“You are divine!” said Mavrokordatos. “But not everyone is—ah, metaphysical as you. How should you have treated the Christian among Turks?”
“I should have chosen my own subject. I never suffer a man to give me another.”
“Superb! Pray name it.”
“Well.” Shelley made a regretful face at the improvisatore, then stood to his full height, pulled straight his jacket and hat, and swept his arm over the ball like a strategist marking out terrain. “Why go abroad? Take the subject around us.”
His eyes had a martial gleam; there was something Napoleonic in his attitude, if not his person. Suppose Napoleon had been born tall, and fair, and an aristocrat, and hadn’t needed to fight his way up from under every disadvantage of nature.
“I would evoke a masque,” he said. “Not a masque such as tonight’s
