To make Love prosaically decent, how gross! to deprive it of all impropriety, how dull!

Lord David was ripening.  Forty; ’tis a marked period.  He did not perceive this, and in truth he looked no more than thirty.  He considered it more amusing to desire Josiana than to possess her.  He possessed others.  He had mistresses.  On the other hand, Josiana had dreams.

The Duchess Josiana had a peculiarity, less rare than it is supposed.  One of her eyes was blue and the other black.  Her pupils were made for love and hate, for happiness and misery.  Night and day were mingled in her look.

Her ambition was this—­to show herself capable of impossibilities.  One day she said to Swift, “You people fancy that you know what scorn is.”  “You people” meant the human race.

She was a skin-deep Papist.  Her Catholicism did not exceed the amount necessary for fashion.  She would have been a Puseyite in the present day.  She wore great dresses of velvet, satin, or moire, some composed of fifteen or sixteen yards of material, with embroideries of gold and silver; and round her waist many knots of pearls, alternating with other precious stones.  She was extravagant in gold lace.  Sometimes she wore an embroidered cloth jacket like a bachelor.  She rode on a man’s saddle, notwithstanding the invention of side-saddles, introduced into England in the fourteenth century by Anne, wife of Richard II.  She washed her face, arms, shoulders, and neck, in sugar-candy, diluted in white of egg, after the fashion of Castile.  There came over her face, after any one had spoken wittily in her presence, a reflective smile of singular grace.  She was free from malice, and rather good-natured than otherwise.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LEADER OF FASHION.

Josiana was bored.  The fact is so natural as to be scarcely worth mentioning.

Lord David held the position of judge in the gay life of London.  He was looked up to by the nobility and gentry.  Let us register a glory of Lord David’s.  He was daring enough to wear his own hair.  The reaction against the wig was beginning.  Just as in 1824 Eugene Deveria was the first to allow his beard to grow, so in 1702 Prince Devereux was the first to risk wearing his own hair in public disguised by artful curling.  For to risk one’s hair was almost to risk one’s head.  The indignation was universal.  Nevertheless Prince Devereux was Viscount Hereford, and a peer of England.  He was insulted, and the deed was well worth the insult.  In the hottest part of the row Lord David suddenly appeared without his wig and in his own hair.  Such conduct shakes the foundations of society.  Lord David was insulted even more than Viscount Hereford.  He held his ground.  Prince Devereux was the first, Lord David Dirry-Moir the second.  It is sometimes more difficult to be second than first.  It requires less genius, but more courage.  The first, intoxicated by the novelty, may ignore the danger; the second sees the abyss, and rushes into it.  Lord David flung himself into the abyss of no longer wearing a wig.  Later on these lords found imitators.  Following these two revolutionists, men found sufficient audacity to wear their own hair, and powder was introduced as an extenuating circumstance.