Page:Through a Glass Lightly (1897, Greg).djvu/139

 and thought, or gallop impetuously into the very jousts of love and romance, into the tourney, as it were, of life, if we would watch the tossing, dancing bubbles in our champagne like stars of dawn luring us onward to a new youth, lo! in a moment this griping fiend has us writhing in his talons, and all becomes flat, jejune, unprofitable, stale. The long white fingers, tipped with the almond nails of perfect feature and complexion have grown, it seems to us, a trifle crooked, and there rises now and again an angry flush of ugly purple which irradiates them with an uncanny lurid glare from which we shrink, with a tiny shudder of inconsiderable horror, for we will not swell our own bogie man to unreasonable proportions. There appear, too, on the joints of those