Sir William by David Stacton

when they told him to. He looked, in other words, like an Eton portrait, a presentation piece you give away as you leave, available always as a fourteenth at dinner if one had forgotten to ask him before, and as last man into the Cabinet.
    Now where, everyone asked, when everything was made up, shall we put Greville?
    “In his place,” said Lord North, the then First Minister.
    “Well, he won’t do for the Cabinet. A gentleman in waiting, perhaps? I doubt if the King would mind.”
    “The King has no mind. He has gone barmy again, so they say,” said North with a chuckle (or perhaps it was Pitt).
    As indeed he had. Father George was toppled down with tares, mostly of his own sowing, and all burdensome. He was having one of his rest periods. And as for Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who had had a cool hoyden charm when young, she now looked like a dropsical mouse. But Greville had long ago given up trying to explain to Emma the nature of politics. She would not listen. The scramble for place did not interest her. As far as she was concerned, she had found hers, and high time, too, for she was seventeen.
    Meanwhile here was the carriage, the horses stomping methodically, like prisoners taking their exercise; into the carriage they got, and “Ranelagh, my man,” said Greville, in a youthful, manly tone, and off they went across Paddington Green, down Park Lane and over the fields to Chelsea. The trees in Hyde Park were pools of black, like ink blots by the Brothers Cozens, of no artistic merit, but a curiosity; and the shrubbery was fragrant, indeterminateand blobby. The night was clear with a shimmer to it, the sky a miniscus, and here and there a star danced—all of them Emma’s, all of them musical. Inside her muff her hands met with cosy delight. He was not a dull old stick. Things would go better now.
    The dull old stick sat with face averted, waiting. He was a town man. He preferred scenery where it belonged, at Drury Lane.
    The Thames was a black mirror, reflecting the firefly lanterns of wherries, for since it was possible to arrive at Ranelagh by both carriage and boat, no matter which side one entered from or with whom, one never knew who might be there. Above the trees rose the Central Edifice, a large, purring dome. Before the carriage, rose the gates.
    So they entered the gardens, a perfect Gainsborough couple, resembling that connubial self-portrait “The Walk,” in which, before feathery foliage which looks as though it had been taken from a hatbox rather than from nature, the painter, dressed as a gentleman, conducts his wife—who has a certain charm independent of assumed station—toward the spectator.
    Greville took Emma’s arm; it was the expected thing.
    Emma was disappointed. The trouble with respectability, even if perilously achieved, is that inevitably, since it consists in doing only the expected thing, it lacks spontaneity. It has no spirits. It does not run; it perambulates. They perambulated.
    “My God,” she said, “is there nothing else to do but this?”
    “What else would there be to do?” asked Greville indulgently, who was himself bored but found the sensation familiar and therefore congenial. Even the music was congenial.
    “But does nobody sing?”
    “Not during the symphony, no,” said Greville, and blinked like a barn owl. He had just seen some people he knew. He bowed.
    “Who was that?”
    “Nobody in particular,” said Greville, glossing over anactress, a member of Parliament and two disreputable duchesses, and for once he was right.
    They were on their third lap around the Rotunda. Having deduced that she would be introduced to no one, Emma demanded to go outdoors. Greville was willing, for the third time around was never a novelty.
    Emma could hear the jagged sounds of song.
    “Oh let’s hurry, Greville, do,” she said, but Greville would not. He had heard Mrs. Bottarelli sing that moral aria da capo, “The Chaste Nymph Surprised,” before, and to judge