The evening peace, with its note of decay and death, seemed to stir feeling rather than soothe it.

It set the nerves trembling.
He began to talk of some pictures he had been studying in the Palace that day--Nattiers, Rigauds, Drouais--examples of that happy, sensuous, confident art, produced by a society that knew no doubts of itself, which not to have enjoyed--so the survivors of it thought--was to be for ever ignorant of what the charm of life might be.
Fenwick spoke of it with envy and astonishment.

The _pleasure_ of it had penetrated him, its gay, perpetual _festa_--as compared with the strain of thought and conscience under which the modern lives.
'It gives me a perfect hunger for fine clothes, and jewels, and masquerades--and "fetes de nuit"-- and every sort of theatricality and expense! Nature has sent us starvelings on the scene a hundred years late.

We are like children in the rain, flattening our noses against a ballroom window.' 'There were plenty of them then,' said Eugenie.

'But they broke in and sacked the ballroom.' 'Yes.