Gynecocracy

"Ah, Lord Alfred, you naughty man!" exclaimed Mademoiselle, cheerily. "I fear you will find Julia as difficult to deal with as Lady Alfred would have found Julian. I recollect very well that evening when you dined with us and your elopement from the saloon afterwards. Remember it, if you do not."

Lord Alfred glanced at Mademoiselle very meaningly and possessed by an apparently irresistible spirit of mischief, passed his hands down the backs of his thighs in so comical a manner, that I fairly laughed outright, and Mademoiselle smiled, and bit her lip.

She was vexed, I suppose, because she thought he was revealing too much to me; but what Elise had said to Beatrice in my hearing on the same evening, had already informed me of the truth and made guessing, which would have been easy, if necessary, altogether superfluous.

"Oh! We shall get on capitally together, sha'n't we, Julia? Mademoiselle, you know, is a very old friend of mine; and although she looks so stern, she loves a joke."

And he calmly put his arm round my slender waist, and kissed my lips.

"Oh, Lord Alfred!" I cried, flustered and blushing. "How dare you."

While he and Mademoiselle rattled on, I wondered, whether this could possibly be Lady Alfred Ridlington, and then scouted the question as impossible and ridiculous. It must be Lord Alfred. He looked it. His cheeks, lips, and chin, bore signs of the razor. Lady Ridlington would certainly not have shaved, but then his form was wonderfully round, his limbs astonishingly plump for a man's and his breasts too did not look under his swelling waistcoat like the mock mamillae which men possess. On the other hand his closely cropped hair, his gestures, his manners, were, I was secretly delighted to notice, decidedly and emphatically masculine.

"Julia," presently said Mademoiselle to my relief, for I began to feel de trop, when her visitor had taken a chair and seated himself near her and had commenced a low conversation with her alone, "you had better go to my boudoir, amuse yourself there with that passage in the Medea you could not construe this morning or with Aeschylus or Sophocles-"

"Or Sappho," he broke in; "or, better still, Ovid's Art of Love. Mademoiselle has a rariorum edition deluxe, illustrated, and altogether sumptuous, if you can only find it."

"Lord Alfred!" said Mademoiselle, menacingly.

"Mademoiselle!" I heard him retort in a mock-pleading tone, his head a little on one side, as he looked at her. And I left the room.

VOLUME THREE

CHAPTER 1

Summum Bonum

Why had I not been allowed to go out with my cousins as usual? Why was I sent to Mademoiselle's boudoir! These were the questions which first suggested themselves to me; and then in a flutter partly agreeable and partly the contrary, I looked at the statues and at the pictures in a vague search of some assistance to determine Lord Alfred Ridlington's sex and my own!

At last my attention was caught and engrossed by a truly sumptuous edition of Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, a work I then saw for the first time-one which has ever since fascinated me and which to my mind possesses a greater charm than the writings even of Rousseau himself.

The steel engravings were all that the most exacting imagination could desire, executed with consummate art, and possessing a still atmosphere of perfect luxury and voluptuousness which imparted itself as an additional delight to the letterpress.

Mademoiselle had with difficulty obtained the copy in Bond Street on our last visit to London and had paid?15 for it. She had it bound, at an additional charge of three guineas, in a rich chaste cover.

I threw myself down on the great divan with the volume in my hands, opening it at random. I arranged my skirts and myself comfortably, exactly with the feelings of any other girl, leaving my pretty ankles and shoes sufficiently visible for my own delectation, if for no one else's.

I opened my new acquaintance with avidity, intent upon the entertainment promised by the engravings. My thoughts, without any direction on my part, however, momentarily returned to Lord Alfred Ridlington. But only for a moment.

The fact is the puzzle had by this time become a bore.

It worried me; it excited positive neurosis, it set up neuralgia. Impatiently and petulantly, therefore, I dismissed the subject to stew in its own juice and to evolve itself as fate might ordain. As to a welcome refuge I turned to the volume between which and myself these intruders had ventured to insinuate themselves.

Then, with the scent of the glorious roses smiling in great bowls wherever within the little sanctuary, my eyes chanced to light, filling the atmosphere and my nostrils, I read.

The balmy air-soft, cool, and in gentle motion-gratefully fanned my cheeks and neck. A sense of deep rest, of intense peace, as distinctive of this apartment as of its mistress, settled itself upon me, leaving me free to concentrate my undisturbed attention upon a narrative which speedily absorbed it.