Elizabeth had been attractive as a girl; she remained for many years a handsome woman; but at last the traces of beauty were replaced by hard lines, borrowed colours, and a certain grotesque intensity. Yet, as her charms grew less, her insistence on their presence grew greater. She had been content with the devoted homage of her contemporaries; but from the young men who surrounded her in her old age she required - and received - the expressions of romantic passion. The affairs of State went on in a fandango of sighs, ecstasies, and protestations. Her prestige, which success had made enormous, was still further magnified by this transcendental atmosphere of personal worship. Men felt, when they came near her, that they were in a superhuman presence. No reverence was too great for such a divinity. A splendid young nobleman - so the story went - while bowing low before her, had given vent to an unfortunate sound, and thereupon, such was his horrified embarrassment, he had gone abroad and travelled for seven years before venturing to return to the presence of his Mistress. The policy of such a system was obvious; and yet it was by no means all policy. Her clear-sightedness, so tremendous in her dealings with outward circumstances, stopped short when she turned her eyes within. There her vision grew artificial and confused. It seemed as if, in obedience to a subtle instinct, she had succeeded in becoming one of the greatest of worldly realists by dint of concentrating the whole romance of her nature upon herself. The result was unusual. The wisest of rulers, obsessed by a preposterous vanity, existed in a universe that was composed entirely either of absurd, rose-tinted fantasies or the coldest and hardest of facts. There were no transitions - only opposites, juxtaposed. The extraordinary spirit was all steel one moment and all flutters the next. Once more her beauty had conquered, once more her fascinations had evoked the inevitable response. She eagerly absorbed the elaborate adorations of her lovers, and, in the same instant, by a final stroke of luck and cunning, converted them - like everything else she had anything to do with - into a paying concern.

 

That strange court was the abode of paradox and uncertainty. The goddess of it, moving in a nimbus of golden glory, was an old creature, fantastically dressed, still tall, though bent, with hair dyed red above her pale visage, long blackening teeth, a high domineering nose, and eyes that were at once deep-set and starting forward - fierce, terrifying eyes, in whose dark blue depths something frantic lurked - something almost maniacal. She passed on - the peculiar embodiment of a supreme energy; and Fate and Fortune went with her. When the inner door was closed, men knew that the brain behind the eyes was at work there, with the consummate dexterity of long-practised genius, upon the infinite complexities of European statecraft and the arduous government of a nation. From time to time a raucous sound was heard - a high voice, rating: an ambassador was being admonished, an expedition to the Indies forbidden, something determined about the constitution of the Church of England. The indefatigable figure emerged at last, to leap upon a horse, to gallop through the glades, and to return, well satisfied, for an hour with the virginals. After a frugal meal - the wing of a fowl, washed down with a little wine and water - Gloriana danced. While the viols sounded, the young men, grouped about her, awaited what their destiny might bring forth. Sometimes the Earl was absent, and then what might not be hoped for, from that quick susceptibility, that imperious caprice? The excited deity would jest roughly with one and another, and would end by summoning some strong-limbed youth to talk with her in an embrasure. Her heart melted with his flatteries, and, as she struck him lightly on the neck with her long fingers, her whole being was suffused with a lasciviousness that could hardly be defined. She was a woman - ah, yes! a fascinating woman! - but then, was she not also a virgin, and old? But immediately another flood of feeling swept upwards and engulfed her; she towered; she was something more - she knew it; what was it? Was she a man? She gazed at the little beings around her, and smiled to think that, though she might be their Mistress in one sense, in another it could never be so - that the very reverse might almost be said to be the case. She had read of Hercules and Hylas, and she might have fancied herself, in some half-conscious day-dream, possessed of something of that pagan masculinity. Hylas was a page - he was before her ...