It was worth a
long cruise, and even a chance of shipwreck.
He danced with Lady Aphrodite, because, since the affair of the Signora,
he was most punctilious in his attentions to her, particularly in
public. That affair, of course, she passed over in silence, though it
was bitter. She, however, had had sufficient experience of man to feel
that remonstrance is a last resource, and usually an ineffectual one. It
was something that her rival--not that her ladyship dignified the Bird
by that title--it was something that she was not her equal, that she was
not one with whom she could be put in painful and constant collision.
She tried to consider it a freak, to believe only half she heard, and
to indulge the fancy that it was a toy which would soon tire. As for
Sir Lucius, he saw nothing in this adventure, or indeed in the Alhambra
system at all, which militated against his ulterior views. No one more
constantly officiated at the ducal orgies than himself, both because he
was devoted to self-gratification, and because he liked ever to have
his protege in sight. He studiously prevented any other individual from
becoming the Petronius of the circle.
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