"She never went a hundred leagues to drink in one look and a denial
with untold raptures. She has not hung her own life on a thread, nor
tried to stab more than one man to save her sovereign lord, her king,
her divinity. . . . Love, for her, meant a fascinating colonel."
"Here she is with her La Rochelle," Euphrasia made answer. "Love comes
like the wind, no one knows whence. And, for that matter, if one of
those brutes had once fallen in love with you, you would hold sensible
men in horror."
"Brutes are put out of the question by the Code," said the tall,
sarcastic Aquilina.
"I thought you had more kindness for the army," laughed Euphrasia.
"How happy they are in their power of dethroning their reason in this
way," Raphael exclaimed.
"Happy?" asked Aquilina, with dreadful look, and a smile full of pity
and terror. "Ah, you do not know what it is to be condemned to a life
of pleasure, with your dead hidden in your heart. . . ."
A moment's consideration of the rooms was like a foretaste of Milton's
Pandemonium. The faces of those still capable of drinking wore a
hideous blue tint, from burning draughts of punch. Mad dances were
kept up with wild energy; excited laughter and outcries broke out like
the explosion of fireworks.
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