He wished to introduce Nesta.  His girl was on the raised orchestral flooring.  Nataly held her fast to a music-scroll.

Mr. Peridon, sad for the absence and cause of absence of Louise de Seilles,—­summoned in the morning abruptly to Bourges, where her brother lay with his life endangered by an accident at Artillery practise,—­ Mr. Peridon was generally conductor.  Victor was to lead the full force of amateurs in the brisk overture to Zampa.  He perceived a movement of Nataly, Nesta, and Peridon.  ‘They have come,’ he said; he jumped on the orchestra boards and hastened to greet the Luciani with Durandarte in the retiring-room.

His departure raised the whisper that he would wield the baton.  An opinion was unuttered.  His name for the flute-duet with the Hon. Dudley Sowerby had not provoked the reserve opinion; it seemed, on the whole, a pretty thing in him to condescend to do:  the sentiment he awakened was not flustered by it.  But the act of leading, appeared as an official thing to do.  Our soufe of sentiment will be seen subsiding under a breath, without a repressive word to send it down.  Sir Rodwell Blachington would have preferred Radnor’s not leading or playing either.  Colonel Corfe and Mr. Caddis declined to consider such conduct English, in a man of station . . . notwithstanding Royal Highnesses, who are at least partly English:  partly, we say, under our breath, remembering our old ideal of an English gentleman, in opposition to German tastes.  It is true, that the whole country is changeing, decomposing!

The colonel fished for Lady Carmine’s view.  And Lady Swanage too?  Both of the distinguished ladies approved of Mr. Radnor’s leading—­for a leading off.  Women are pleased to see their favourite in the place of prominence—­as long as Fortune swims him unbuffeted, or one should say, unbattered, up the mounting wave.  Besides these ladies had none of the colonel’s remainder of juvenile English sense of the manly, his adolescent’s intolerance of the eccentric, suspicion and contempt of any supposed affectation, which was not ostentatiously, stalkingly practised to subdue the sex.  And you cannot wield a baton without looking affected.  And at one of the Colonel’s Clubs in town, only five years back, an English musical composer, who had not then made his money—­now by the mystery of events knighted!—­had been (he makes now fifteen thousand a year) black-balled.  ’Fiddler? no; can’t admit a Fiddler to associate on equal terms with gentlemen.’  Only five years back:  and at present we are having the Fiddler everywhere.

A sprinkling of the minor ladies also would have been glad if Mr. Radnor had kept himself somewhat more exclusive.  Dr. Schlesien heard remarks, upon which his weighty Teutonic mind sat crushingly.  Do these English care one bit for music?—­for anything finer than material stuffs?—­what that man Durance calls, ’their beef, their beer, and their pew in eternity’?  His wrath at their babble and petty brabble doubted that they did.