victor passed among them, chatting right and left.
Lady Carmine asked him: ‘Is Durandarte counted on?’
He answered: ‘I made sure of the Luciani.’
She serenely understood. Artistes are licenced people, with
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