Page:Hichens - The Green Carnation.djvu/131

Rh that his youth had slipped from him, and left him alone with his intellect and his epigrams. Sometimes he shivered with cold among those epigrams. He was tired of them. He knew them so well, and then so many of them had foreign blood in their veins, and were inclined to taunt him with being English. Ah! youth with its simple puns and its full-blooded pleasures, when there is no gold dust in the hair and no wrinkles about the eyes, when the sources of an epigram, like the sources of the Nile, are undiscoverable, and the joy of being led into sin has not lost its pearly freshness! Ah! youth—youth! He sighed, and sighed again, for he thought his sigh as beautiful as the face of a young Greek god!

"Sing it daintily!" cried Lord Reggie, playing the spinet-like prelude with the soft pedal down. "Let it tinkle."

And the little rosy boys tried to let it, squeaking wrong notes with all their might and main, and fixing their eyes upon Lord Reggie and his carnation, rather than upon their sheets of music.

"Thy lips are like a thread, like a thre-eda o-of scar-let, and thy speech, thy spee-eech i-is come-ly," they squealed at the top of their village voices, strong in the possession of complete unmusicalness. And Lord Reggie