Explore "The Young Duke" by Benjamin Disraeli on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE Lady Aphrodite at first refused to sit in the Duke's pavilion. Was she, then, in the "habit" of refusing? Let us not forget our Venus of the Waters. Shall we whisper where the young Duke first dared to hope? No, you shall guess. "Je vous le donne en trois". The Gardens? The opera? The tea-room? No! no! no! You are conceiving a locality much more romantic. Already you have created the bower of a Parisina, where the waterfall is even more musical than the birds, more lulling than the evening winds; where all is pale, except the stars; all hushed, except their beating pulses! Will this do? No! What think you, then, of a "Bazaar"?
O thou wonderful nineteenth century! thou that believest in no miracles and doest so many, hast thou brought this, too, about, that ladies' hearts should be won, and gentlemen's also, not in courts of tourney or halls of revel, but over a counter and behind a stall? We are, indeed, a nation of shopkeepers!