Even William Oke, who, besides
myself and a few elderly people, was the only man not masqueraded, seemed
delighted and fired by the sight. A certain schoolboy character suddenly
came out in him; and finding that there was no costume left for him, he
rushed upstairs and presently returned in the uniform he had worn before
his marriage. I thought I had really never seen so magnificent a specimen
of the handsome Englishman; he looked, despite all the modern associations
of his costume, more genuinely old-world than all the rest, a knight for
the Black Prince or Sidney, with his admirably regular features and
beautiful fair hair and complexion. After a minute, even the elderly people
had got costumes of some sort--dominoes arranged at the moment, and hoods
and all manner of disguises made out of pieces of old embroidery and
Oriental stuffs and furs; and very soon this rabble of masquers had become,
so to speak, completely drunk with its own amusement--with the
childishness, and, if I may say so, the barbarism, the vulgarity underlying
the majority even of well-bred English men and women--Mr. Oke himself doing
the mountebank like a schoolboy at Christmas.
Pages:
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73