Page:Ethel Churchill 1.pdf/193

Rh is honour, and he lived in a very court of personal homage and flattery. But fortune only neglected to do what nature had already done. Dwarfed from his birth, that slender frame was tenanted by acute physical ills; which, acting upon a mind even more sensitive than his body, made life one long scene of irritation and suffering. The fingers were contracted by pain that yet gave the sweetest music to their page: satire was at once his power (and the sense of power is sweet to us all) and his refuge. The passion and melancholy of one or two poems just suffice to show what a world of affection and sentiment was checked and subdued, because their indulgence had been only too painful; but to-day was to be as flowing as his own verses: he was at her side on whom he lavished so much passionate and graceful flattery; and Lady Mary paid him back,—not in kind, for his heart went with his words, but hers was "only sweet lip service." There is a cruelty in feminine coquetry, which is one of nature's contradictions. Formed