initial commit of ebook 4472HEADmain

6 files changed, 5711 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/4472-0.txt b/4472-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..463d2da
--- /dev/null
+++ b/4472-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2646 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4472 ***
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+XII.      TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
+          HAVING ONE HEART
+XIII.     THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+XIV.      DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+XV.       A PATRIOT ABROAD
+XVI.      ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED
+          NATALY
+XVII.     CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
+XVIII.    SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD HAVING ONE
+HEART
+
+Two that live together in union are supposed to be intimate on every
+leaf.  Particularly when they love one another and the cause they have
+at heart is common to them in equal measure, the uses of a cordial
+familiarity forbid reserves upon important matters between them, as we
+think; not thinking of an imposed secretiveness, beneath the false
+external of submissiveness, which comes of an experience of repeated
+inefficiency to maintain a case in opposition, on the part of the
+loquently weaker of the pair.  In Constitutional Kingdoms a powerful
+Government needs not to be tyrannical to lean oppressively; it is more
+serviceable to party than agreeable to country; and where the alliance
+of men and women binds a loving couple, of whom one is a torrent of
+persuasion, their differings are likely to make the other resemble a log
+of the torrent.  It is borne along; it dreams of a distant corner of the
+way for a determined stand; it consents to its whirling in anticipation
+of an undated hour when it will no longer be neutral.
+
+There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the fellow breast,
+a mutually sensitive nerve to protest against intrusion of light or
+sound.  The cloud over the name of their girl could now strike Nataly and
+Victor dumb in their taking of counsel.  She divined that his hint had
+encouraged him to bring the crisis nearer, and he that her comprehension
+had become tremblingly awake.  They shrank, each of them, the more from
+an end drawing closely into view.  All subjects glooming off or darkening
+up to it were shunned by them verbally, and if they found themselves
+entering beneath that shadow, conversation passed to an involuntary
+gesture, more explicit with him, significant of the prohibited, though
+not acknowledging it.
+
+All the stronger was it Victor's purpose, leaping in his fashion to the
+cover of action as an escape from perplexity, to burn and scheme for the
+wedding of their girl--the safe wedding of that dearest, to have her
+protected, secure, with the world warm about her.  And he well knew why
+his Nataly had her look of a closed vault (threatening, if opened, to
+thunder upon Life) when he dropped his further hints.  He chose to call
+it feminine inconsistency, in a woman who walked abroad with a basket of
+marriage-ties for the market on her arm.  He knew that she would soon
+have to speak the dark words to their girl; and the idea of any doing of
+it, caught at his throat.  Reasonably she dreaded the mother's task;
+pardonably indeed.  But it is for the mother to do, with a girl.
+He deputed it lightly to the mother because he could see himself stating
+the facts to a son.  'And, my dear boy, you will from this day draw your
+five thousand a year, and we double it on the day of your marriage,
+living at Lakelands or where you will.'
+
+His desire for his girl's protection by the name of one of our great
+Families, urged him to bind Nataly to the fact, with the argument, that
+it was preferable for the girl to hear their story during her green early
+youth, while she reposed her beautiful blind faith in the discretion of
+her parents, and as an immediate step to the placing of her hand in a
+husband's.  He feared that her mother required schooling to tell the
+story vindicatingly and proudly, in a manner to distinguish instead of
+degrading or temporarily seeming to accept degradation.
+
+The world would weigh on her confession of the weight of the world on her
+child; she would want inciting and strengthening, if one judged of her
+capacity to meet the trial by her recent bearing; and how was he to do
+it!  He could not imagine himself encountering the startled, tremulous,
+nascent intelligence in those pure brown darklashed eyes of Nesta; he
+pitied the poor mother.  Fancifully directing her to say this and that to
+the girl, his tongue ran till it was cut from his heart and left to wag
+dead colourless words.
+
+The prospect of a similar business of exposition, certainly devolving
+upon the father in treaty with the fortunate youth, gripped at his vitals
+a minute, so intense was his pride in appearing woundless and scarless,
+a shining surface, like pure health's, in the sight of men.  Nevertheless
+he skimmed the story, much as a lecturer strikes his wand on the
+prominent places of a map, that is to show us how he arrived at the
+principal point, which we are all agreed to find chiefly interesting.
+This with Victor was the naming of Nesta's bridal endowment.  He rushed
+to it.  'My girl will have ten thousand a year settled on her the day of
+her marriage.'  Choice of living at Lakelands was offered.
+
+It helped him over the unpleasant part of that interview.  At the same
+time, it moved him to a curious contempt of the youth.  He had to
+conjure-up an image of the young man in person, to correct the
+sentiment:--and it remained as a kind of bruise only half cured.
+
+Mr. Dudley Sowerby was not one of the youths whose presence would rectify
+such an abstract estimate of the genus pursuer.  He now came frequently
+of an evening, to practise a duet for flutes with Victor;--a Mercadante,
+honeyed and flowing; too honeyed to suit a style that, as Fenellan
+characterized it to Nataly, went through the music somewhat like an
+inquisitive tourist in a foreign town, conscientious to get to the end of
+the work of pleasure; until the notes had become familiar, when it rather
+resembled a constable's walk along the midnight streets into collision
+with a garlanded roysterer; and the man of order and the man of passion,
+true to the measure though they were, seeming to dissent, almost to
+wrangle, in their different ways of winding out the melody, on to the
+last movement; which was plainly a question between home to the strayed
+reveller's quarters or off to the lockup.  Victor was altogether the
+younger of the two.  But his vehement accompaniment was a tutorship;
+Mr. Sowerby improved; it was admitted by Nesta and mademoiselle that
+he gained a show of feeling; he had learnt that feeling was wanted.
+Passion, he had not a notion of: otherwise he would not be delaying;
+the interview, dramatized by the father of the young bud of womanhood,
+would be taking place, and the entry into Lakelands calculable, for
+Nataly's comfort, as under the aegis of the Cantor earldom.  Gossip flies
+to a wider circle round the members of a great titled family, is
+inaudible; or no longer the diptherian whisper the commonalty hear of the
+commonalty: and so we see the social uses of our aristocracy survive.  We
+do not want the shield of any family; it is the situation that wants it;
+Nataly ought to be awake to the fact.  One blow and we have silenced our
+enemy: Nesta's wedding-day has relieved her parents.
+
+Victor's thoughts upon the instrument for striking that, blow, led him to
+suppose Mr. Sowerby might be meditating on the extent of the young lady's
+fortune.  He talked randomly of money, in a way to shatter Nataly's
+conception of him.  He talked of City affairs at table, as it had been
+his practice to shun the doing; and hit the resounding note on mines,
+which have risen in the market like the crest of a serpent, casting a
+certain spell upon the mercantile understanding.  'Fredi's diamonds from
+her own mine, or what once was--and she still reserves a share,' were to
+be shown to Mr. Sowerby.
+
+Nataly respected the young fellow for not displaying avidity at the
+flourish of the bait, however it might be affecting him; and she fancied
+that he did laboriously, in his way earnestly, study her girl, to sound
+for harmony between them, previous to a wooing.  She was a closer reader
+of social character than Victor; from refraining to run on the broad
+lines which are but faintly illustrative of the individual one in being
+common to all--unless we have hit by chance on an example of the
+downright in roguery or folly or simple goodness.  Mr. Sowerby'g bearing
+to Nesta was hardly warmed by the glitter of diamonds.  His next visit
+showed him livelier in courtliness, brighter, fresher; but that was
+always his way at the commencement of every visit, as if his reflections
+on the foregone had come to a satisfactory conclusion; and the labours of
+the new study of the maiden ensued again in due course to deaden him.
+
+Gentleman he was.  In the recognition of his quality as a man of
+principle and breeding, Nataly was condemned by thoughts of Nesta's
+future to question whether word or act of hers should, if inclination on
+both sides existed, stand between her girl and a true gentleman.  She
+counselled herself, as if the counsel were in requisition, to be passive;
+and so doing, she more acutely than Victor--save in his chance flashes--
+discerned the twist of her very nature caused by their false position.
+And her panacea for ills, the lost little cottage, would not have averted
+it: she would there have had the same coveting desire to name a man of
+breeding, honour, station, for Nesta's husband.  Perhaps in the cottage,
+choosing at leisure, her consent to see the brilliant young creature tied
+to the best of dull men would have been unready, without the girl to push
+it.  For the Hon. Dudley was lamentably her pupil in liveliness; he took
+the second part, as it is painful for a woman with the old-fashioned
+ideas upon the leading of the sexes to behold; resembling in his look the
+deaf, who constantly require to have an observation repeated; resembling
+the most intelligent of animals, which we do not name, and we reprove
+ourselves for seeing likeness.
+
+Yet the likeness or apparent likeness would suggest that we have not so
+much to fear upon the day of the explanation to him.  Some gain is there.
+Shameful thought!  Nataly hastened her mind to gather many instances or
+indications testifying to the sterling substance in young Mr. Sowerby,
+such as a mother would pray for her son-in-law to possess.  She
+discovered herself feeling as the burdened mother, not providently for
+her girl, in the choice of a mate.  The perception was clear, and not the
+less did she continue working at the embroidery of Mr. Sowerby on the
+basis of his excellent moral foundations, all the while hoping, praying,
+that he might not be lured on to the proposal for Nesta.  But her
+subservience to the power of the persuasive will in Victor--which was
+like the rush of a conflagration--compelled her to think realizingly of
+any scheme he allowed her darkly to read.
+
+Opposition to him, was comparable to the stand of blocks of timber before
+flame.  Colney Durance had done her the mischief we take from the
+pessimist when we are overweighted: in darkening the vision of external
+aid from man or circumstance to one who felt herself mastered.  Victor
+could make her treacherous to her wishes, in revolt against them, though
+the heart protested.  His first conquest of her was in her blood, to
+weaken a spirit of resistance.  For the precedent of submission is a
+charm upon the faint-hearted through love: it unwinds, unwills them.
+Nataly resolved fixedly, that there must be a day for speaking; and she
+had her moral sustainment in the resolve; she had also a tormenting
+consciousness of material support in the thought, that the day was not
+present, was possibly distant, might never arrive.  Would Victor's
+release come sooner?  And that was a prospect bearing resemblance to
+hopes of the cure of a malady through a sharp operation.
+
+These were matters going on behind the curtain; as wholly vital to her,
+and with him at times almost as dominant, as the spiritual in memory,
+when flesh has left but its shining track in dust of a soul outwritten;
+and all their talk related to the purchase of furniture, the expeditions
+to Lakelands, music, public affairs, the pardonable foibles of friends
+created to amuse their fellows, operatic heroes and heroines, exhibitions
+of pictures, the sorrows of Crowned Heads, so serviceable ever to mankind
+as an admonition to the ambitious, a salve to the envious!--in fine,
+whatsoever can entertain or affect the most social of couples,
+domestically without a care to appearance.  And so far they partially--
+dramatically--deceived themselves by imposing on the world while they
+talked and duetted; for the purchase of furniture from a flowing purse
+is a cheerful occupation; also a City issuing out of hospital, like this
+poor City of London, inspires good citizens to healthy activity.  But the
+silence upon what they were most bent on, had the sinister effect upon
+Victor, of obscuring his mental hold of the beloved woman, drifting her
+away from him.  In communicating Fenellan's news through the lawyer
+Carling of Mrs. Burman's intentions, he was aware that there was an
+obstacle to his being huggingly genial, even candidly genial with her,
+until he could deal out further news, corroborative and consecutive,
+to show the action of things as progressive.  Fenellan had sunk into his
+usual apathy:--and might plead the impossibility of his moving faster
+than the woman professing to transform herself into, beneficence out of
+malignity;--one could hear him saying the words!  Victor had not seen him
+since last Concert evening, and he deemed it as well to hear the words
+Fenellan's mouth had to say.  He called at an early hour of the Westward
+tidal flow at the Insurance Office looking over the stormy square of the
+first of Seamen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+
+After cursory remarks about the business of the Office and his friend's
+contributions to periodical literature, in which he was interested for as
+long as he had assurance that the safe income depending upon official
+duties was not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and fro.
+Fenellan waited for him to lead.
+
+'Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?'
+
+'I have dined with Mr. Carling:--capital claret.'
+
+Emptiness was in the reply.
+
+Victor curbed himself and said: 'By the way, you're not likely to have
+dealings with Blathenoy.  The fellow has a screw to the back of a shifty
+eye; I see it at work to fix the look for business.  I shall sit on the
+Board of my Bank.  One hears things.  He lives in style at Wrensham.  By
+the way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney from Creckholt staying with her.
+You said of little Mabsy--"Here she comes into the room all pink and
+white, like a daisy."  She's the daisy still; reminds us of our girl at
+that age.--So, then, we come to another dead block!'
+
+'Well, no; it's a chemist's shop, if that helps us on,' said Fenellan,
+settling to a new posture in his chair.  'She's there of an afternoon for
+hours.'
+
+'You mean it's she?'
+
+'The lady.  I 'll tell you.  I have it from Carling, worthy man; and
+lawyers can be brought to untruss a point over a cup of claret.  He's a
+bit of a "Mackenzie Man," as old aunts of mine used to say at home--a Man
+of Feeling.  Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted a
+lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it's an exposition of
+positive human nature when they've pulled down our noses to the worst
+parts--if there's a worse where all are useful: but the Realism of the
+dogs is to have us by the nose:--excite it and befoul it, and you're
+fearfully credible!  You don't read that olfactory literature.  However,
+friend Carling is a conciliatory carle.  Three or four days of the week
+the lady, he says, drives to her chemist's, and there she sits in the
+shop; round the corner, as you enter; and sees all Charing in the shop
+looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if
+Carling's picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet
+striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green
+shade over her forehead.  Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders
+of applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind
+of a prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she 'll try it
+herself.  It's a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent's Park
+pretty well every day.'
+
+'Ha! Regent's Park!' exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the
+district and the number of the house, dismal to him.  London buried the
+woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London.  'A
+chemist's shop!  She sits there?'
+
+'Mrs. Burman.  We pass by the shop.'
+
+'She had always a turn for drugs.--Not far from here, did you say?  And
+every day! under a green shade?'
+
+'Dear fellow, don't be suggesting ballads; we'll go now,' said Fenellan.
+'It 's true it's like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.'
+
+He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the
+office.
+
+'You've done nothing?' Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.
+
+'Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.'
+
+'Where did you hear?'
+
+'Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady's chemists.  I called
+the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board Meeting.'
+
+'The Themison?'
+
+'The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much in
+request for it.'
+
+'There's one of your echoes of Colney!' Victor cried.  'One gets dead
+sick of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors.  They don't kill, you know
+very well.  It 's not to their interest to kill.  They may take the
+relish out of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the
+patient living!'
+
+Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through his
+friend.
+
+'The City's mending; it's not the weary widow woman of the day when we
+capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,' he said, as they trod
+the pavement.  'Funny people, the English!  They give you all the
+primeing possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for
+the exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not,
+you're marched off to penitence.  I complain, that they have no
+philosophical appreciation of human nature.'
+
+'We pass the shop?' Victor interrupted him.
+
+'You're in view of it in a minute.  And what a square, for recreative
+dancing!  And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political
+agitation!  And what a country, where from morning to night it's an
+endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence!  Old Colney
+seems right now and then: they 're the offspring of pirates, and they 've
+got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of
+quarrelling everlastingly over the booty.  I 'd have band-music here for
+a couple of hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the
+East; and that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South
+too.  But just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this
+London of ours, it 's only too sadly true that the people are in the
+first rumble of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives.  Now
+you see the shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.'
+
+Victor looked.  He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
+swelled it, ahemming.  'That shop?' said he.  And presently: 'Fenellan,
+I'm not superstitious, I think.  Now listen; I declare to you, on the day
+of our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked home
+up this way across the square, and I was about to step into that
+identical shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having
+forgotten Nataly's favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I'm
+stating a fact--I distinctly--I 'm sure of the shop--felt myself plucked
+back by the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a
+foot backward to keep your equilibrium.'
+
+So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item
+for the colouring of history.
+
+He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in
+amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as
+being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish
+tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder's
+experience.
+
+Fenellan smiled indulgently.  'Queer things happen.  I recollect reading
+in my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where
+he was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at
+midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight of
+the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice, when at
+his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of
+undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform,
+not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted twice;
+and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and he jumped
+up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them providentially over
+the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into the boat awaiting
+them, and had them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon of
+gratitude for the special deliverance.  There was a Warning!  and it
+might well be called, as he called it, from within.  We're cared for,
+never doubt.  Aide-toi.  Be ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity,
+or you'll not stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the
+burnt.  That sounds like the moral.'
+
+'She could have seen me,' Victor threw out an irritable suggestion.  The
+idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.
+
+'Scarcely likely.  I'm told she sits looking on her lap, under the
+beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
+mixture that strikes her fancy.  It's possible to do more suicidal things
+than sit the afternoons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get
+their different passports to Orcus.'
+
+Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
+chemical wash.  The woman might be inside there now!  She might have seen
+his figure in the shop-mirror!  And she there!  The wonder of it all
+seemed to be, that his private history was not walking the streets.
+The thinness of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day's
+immunity: because this woman would live in London, in order to have her
+choice of a central chemist's shop, where she could feed a ghastly
+imagination on the various recipes .  .  .  and while it would have been
+so much healthier for her to be living in a recess of the country!
+
+He muttered: 'Diseases--drugs!'
+
+Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
+woman going.
+
+'And deadly spite.'  That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
+conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.
+
+In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
+the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.
+
+A little further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He confessed to himself, that
+latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous in
+thought, as never before.  He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
+tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
+Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving.  He accused her of dragging
+him down to humanity's lowest.
+
+But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.
+
+Her station in the chemist's shop he passed almost daily, appeared to him
+as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a short
+drive from the house in Regent's Park; but having shaken-off that house,
+he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it.  The woman certainly
+had a power.
+
+He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his capacity for winning
+men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of his
+energies: men and, individually, women.  Individually, the women were to
+be counted on as well; warm supporters.
+
+It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them
+collectively.  Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them.  Glancing at
+congregated women, he had a chill.  The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly
+judicial assembly: that is, the phantom of the offended collective woman:
+that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of civilized
+life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the tolerable, the
+legal, and banish the rebellious: these maintained an aspect of the stand
+against him.
+
+Did Nataly read the case: namely, that the crowned collective woman is
+not to be subdued?  And what are we to say of the indefinite but forcible
+Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
+Nataly!
+
+Victor's novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
+to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight.  Not
+many of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that
+index: nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure of
+value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides.  The
+passing by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to sit
+beneath her green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a henbane-visage!--
+had precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract verity:
+and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world to the practical
+mind.  But he made no advance.  He stopped in a fever of sensibility,
+to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a source that
+was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.
+
+In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school of
+its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums done
+on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the
+creditor on the defaulter.  Debtors are always paying like those who are
+guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth, they have
+made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in soul; and
+the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete burden is
+undischarged.  You know the Liar; you must have seen him diminishing,
+until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to humanity's
+preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on
+our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of things, he must
+from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive nimbleness, up to
+the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it again.  There is a
+repentance that does reconstitute!  It may help to the traceing to
+springs of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out of the wood.
+
+Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every debt
+with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt apologies for
+a short brush of his temper.  Nay, he had such a conscience for the
+smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a
+friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge, softened
+his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once.  Although this
+man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature which drives to
+unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen at its beating
+after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for the reverse of
+lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship.  So social a man
+could not otherwise incline.  But when it came to the examination of
+accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of physical revulsion,
+loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out of Court.  To men,
+it was impossible for him to speak the torments of those days of the
+monstrous alliance.  The heavens were cognizant.  He pleaded his case
+in their accustomed hearing:--a youngster tempted by wealth, attracted,
+besought, snared, revolted, etc.  And Mrs. Burman, when roused to
+jealousy, had shown it by teazing him for a confession of his admiration
+of splendid points in the beautiful Nataly, the priceless fair woman
+living under their roof, a contrast of very life, with the corpse and
+shroud; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her breath about
+him, her voice incessantly upon every chord of his being!
+
+He pleaded successfully.  But the silence following the verdict was
+heavy; the silence contained an unheard thunder.  It was the sound, as
+when out of Court the public is dissatisfied with a verdict.  Are we
+expected to commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
+public?--Imagine it for a moment as done.  Men are ours at a word--or at
+least a word of invitation.  Women we woo; fluent smooth versions of our
+tortures, mixed with permissible courtship, win the individual woman.
+And that unreasoning collective woman, icy, deadly, condemns the poor
+racked wretch who so much as remembers them!  She is the enemy of
+Nature.--Tell us how?  She is the slave of existing conventions.--
+And from what cause?  She is the artificial production of a state that
+exalts her so long as she sacrifices daily and hourly to the artificial.
+
+Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman--the foe of Nature: who, with her
+arts and gold lures, has now possession of the Law (the brass idol
+worshipped by the collective) to drive Nature into desolation.
+
+He placed himself to the right of Mrs. Burman, for the world to behold
+the couple: and he lent the world a sigh of disgust.
+
+What he could not do, as in other matters he did, was to rise above the
+situation, in a splendid survey and rapid view of the means of reversing
+it.  He was too social to be a captain of the socially insurgent;
+imagination expired.
+
+But having a courageous Nataly to second him!--how then?  It was the
+succour needed.  Then he would have been ready to teach the world that
+Nature--honest Nature--is more to be prized than Convention: a new Era
+might begin.
+
+The thought was tonic for an instant and illuminated him springingly.  It
+sank, excused for the flaccidity by Nataly's want of common adventurous
+daring.  She had not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture
+from a flowing purse with a heavy heart--unfeminine, one might say; she
+preferred to live obscurely; she did not, one had to think--but it was
+unjust: and yet the accusation, that she did not cheerfully make a strain
+and spurt on behalf of her child, pressed to be repeated.
+
+These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the verberant
+twang of a musical instrument that has had a smart blow, and wails away
+independent of the player's cunning hand.  He would have said, that he
+was more his natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to make
+him praise and uplift his beloved: mightily would it have astonished him
+to contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he
+invoked.  But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she
+in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes.  Men call
+on her for their defence, as a favourable witness: she is a note of their
+rhetoric.  They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not, as
+women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour.  It is not an effort at
+epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she most supports.
+
+An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.
+
+'How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians!  Well, now, the Germans
+have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German
+emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner
+has done.  He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod's Romeo
+et Juliette--and we don't gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for the
+melody gone; think of the little shepherd's pipeing in Mireille; and
+there's another in Sapho-delicious.  I held out against Wagner as long as
+I could.  The Italians don't much more than Wagnerize in exchange for the
+loss of melody.  They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese,
+Campagnole.  The Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
+master.  Aida and Otello, no.  I confess to a weakness for the old
+barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade.  Aren't you seduced by
+cadences?  Never mind Wagner's tap of his paedagogue's baton--a cadence
+catches me still.  Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps!  There's a
+march in Verdi's Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I'm in military step
+when I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera.  Fredi
+takes little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night.  Enough to make us
+old ones envious!  You remember your first Opera, Fenellan?  Sonnambula,
+with me.  I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if
+you like--showing all that's noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
+describe its effect on me.  I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for a
+year after.  The Huguenots to-night.  Not the best suited for little
+Mabsy; but she'll catch at the Rataplan.  Capital Opera; we used to think
+it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the
+Meistersinger.'
+
+Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
+the Huguenots.  That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him.  He
+drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying.  The return of a lively
+disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the yoke
+of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist's shop; save
+that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the picture; she
+threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him through his
+nostrils.  He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need for it;
+singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour abreast with
+Armandine's kitchen-clock.  Fenellan proposed a glass of sherry and
+bitters at his Club over the way.  He had forgotten a shower of black-
+balls (attributable to the conjurations of old Ate) on a certain past
+day.  Without word of refusal, Victor entered a wine-merchant's office,
+where he was unknown, and stating his wish for bitters and dry sherry,
+presently received the glass, drank, nodded to the administering clerk,
+named the person whom he had obliged and refreshed, and passed out,
+remarking to Fenellan: 'Colney on Clubs!  he's right; they're the
+mediaeval in modern times, our Baron's castles, minus the Baron; dead
+against public life and social duties.  Business excuses my City Clubs;
+but I shall take my name off my Club up West.'
+
+'More like monasteries, with a Committee for Abbot, and Whist for the
+services,' Fenellan said.  'Or tabernacles for the Chosen, and
+Grangousier playing Divinity behind the veil.  Well, they're social.'
+
+'Sectionally social, means anything but social, my friend.  However--and
+the monastery had a bell for the wanderer!  Say, I'm penniless or
+poundless, up and down this walled desert of a street, I feel, I must
+feel, these palaces--if we're Christian, not Jews: not that the Jews
+are uncharitable; they set an: example, in fact .  .  .  .  '
+
+He rambled, amusingly to the complacent hearing of Fenellan, who thought
+of his pursuit of wealth and grand expenditure.
+
+Victor talked as a man having his mind at leaps beyond the subject.
+He was nearing to the Idea he had seized and lost on London Bridge.
+
+The desire for some good news wherewith to inspirit Nataly, withdrew him
+from his ineffectual chase.  He had nought to deliver; on the contrary,
+a meditation concerning her comfort pledged him to concealment which was
+the no step, or passive state, most abhorrent to him.
+
+He snatched at the name of Themison.
+
+With Dr. Themison fast in his grasp, there was a report of progress to be
+made to Nataly; and not at all an empty report.
+
+Themison, then: he leaned on Themison.  The woman's doctor should have an
+influence approaching to authority with her.
+
+Land-values in the developing Colonies, formed his theme of discourse to
+Fenellan: let Banks beware.
+
+Fenellan saw him shudder and rub the back of his head.  'Feel the wind?'
+he said.
+
+Victor answered him with that humane thrill of the deep tones, which at
+times he had: 'No: don't be alarmed; I feel the devil.  If one has wealth
+and a desperate wish, he will speak.  All he does, is to make me more
+charitable to those who give way to him.  I believe in a devil.'
+
+'Horns and tail?'
+
+'Bait and hook.'
+
+'I haven't wealth, and I wish only for dinner,' Fenellan said.
+
+'You know that Armandine is never two minutes late.  By the way, you
+haven't wealth--you have me.'
+
+'And I thank God for you!' said Fenellan, acutely reminiscent of his
+having marked the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Burman, the Rev. Groseman
+Buttermore, as a man who might be useful to his friend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+
+A fortnight later, an extremely disconcerting circumstance occurred:
+Armandine was ten minutes behind the hour with her dinner.  But the
+surprise and stupefaction expressed by Victor, after glances at his
+watch, were not so profound as Fenellan's, on finding himself exchangeing
+the bow with a gentleman bearing the name of Dr. Themison.  His friend's
+rapidity in pushing the combinations he conceived, was known: Fenellan's
+wonder was not so much that Victor had astonished him again, as that he
+should be called upon again to wonder at his astonishment.  He did; and
+he observed the doctor and Victor and Nataly: aided by dropping remarks.
+Before the evening was over, he gathered enough of the facts, and had to
+speculate only on the designs.  Dr. Themison had received a visit from
+the husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor concerning her state of health.  At an
+interview with the lady, laughter greeted him; he was confused by her
+denial of the imputation of a single ailment: but she, to recompose him,
+let it be understood, that she was anxious about her husband's condition,
+he being certainly overworked; and the husband's visit passed for a
+device on the part of the wife.  She admitted a willingness to try a
+change of air, if it was deemed good for her husband.  Change of air was
+prescribed to each for both.  'Why not drive to Paris?' the doctor said,
+and Victor was taken with the phrase.
+
+He told Fenellan at night that Mrs. Burman, he had heard, was by the sea,
+on the South coast.  Which of her maladies might be in the ascendant,
+he did not know.  He knew little.  He fancied that Dr. Themison was
+unsuspicious of the existence of a relationship between him and Mrs.
+Burman: and Fenellan opined, that there had been no communication upon
+private affairs.  What, then, was the object in going to Dr. Themison?
+He treated her body merely; whereas the Rev. Groseman Buttermore could
+be expected to impose upon her conduct.  Fenellan appreciated his own
+discernment of the superior uses to which a spiritual adviser may be put,
+and he too agreeably flattered himself for the corrective reflection to
+ensue, that he had not done anything.  It disposed him to think a happy
+passivity more sagacious than a restless activity.  We should let Fortune
+perform her part at the wheel in working out her ends, should we not?--
+for, ten to one, nine times out of ten we are thwarting her if we stretch
+out a hand.  And with the range of enjoyments possessed by Victor, why
+this unceasing restlessness?  Why, when we are not near drowning, catch
+at apparent straws, which may be instruments having sharp edges?
+Themison, as Mrs. Burman's medical man, might tell the lady tales
+that would irritate her bag of venom.
+
+Rarely though Fenellan was the critic on his friend, the shadow cast over
+his negligent hedonism by Victor's boiling pressure, drove him into the
+seat of judgement.  As a consequence, he was rather a dull table-guest in
+the presence of Dr. Themison, whom their host had pricked to anticipate
+high entertainment from him.  He did nothing to bridge the crevasse and
+warm the glacier air at table when the doctor, anecdotal intentionally to
+draw him out, related a decorous but pungent story of one fair member of
+a sweet new sisterhood in agitation against the fixed establishment of
+our chain-mail marriage-tie.  An anecdote of immediate diversion was
+wanted, expected: and Fenellan sat stupidly speculating upon whether the
+doctor knew of a cupboard locked.  So that Dr. Themison was carried on by
+Lady Grace Halley's humourous enthusiasm for the subject to dilate and
+discuss and specify, all in the irony of a judicial leaning to the side
+of the single-minded social adventurers, under an assumed accord with his
+audience; concluding: 'So there's an end of Divorce.'
+
+'By the trick of multiplication,' Fenellan, now reassured, was content to
+say.  And that did not extinguish the cracker of a theme; handled very
+carefully, as a thing of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young
+women being present.
+
+Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an alertness shown by Mr.
+Sowerby to second her by crossing the dialogue.  As regarded her personal
+feelings, she was hardened, so long as the curtains were about her to
+keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition upon one of its
+culprits.  But her anxiety was vigilant to guard her girl from an
+infusion of any of the dread facts of life not coming through the
+mother's lips: and she was a woman having the feminine mind's pudency
+in that direction, which does not consent to the revealing of much.
+Here was the mother's dilemma: her girl--Victor's girl, as she had to
+think in this instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth,
+seemed, and might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off the
+table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific heights of
+surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful healthiness brought
+her down to grass and flowers.  She had once or twice received the
+electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts
+in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the
+circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a
+newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities:
+and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how
+witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent creature
+shocked her sensibility.  She foresaw the need to such a flameful soul,
+as bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very princeliest of men in
+gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide.  And the provident mother
+knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his wife.
+
+Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
+imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
+perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
+nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
+to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
+before the public.  Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was
+her father's child.
+
+At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
+so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
+maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
+simplicity.  If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
+partook of the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian independence likened her
+somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl.  Her
+high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
+carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
+set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
+various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
+praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
+tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on the cheeks, or assumptions
+of the frigid mask, or indicated reserve-cajoleries.  Neither ignorantly
+nor advisedly did she play on these or other bewitching strings of her
+sex, after the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast of
+Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
+ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded meet an artful serenader,
+that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked by their performances, and
+knows anthropologically the nature behind the devious show; a sciential
+rascal; as little to be excluded from our modern circles as Eve's own old
+deuce from Eden's garden whereupon, opportunity inviting, both the fool
+and the cunning, the pure donkey princess of insular eulogy, and the sham
+one, are in a perilous pass.
+
+Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be ignorant utterly amid
+a world where the hints are hourly scattering seed of the inklings; when
+vileness is not at work up and down our thoroughfares, proclaiming its
+existence with tableau and trumpet.  Nataly encountered her girl's
+questions, much as one seeks to quiet an enemy.  The questions had soon
+ceased.  Excepting repulsive and rejected details, there is little to be
+learnt when a little is known: in populous communities, density only will
+keep the little out.  Only stupidity will suppose that it can be done for
+the livelier young.  English mothers forethoughtful for their girls, have
+to take choice of how to do battle with a rough-and-tumble Old England,
+that lumbers bumping along, craving the precious things, which can be had
+but in semblance under the conditions allowed by laziness to subsist, and
+so curst of its shifty inconsequence as to worship in the concrete an
+hypocrisy it abhors in the abstract.  Nataly could smuggle or confiscate
+here and there a newspaper; she could not interdict or withhold every one
+of them, from a girl ardent to be in the race on all topics of popular
+interest: and the newspapers are occasionally naked savages; the streets
+are imperfectly garmented even by day; and we have our stumbling social
+anecdotist, our spot-mouthed young man, our eminently silly woman; our
+slippery one; our slimy one, the Rahab of Society; not to speak of Mary
+the maid and the footman William.  A vigilant mother has to contend with
+these and the like in an increasing degree.  How best?
+
+There is a method: one that Colney Durance advocated.  The girl's
+intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it.  Since, as he argued,
+we cannot keep the poisonous matter out, mothers should prepare and
+strengthen young women for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil,
+baring the world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they
+have to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
+collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our life in
+youth:--this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine disease of the
+time, common to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
+the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.
+
+Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for English
+hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences.  Besides he was a
+bachelor; therefore but a theorist.  And his illustrations of his theory
+were grotesque; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to consume,
+in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man.  The satirist
+too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher.  Nataly had
+excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.
+
+One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at the thought,
+that the day drew near for her speaking fully to Nesta; when, between
+what she then said and what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike
+the girl and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with them
+then;--in softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it seemed
+painfully possible to be sowing in the girl's mind something like the
+reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing the way to a rebelliousness
+partly or wholly similar to her own.  But Nataly's chief and her
+appeasing reason for pursuing the conventional system with this
+exceptional young creature, referred to the sentiments on that subject
+of the kind of young man whom a mother elects from among those present
+and eligible, as perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of
+good promise in the moral department.  She had Mr. Dudley Sowerby under
+view; far from the man of her choice and still the practice of decorum,
+discretion, a pardonable fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any
+forecast of the behaviour of young men or may trust the faces they see,
+to, promise a future stability in the husband.  Assuredly a Dudley
+Sowerby would be immensely startled to find in his bride a young woman
+more than babily aware of the existence of one particular form of
+naughtiness on earth.
+
+Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right education of the
+young of the sex.  Repression and mystery, he considered wholesome for
+girls; and he considered the enlightening of them--to some extent--a
+prudential measure for their defence; and premature instruction is a
+fire-water to their wild-in-woods understanding; and histrionic innocence
+is no doubt the bloom on corruption; also the facts of current human
+life, in the crude of the reports or the cooked of the sermon in the
+newspapers, are a noxious diet for our daughters; whom nevertheless we
+cannot hope to be feeding always on milk: and there is a time when their
+adorable pretty ignorance, if credibly it exists out of noodledom, is
+harmful:--but how beautiful the shining simplicity of our dear young
+English girls!  He was one of the many men to whose minds women come in
+pictures and are accepted much as they paint themselves.  Like his
+numerous fellows, too, he required a conflict with them, and a worsting
+at it, to be taught, that they are not the mere live stock we scheme to
+dispose of for their good: unless Love should interpose, he would have
+exclaimed.  He broke from his fellows in his holy horror of a father's
+running counter to love.  Nesta had only to say, that she loved another,
+for Dudley Sowerby to be withdrawn into the background of aspirants.
+But love was unknown to the girl.
+
+Outwardly, the plan of the Drive to Paris had the look of Victor's
+traditional hospitality.  Nataly smiled at her incorrigibly lagging
+intelligence of him, on hearing that he had invited a company: 'Lady
+Grace, for gaiety; Peridon and Catkin, fiddles; Dudley Sowerby and
+myself, flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by the dear
+old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage, as in old times; towers
+of Dieppe in the morning-light; and the lovely road to the capital!  Just
+three days in Paris, and home by any of the other routes.  It's the drive
+we want.  Boredom in wet weather, we defy; we have our Concert--an hour
+at night and we're sure of sleep.'  It had a sweet simple air, befitting
+him; as when in bygone days they travelled with the joy of children.
+For travelling shook Nataly out of her troubles and gave her something of
+the child's inheritance of the wisdom of life--the living ever so little
+ahead of ourselves; about as far as the fox in view of the hunt.  That is
+the soul of us out for novelty, devouring as it runs, an endless feast;
+and the body is eagerly after it, recording the pleasures, a daily chase.
+Remembrance of them is almost a renewal, anticipation a revival.  She
+enraptured Victor with glimpses of the domestic fun she had ceased to
+show sign of since the revelation of Lakelands.  Her only regret was on
+account of the exclusion of Colney Durance from the party, because of
+happy memories associating him with the Seine-land, and also that his
+bilious criticism of his countrymen was moderated by a trip to the
+Continent.  Fenellan reported Colney to be 'busy in the act of distilling
+one of his Prussic acid essays.'  Fenellan would have jumped to go.  He
+informed Victor, as a probe, that the business of the Life Insurance was
+at periods 'fearfully necrological!  Inexplicably, he was not invited.
+Did it mean, that he was growing dull?  He looked inside instead of out,
+and lost the clue.
+
+His behaviour on the evening of the departure showed plainly what would
+have befallen Mr. Sowerby on the expedition, had not he as well as Colney
+been excluded.  Two carriages and a cab conveyed the excursionists, as
+they merrily called themselves, to the terminus.  They were Victor's
+guests; they had no trouble, no expense, none of the nipper reckonings
+which dog our pleasures; the state of pure bliss.  Fenellan's enviousness
+drove him at the Rev. Mr. Barmby until the latter jumped to the seat
+beside Nesta in her carriage, Mademoiselle de Seilles and Mr. Sowerby
+facing them.  Lady Grace Halley, in the carriage behind, heard Nesta's
+laugh; which Mr. Barmby had thought vacuous, beseeming little girls, that
+laugh at nothings.  She questioned Fenellan.
+
+'Oh,' said he, 'I merely mentioned that the Rev. gentleman carries his
+musical instrument at the bottom of his trunk.'
+
+She smiled: 'And who are in the cab?'
+
+'Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and Catkin.  Those two
+would have writhed like head and tail of a worm, at a division on the way
+to the station.  Point a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through the
+body.  They're a fabulous couple.'
+
+Victor cut him short.  'I deny that those two are absurd.'
+
+'And Catkin's toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon.'
+
+Nataly strongly denied it.  Peridon and Catkin pertained to their genial
+picture of the dear sweet nest in life; a dale never traversed by the
+withering breath they dreaded.
+
+Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his way as Colney,
+fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, with a
+pitchfork's exaltation of the sacred attachment of the divergently
+meritorious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles in
+the principles of each.  The pair were offending the amatory corner in
+the generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly
+protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities, except
+by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of Miss
+Graves.  Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla
+Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge.  She wondered at
+having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her
+repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among
+those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed
+now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the
+Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
+are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
+tribulation-bell.  Fenellan's graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman
+seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons--abominations of
+emptiness--to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the one
+most wretched light is Inebriation's nose; and of the vegetarian
+violoncello's horror at his vision of the long procession of the flocks
+and herds into his lady's melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and delighted
+her antipathy.  She was amused to transports at the station, on hearing
+Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark: 'No, I carry no
+instrument.'  The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not
+forgotten when it sounded.
+
+Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just
+under Victor's ear: 'Where are those two?'
+
+'Bid me select the couple,' said he.
+
+She rejoined: 'Silly man'; and sleepily gave him her hand for good night,
+and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued junction by
+saying more than he intended: 'If they come to an understanding!'
+
+'Plain enough on one side.'
+
+'You think it suitable?'
+
+'Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.'  'This is really
+my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.'
+
+'Go on.'
+
+'How?'
+
+'Number your loves.  It would tax your arithmetic.'
+
+'I can hate.'
+
+'Not me?'
+
+Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers declared it;
+and they broke the link, neither of them sensibly hurt; though a leaf
+or two of the ingenuities, which were her thoughts, turned over in the
+phantasies of the lady; and the gentleman was taught to feel that a never
+so slightly lengthened compression of the hand female shoots within us
+both straight and far and round the corners.  There you have Nature, if
+you want her naked in her elements, for a text.  He loved his Nataly
+truly, even fervently, after the twenty years of union; he looked about
+at no other woman; it happened only that the touch of one, the chance
+warm touch, put to motion the blind forces of our mother so remarkably
+surcharging him.  But it was without kindling.  The lady, the much cooler
+person, did nurse a bit of flame.  She had a whimsical liking for the man
+who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries; and it became a
+fascination, by extreme contrast, at the reminder of his adventurous
+enterprises in progress while he could so childishly enjoy.  Women who
+dance with the warrior-winner of battles, and hear him talk his ball-room
+trifles to amuse, have similarly a smell of gunpowder to intoxicate them.
+
+For him, a turn on the deck brought him into new skies.  Nataly lay in
+the cabin.  She used to be where Lady Grace was lying.  A sort of
+pleadable, transparent, harmless hallucination of the renewal of old
+service induced him to refresh and settle the fair semi-slumberer's
+pillow, and fix the tarpaulin over her silks and wraps; and bend his head
+to the soft mouth murmuring thanks.  The women who can dare the nuit
+blanche, and under stars; and have a taste for holiday larks after their
+thirtieth, are rare; they are precious.  Nataly nevertheless was approved
+for guarding her throat from the nightwind.  And a softer southerly
+breath never crossed Channel!  The very breeze he had wished for!  Luck
+was with him.
+
+Nesta sat by the rails of the vessel beside her Louise.  Mr. Sowerby in
+passing, exchanged a description of printed agreement with her, upon the
+beauty of the night--a good neutral topic for the encounter of the sexes
+not that he wanted it neutral; it furnished him with a vocabulary.  Once
+he perceptibly washed his hands of dutiful politeness, in addressing
+Mademoiselle de Seilles, likewise upon the beauty of the night; and the
+French lady, thinking--too conclusively from the breath on the glass at
+the moment, as it is the Gallic habit--that if her dear Nesta must
+espouse one of the uninteresting creatures called men in her native land,
+it might as well be this as another, agreed that the night was very
+beautiful.
+
+'He speaks grammatical French,' Nesta commented on his achievement.
+'He contrives in his walking not to wet his boots,' mademoiselle
+rejoined.
+
+Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders, despite an
+inferior pretension to accent.  He burned to be near these ladies, and
+he passed them but once.  His enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was
+notorious.  Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her
+demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for the man
+who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen, or eminently she among
+them, must have their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they
+can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales.  And say, that she is
+uprooted;--he does but roll a log.  Mr. Peridon's efforts to perfect
+himself in the French tongue touched her.
+
+A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate wink of
+the eye of light.  Mr. Barmby, an exile from the ladies by reason of an
+addiction to tobacco, quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first
+greying.  Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for
+the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs.
+The gentle waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an
+interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily
+grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for
+refuge on any far fisher-sail.
+
+Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed.
+The girl's cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born.
+They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was a
+languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.
+Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair
+were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and
+securest of slumbers.
+
+Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly.  Both the ladies were in their oblivion;
+the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably framed, elevating
+to behold; a reproach to the reminiscence of pipes.  He was near; and
+quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him.  Her look was grave,
+straight, uninquiring, soon accurately perusing; an arrow of Artemis for
+penetration.  He went by, with the sound in the throat of a startled
+bush-bird taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as if that
+young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof.  Man could not be more
+guiltless, yet her look had perturbed him; nails conspired; in his
+vexation, he execrated tobacco.  And ask not why, where reason never was.
+
+Nesta woke babbling on the subject she had relinquished for sleep.
+Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her hair and hood during their
+silvery French chimes.
+
+Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with encomiums, after
+they had been observing every variation in it.  He spoke happily of the
+pleasant passage, and of the agreeable night; particularly of the
+excellent idea of the expedition by this long route at night; the
+prospect of which had disfigured him with his grimace of speculation--
+apparently a sourness that did not exist.  Nesta had a singular notion,
+coming of a girl's mingled observation and intuition, that the
+impressions upon this gentleman were in arrear, did not strike him till
+late.  Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she remembered to
+have noticed the same in many small things.  And it was a pointed
+perception.
+
+Victor sent his girl down to Nataly, with a summons to hurry up and see
+sunlight over the waters.  Nataly came; she looked, and the outer wakened
+the inner, she let the light look in on her, her old feelings danced to
+her eyes like a, string of bubbles in ascent.  'Victor, Victor, it seems
+only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back--was it?--and in May,
+and saw the shoal of porpoises, and five minutes after, Dieppe in view.
+Dear French people!  I share your love for France.'
+
+'Home of our holidays!--the "drives"; and they may be the happiest.
+And fifty minutes later we were off the harbour; and Natata landed, a
+stranger; and at night she was the heroine of the town.'
+
+Victor turned to a stately gentleman and passed his name to Nataly: 'Sir
+Rodwell Balchington, a neighbour of Lakelands!  She understood that Lady
+Grace Halley was acquainted with Sir Rodwell:--hence this dash of brine
+to her lips while she was drinking of happy memories, and Victor
+evidently was pluming himself upon his usual luck in the fortuitous
+encounter with an influential neighbour of Lakelands.  He told Sir
+Rodwell the story of how they had met in the salle a manger of the hotel
+the impresario of a Concert in the town, who had in his hand the doctor's
+certificate of the incapacity of the chief cantatrice to appear, and
+waved it, within a step of suicide.  'Well, to be brief, my wife--"noble
+dame Anglaise," as the man announced her on the Concert platform,
+undertook one of the songs, and sang another of her own-pure contralto
+voice, as you will say; with the result that there was a perfect tumult
+of enthusiasm.  Next day, the waiters of the hotel presented her with a
+bouquet of Spring flowers, white, and central violets.  It was in the
+Paris papers, under the heading: Une amie d'outre Manche--I think that
+was it?' he asked Nataly.
+
+'I forget,' said she.
+
+He glanced at her: a cloud had risen.  He rallied her, spoke of the old
+Norman silver cross which the manager of the Concert had sent, humbly
+imploring her to accept the small memento of his gratitude.  She nodded
+an excellent artificial brightness.
+
+And there was the coast of France under young sunlight over the waters.
+Once more her oft-petitioning wish through the years, that she had
+entered the ranks of professional singers, upon whom the moral scrutiny
+is not so microscopic, invaded her, resembling a tide-swell into rock-
+caves, which have been filled before and left to emptiness, and will be
+left to emptiness again.  Nataly had the intimation visiting us when,
+in a decline of physical power, the mind's ready vivacity to conjure
+illusions forsakes us; and it was, of a wall ahead, and a force impelling
+her against it, and no hope of deviation.  And this is the featureless
+thing, Destiny; not without eyes, if we have a conscience to throw them
+into it to look at us.
+
+Counsel to her to live in the hour, came, as upon others on the vessel,
+from an active breath of the salt prompting to healthy hunger; and hardly
+less from the splendour of the low full sunlight on the waters, the
+skimming and dancing of the thousands of golden shells away from under
+the globe of fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A PATRIOT ABROAD
+
+Nine days after his master's departure, Daniel Skepsey, a man of some
+renown of late, as a subject of reports and comments in the newspapers,
+obtained a passport, for the identification, if need were, of his missing
+or misapprehended person in a foreign country, of the language of which
+three unpronounceable words were knocking about his head to render the
+thought of the passport a staff of safety; and on the morning that
+followed he was at speed through Normandy, to meet his master rounding
+homeward from Paris, at a town not to be spoken as it is written, by
+reason of the custom of the good people of the country, with whom we
+would fain live on neighbourly terms:--yes, and they had proof of it,
+not so very many years back, when they were enduring the worst which can
+befall us--though Mr. Durance, to whom he was indebted for the writing of
+the place of his destination large on a card, and the wording of the
+French sound beside it, besides the jotting down of trains and the
+station for the change of railways, Mr. Durance could say, that the
+active form of our sympathy consisted in the pouring of cheeses upon
+them when they were prostrate and unable to resist!
+
+A kind gentleman, Mr. Durance, as Daniel Skepsey had recent cause to
+know, but often exceedingly dark; not so patriotic as desireable, it was
+to be feared; and yet, strangely indeed, Mr. Durance had said cogent
+things on the art of boxing and on manly exercises, and he hoped--he was
+emphatic in saying he hoped--we should be regenerated.  He must have
+meant, that boxing--on a grand scale would contribute to it.  He said,
+that a blow now and then was wholesome for us all.  He recommended a
+monthly private whipping for old gentlemen who decline the use of the
+gloves, to disperse their humours; not excluding Judges and Magistrates:
+he could hardly be in earnest.  He spoke in a clergyman's voice, and said
+it would be payment of good assurance money, beneficial to their souls:
+he seemed to mean it.  He said, that old gentlemen were bottled vapours,
+and it was good for them to uncork them periodically.  He said, they
+should be excused half the strokes if they danced nightly--they resented
+motion.  He seemed sadly wanting in veneration.
+
+But he might not positively intend what he said.  Skepsey could overlook
+everything he said, except the girding at England.  For where is a braver
+people, notwithstanding appearances!  Skepsey knew of dozens of gallant
+bruisers, ready for the cry to strip to the belt; worthy, with a little
+public encouragement, to rank beside their grandfathers of the Ring, in
+the brilliant times when royalty and nobility countenanced the manly art,
+our nursery of heroes, and there was not the existing unhappy division of
+classes.  He still trusted to convince Mr. Durance, by means of argument
+and happy instances, historical and immediate, that the English may
+justly consider themselves the elect of nations, for reasons better than
+their accumulation of the piles of gold-better than 'usurers' reasons,'
+as Mr. Durance called them.  Much that Mr. Durance had said at intervals
+was, although remembered almost to the letter of the phrase, beyond his
+comprehension, and he put it aside, with penitent blinking at his
+deficiency.
+
+All the while, he was hearing a rattle of voluble tongues around him, and
+a shout of stations, intelligible as a wash of pebbles, and blocks in a
+torrent.  Generally the men slouched when they were not running.  At
+Dieppe he had noticed muscular fellows; he admitted them to be nimbler on
+the legs than ours; and that may count both ways, he consoled a patriotic
+vanity by thinking; instantly rebuking the thought; for he had read
+chapters of Military History.  He sat eyeing the front row of figures in
+his third-class carriage, musing on the kind of soldiers we might, heaven
+designing it, have to face, and how to beat them; until he gazed on
+Rouen, knowing by the size of it and by what Mr. Durance had informed him
+of the city on the river, that it must be the very city of Rouen, not so
+many years back a violated place, at the mercy of a foreign foe.  Strong
+pity laid hold of Skepsey.  He fortified the heights for defence, but saw
+at a glance that it was the city for modern artillery to command, crush
+and enter.  He lost idea of these afflicted people as foes, merely
+complaining of their attacks on England, and their menaces in their
+Journals and pamphlets; and he renounced certain views of the country to
+be marched over on the road by this route to Paris, for the dictation of
+terms of peace at the gates of the French capital, sparing them the
+shameful entry; and this after the rout of their attempt at an invasion
+of the Island!
+
+A man opposite him was looking amicably on his lively grey eyes.  Skepsey
+handed a card from his pocket.  The man perused it, and crying: 'Dreux?'
+waved out of the carriage-window at a westerly distance, naming Rouen as
+not the place, not at all, totally other.  Thus we are taught, that a
+foreign General, ignorant of the language, must confine himself to
+defensive operations at home; he would be a child in the hands of the
+commonest man he meets.  Brilliant with thanks in signs, Skepsey drew
+from his friend a course of instruction in French names, for our
+necessities on a line of march.  The roads to Great Britain's metropolis,
+and the supplies of forage and provision at every stage of a march on
+London, are marked in the military offices of these people; and that,
+with their barking Journals, is a piece of knowledge to justify a
+belligerent return for it.  Only we pray to be let live peacefully.
+
+Fervently we pray it when this good man, a total stranger to us, conducts
+an ignorant foreigner from one station to another through the streets of
+Rouen, after a short stoppage at the buffet and assistance in the
+identification of coins; then, lifting his cap to us, retires.
+
+And why be dealing wounds and death?  It is a more blessed thing to keep
+the Commandments.  But how is it possible to keep the Commandments if you
+have a vexatious wife?
+
+Martha Skepsey had given him a son to show the hereditary energy in his
+crying and coughing; and it was owing, he could plead, to her habits and
+her tongue, that he sometimes, that he might avoid the doing of worse--
+for she wanted correction and was improved by it--courted the excitement
+of a short exhibition of skill, man to man, on publicans' first floors.
+He could have told the magistrates so, in part apology for the
+circumstances dragging him the other day, so recently, before his
+Worship; and he might have told it, if he had not remembered Captain
+Dartrey Fenellan's words about treating women chivalrously which was
+interpreted by Skepsey as correcting them, when called upon to do it,
+but never exposing them only, if allowed to account for the circumstances
+pushing us into the newspapers, we should not present so guilty a look
+before the public.
+
+Furthermore, as to how far it is the duty of a man to serve his master,
+there is likewise question: whether is he, while receiving reproof and
+punishment for excess of zeal in the service of his master, not to
+mention the welfare of the country, morally--without establishing it as a
+principle--exonerated?  Miss Graves might be asked save that one would
+not voluntarily trouble a lady on such subjects.  But supposing, says the
+opposing counsel, now at work in Skepsey's conscience, supposing this
+act, for which, contraveneing the law of the land, you are reproved and
+punished, to be agreeable to you, how then?  We answer, supposing it--and
+we take uncomplainingly the magistrate's reproof and punishment--morally
+justified can it be expected of us to have the sense of guilt, although
+we wear and know we wear a guilty look before the public?
+
+His master and the dear ladies would hear of it; perhaps they knew of it
+now; with them would rest the settlement of the distressing inquiry.  The
+ladies would be shocked ladies cannot bear any semblance of roughness,
+not even with the gloves:--and knowing, as they must, that our practise
+of the manly art is for their protection.
+
+Skepsey's grievous prospect of the hour to come under judgement of a sex
+that was ever a riddle unread, clouded him on the approach to Dreux.  He
+studied the country and the people eagerly; he forbore to conduct great
+military operations.  Mr. Durance had spoken of big battles round about
+the town of Dreux; also of a wonderful Mausoleum there, not equally
+interesting.  The little man was in deeper gloom than a day sobering on
+crimson dusk when the train stopped and his quick ear caught the sound of
+the station, as pronounced by his friend at Rouen.
+
+He handed his card to the station-master.  A glance, and the latter
+signalled to a porter, saying: 'Paradis'; and the porter laid hold of
+Skepsey's bag.  Skepsey's grasp was firm; he pulled, the porter pulled.
+Skepsey heard explanatory speech accompanying a wrench.  He wrenched back
+with vigour, and in his own tongue exclaimed, that he held to the bag
+because his master's letters were in the bag, all the way from England.
+For a minute, there was a downright trial of muscle and will: the porter
+appeared furiously excited, Skepsey had a look of cooled steel.  Then the
+Frenchman, requiring to shrug, gave way to the Englishman's eccentric
+obstinacy, and signified that he was his guide.  Quite so, and Skepsey
+showed alacrity and confidence in following; he carried his bag.  But
+with the remembrance of the kindly serviceable man at Rouen, he sought to
+convey to the porter, that the terms of their association were cordial.
+A waving of the right hand to the heavens ratified the treaty on the
+French side.  Nods and smiles and gesticulations, with across-Channel
+vocables, as it were Dover cliffs to Calais sands and back, pleasantly
+beguiled the way down to the Hotel du Paradis, under the Mausoleum
+heights, where Skepsey fumbled at his pocket for coin current; but the
+Frenchman, all shaken by a tornado of negation, clapped him on the
+shoulder, and sang him a quatrain.  Skepsey had in politeness to stand
+listening, and blinking, plunged in the contrition of ignorance,
+eclipsed.  He took it to signify something to the effect, that money
+should not pass between friends.  It was the amatory farewell address of
+Henri IV. to his Charmante Gabrielle; and with
+
+                        'Perce de mille lords,
+                         L'honneur m'appelle
+                         Au champ de Mars,'
+
+the Frenchman, in a backing of measured steps, apologized for his
+enforced withdrawal from the stranger who had captured his heart.
+
+Skepsey's card was taken in the passage of the hotel.  A clean-capped
+maid, brave on the legs, like all he had seen of these people, preceded
+him at quick march to an upper chamber.  When he descended, bag in hand,
+she flung open the salon-door of a table d'hote, where a goodly number
+were dining and chattering; waiters drew him along to the section
+occupied by his master's party.  A chair had been kept vacant for him;
+his master waved a hand, his dear ladies graciously smiled; he struck the
+bag in front of a guardian foot, growing happy.  He could fancy they had
+not seen the English newspapers.  And his next observation of the table
+showed him wrecked and lost: Miss Nesta's face was the oval of a woeful O
+at his wild behaviour in England during their absence.  She smiled.
+Skepsey had nevertheless to consume his food--excellent, very tasty soup-
+with the sour sauce of the thought that he must be tongue-tied in his
+defence for the time of the dinner.
+
+'No, dear Skips, please! you are to enjoy yourself,' said Nesta.
+
+He answered confusedly, trying to assure her that he was doing so,
+and he choked.
+
+His master had fixed his arrival for twenty minutes earlier.  Skepsey
+spoke through a cough of long delays at stations.  The Rev. Septimus
+Barmby, officially peacemaker, sounded the consequent excuse for a
+belated comer.  It was final; such is the power of sound.  Looks were
+cast from the French section of the table at the owner of the prodigious
+organ.  Some of the younger men, intent on the charms of Albion's
+daughters, expressed in a, sign and a word or two alarm at what might be
+beneath the flooring: and 'Pas encore Lui!' and 'Son avant-courrier!' and
+other flies of speech passed on a whiff, under politest of cover, not to
+give offence.  But prodigies, claim attention.
+
+Our English, at the close of the dinner, consented to say it was good,
+without specifying a dish, because a selection of this or that would have
+seemed to italicize, and commit, them, in the presence of ladies, to a
+notice of the matter of-course, beneath us, or the confession of a low
+sensual enjoyment; until Lady Grace Halley named the particular dressing
+of a tete de veau approvingly to Victor; and he stating, that he had
+offered a suggestion for the menu of the day, Nataly exclaimed, that she
+had suspected it: upon which Mr. Sowerby praised the menu, Mr. Barmby,
+Peridon and Catkin named other dishes, there was the right after-dinner
+ring in Victor's ears, thanks to the woman of the world who had travelled
+round to nature and led the shackled men to deliver themselves heartily.
+One tap, and they are free.  That is, in the moments after dinner, when
+nature is at the gates with them.  Only, it must be a lady and a
+prevailing lady to give the tap.  They need (our English) and will for
+the ages of the process of their transformation need a queen.
+
+Skepsey, bag in hand, obeyed the motion of his master's head and followed
+him.
+
+He was presently back, to remain with the ladies during his master's
+perusal of letters.  Nataly had decreed that he was not to be troubled;
+so Nesta and mademoiselle besought him for a recital of his French
+adventures; and strange to say, he had nothing to tell.  The journey,
+pregnant at the start, exciting in the course of it, was absolutely blank
+at the termination.  French people had been very kind; he could not say
+more.  But there was more; there was a remarkable fulness, if only he
+could subordinate it to narrative.  The little man did not know, that
+time was wanted for imagination to make the roadway or riverway of a true
+story, unless we press to invent; his mind had been too busy on the way
+for him to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage of incidents
+at the call for them.  Things had happened, numbers of interesting minor
+things, but they all slipped as water through the fingers; and he being
+of the band of honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction,
+drearily he sat before the ladies, confessing to an emptiness he was far
+from feeling.
+
+Nesta professed excessive disappointment.  'Now, if it had been in
+England, Skips!' she said, under her mother's gentle gloom of brows.
+
+He made show of melancholy submission.
+
+'There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,' Nataly said.
+
+And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent to prove to us
+that they can be a blessing; instead of the dreadful cry to Providence
+for the reason of the spread of the race of man by their means!  He
+declared his readiness, rejecting excuses, to state his case to them, but
+for his fear of having it interpreted as an appeal for their kind aid in
+obtaining his master's forgiveness.  Mr. Durance had very considerately
+promised to intercede.  Skepsey dropped a hint or two of his naughty
+proceedings drily aware that their untutored antipathy to the manly art
+would not permit of warmth.
+
+Nesta said: 'Do you know, Skips, we saw a grand exhibition of fencing in
+Paris.'
+
+He sighed.  'Ladies can look on at fencing!  foils and masks!  Captain
+Dartrey Fenellan has shown me, and says, the French are our masters at
+it.'  He bowed constrainedly to mademoiselle.
+
+'You box, M. Skepsey!' she said.
+
+His melancholy increased: 'Much discouragement from Government, Society!
+If ladies .  .  .  but I do not venture.  They are not against Games.
+But these are not a protection .  .  .  to them, when needed; to the
+country.  The country seems asleep to its position.  Mr. Durance has
+remarked on it:--though I would not always quote Mr. Durance .  .  .
+indeed, he says, that England has invested an Old Maid's All in the
+Millennium, and is ruined if it delays to come.  "Old Maid," I do not
+see.  I do not--if I may presume to speak of myself in the same breath
+with so clever a gentleman, agree with Mr. Durance in everything.  But
+the chest-measurement of recruits, the stature of the men enlisted, prove
+that we are losing the nursery of our soldiers.'
+
+'We are taking them out of the nursery, Skips, if you 're for quoting
+Captain Dartrey,' said Nesta.  'We'll never haul down our flag, though,
+while we have him!'
+
+'Ah!  Captain Dartrey!' Skepsey was refreshed by the invocation of the
+name.
+
+A summons to his master's presence cut short something he was beginning
+to say about Captain Dartrey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED NATALY
+
+His master opened on the bristling business.
+
+'What's this, of your name in the papers, your appearing before a
+magistrate, and a fine?  Tell the tale shortly.'
+
+Skepsey fell upon his attitude for dialectical defence the modest form of
+the two hands at rolling play and the head deferentially sidecast.  But
+knowing that he had gratified his personal tastes in the act of serving
+his master's interests, an interfusion of sentiments plunged him into
+self-consciousness; an unwonted state with him, clogging to a simple
+story.
+
+'First, sir, I would beg you to pardon the printing of your name beside
+mine .  .  .'
+
+'Tush: on with you.'
+
+'Only to say, necessitated by the circumstances of the case.  I read,
+that there was laughter in the court at my exculpation of my conduct--
+as I have to call it; and there may have been.  I may have expressed
+myself .  .  .  .  I have a strong feeling for the welfare of the
+country.'
+
+'So, it seems, you said to the magistrate.  Do you tell me, that the
+cause of your gross breach of the law, was a consideration for the
+welfare of the country?  Run on the facts.'
+
+'The facts--I must have begun badly, sir.'  Skepsey rattled the dry facts
+in his head to right them.  From his not having begun well, they had
+become dry as things underfoot.  It was an error to have led off with the
+sentiments.  'Two very, two very respectable persons--respectable--were
+desirous to witness a short display of my, my system, I would say; of my
+science, they call it.'
+
+'Don't be nervous.  To the point; you went into a field five miles out of
+London, in broad day, and stood in a ring, the usual Tiff-raff about
+you!'
+
+'With the gloves: and not for money, Sir: for the trial of skill; not
+very many people.  I cannot quite see the breach of the law.'
+
+'So you told the magistrate.  You were fined for your inability to quite
+see.  And you had to give security.'
+
+'Mr. Durance was kindly responsible for me, sir: an acquaintance of the
+magistrate.'
+
+'This boxing of yours is a positive mania, Skepsey.  You must try to get
+the better of it--must!  And my name too!  I'm to be proclaimed, as
+having in my service an inveterate pugilist--who breaks the law from
+patriotism!  Male or female, these very respectable persons--the people
+your show was meant for?'
+
+'Male, sir.  Females!  .  .  .  that is, not the respectable ones.'
+
+'Take the opinion of the respectable ones for your standard of behaviour
+in future.'
+
+'It was a mere trial of skill, sir, to prove to one of the spectators,
+that I could be as good as my word.  I wished I may say, to conciliate
+him, partly.  He would not--he judged by size--credit me with .  .  .
+he backed my adversary Jerry Scroom--a sturdy boxer, without the
+knowledge of the first principles.'
+
+'You beat him?'
+
+'I think I taught the man that I could instruct, sir; he was
+complimentary before we parted.  He thought I could not have lasted.
+After the second round, the police appeared.'
+
+'And you ran!'
+
+'No, sir; I had nothing on my conscience.'
+
+'Why not have had your pugilistic display in a publican's room in town,
+where you could have hammer-nailed and ding-donged to your heart's
+content for as long as you liked!'
+
+'That would have been preferable, from the point of view of safety from
+intrusion, I can admit-speaking humbly.  But one of the parties--I had a
+wish to gratify him--is a lover of old English times and habits and our
+country scenes.  He wanted it to take place on green grass.  We drove
+over Hampstead in three carts and a gig, as a company of pleasure--as it
+was.  A very beautiful morning.  There was a rest at a public-house.  Mr.
+Shaplow traces the misfortune to that.  Mr. Jarniman, I hear, thinks it
+what he calls a traitor in the camp.  I saw no sign; we were all merry
+and friendly.'
+
+'Jarniman?' said Victor sharply.  'Who is the Jarniman?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman is, I am to understand from the acquaintance introducing
+us--a Mr. Shaplow I met in the train from Lakelands one day, and again at
+the corner of a street near Drury Lane, a ham and beef shop kept by a
+Mrs. Jarniman, a very stout lady, who does the chief carving in the shop,
+and is the mother of Mr. Jarniman: he is in a confidential place, highly
+trusted.'  Skepsey looked up from the hands he soaped: 'He is a curious
+mixture; he has true enthusiasm for boxing, he believes in ghosts.  He
+mourns for the lost days of prize-fighting, he thinks that spectres are
+on the increase.  He has a very large appetite, depressed spirits.  Mr.
+Shaplow informs me he is a man of substance, in the service of a wealthy
+lady in poor health, expecting a legacy and her appearance to him.  He
+has the look--Mr. Shaplow assures me he does not drink to excess: he is a
+slow drinker.'
+
+Victor straightened: 'Bad way of health, you said?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman spoke of his expectations, as being immediate: he put it,
+that he expected her spirit to be out for him to meet it any day--or
+night.  He desires it.  He says, she has promised it--on oath, he says,
+and must feel that she must do her duty to him before she goes, if she is
+to appear to him with any countenance after.  But he is anxious for her
+in any case to show herself, and says, he should not have the heart to
+reproach her.  He has principles, a tear for suffering; he likes to be
+made to cry.  Mrs. Jarniman, his mother, he is not married, is much the
+same so far, except ghosts; she will not have them; except after strong
+tea, they come, she says, come to her bed.  She is foolish enough to
+sleep in a close-curtained bed.  But the poor lady is so exceedingly
+stout that a puff of cold would carry her off, she fears.'
+
+Victor stamped his foot.  'This man Jarniman serves a lady now in a--
+serious, does he say?  Was he precise?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman spoke of a remarkable number of diseases; very complicated,
+he says.  He has no opinion of doctors.  He says, that the lady's doctor
+and the chemist--she sits in a chemist's shop and swallows other people's
+prescriptions that take her fancy.  He says, her continuing to live is
+wonderful.  He has no reason to hurry her, only for the satisfaction of a
+natural curiosity.'
+
+'He mentioned her name?'
+
+'No name, sir.'
+
+Skepsey's limpid grey eyes confirmed the negative to Victor, who was
+assured that the little man stood clean of any falsity.
+
+'You are not on equal terms.  You and the magistrate have helped him to
+know who it is you serve, Skepsey.'
+
+'Would you please to direct me, sir.'
+
+'Another time.  Now go and ease your feet with a run over the town.  We
+have music in half an hour.  That you like, I know.  See chiefly to
+amusing yourself.'
+
+Skepsey turned to go; he murmured, that he had enjoyed his trip.
+
+Victor checked him: it was to ask whether this Jarniman had specified
+one, any one of the numerous diseases afflicting his aged mistress.
+
+Now Jarniman had shocked Skepsey with his blunt titles for a couple of
+the foremost maladies assailing the poor lady's decayed constitution: not
+to be mentioned, Skepsey's thought, in relation to ladies; whose organs
+and functions we, who pay them a proper homage by restricting them to the
+sphere so worthily occupied by their mothers up to the very oldest date,
+respectfully curtain; their accepted masters are chivalrous to them,
+deploring their need at times for the doctors and drugs.  He stood
+looking most unhappy.  'She was to appear, sir, in a few--perhaps a week,
+a month.'
+
+A nod dismissed him.
+
+The fun of the expedition (and Dudley Sowerby had wound himself up to
+relish it) was at night in the towns, when the sound of instrumental and
+vocal music attracted crowds beneath the windows of the hotel, and they
+heard zon, zon, violon, fete et basse; not bad fluting, excellent
+fiddling, such singing as a maestro, conducting his own Opera, would have
+approved.  So Victor said of his darlings' voices.  Nesta's and her
+mother's were a perfect combination; Mr. Barmby's trompe in union,
+sufficiently confirmed the popular impression, that they were artistes.
+They had been ceremoniously ushered to their carriages, with expressions
+of gratitude, at the departure from Rouen; and the Boniface at Gisors had
+entreated them to stay another night, to give an entertainment.  Victor
+took his pleasure in letting it be known, that they were a quiet English
+family, simply keeping-up the habits they practiced in Old England: all
+were welcome to hear them while they were doing it; but they did not give
+entertainments.
+
+The pride of the pleasure of reversing the general idea of English
+dulness among our neighbours, was perceived to have laid fast hold of
+Dudley Sowerby at Dreux.  He was at the window from time to time,
+counting heads below.  For this reason or a better, he begged Nesta to
+supplant the flute duet with the soprano and contralto of the Helena
+section of the Mefistofele, called the Serenade: La Luna immobile.  She
+consulted her mother, and they sang it.  The crowds below, swollen to a
+block of the street, were dead still, showing the instinctive good
+manners of the people.  Then mademoiselle astonished them with a
+Provencal or Cevennes air, Huguenot, though she was Catholic; but it
+suited her mezzo-soprano tones; and it rang massively of the martial-
+religious.  To what heights of spiritual grandeur might not a Huguenot
+France have marched!  Dudley Sowerby, heedlessly, under an emotion that
+could be stirred in him with force, by the soul of religion issuing
+through music, addressed his ejaculation to Lady Grace Halley.  She did
+nor shrug or snub him, but rejoined: 'I could go to battle with that song
+in the ears.'  She liked seeing him so happily transformed; and liked the
+effect of it on Nesta when his face shone in talking.  He was at home
+with the girl's eyes, as he had never been.  A song expressing in one of
+the combative and devotional, went to the springs of his blood; for he
+was of an old warrior race, beneath the thick crust of imposed peaceful
+maxims and commercial pursuits and habitual stiff correctness.  As much
+as wine, will music bring out the native bent of the civilized man: endow
+him with language too.  He was as if unlocked; he met Nesta's eyes and
+ran in a voluble interchange, that gave him flattering after-thoughts;
+and at the moment sensibly a new and assured, or to some extent assured,
+station beside a girl so vivid; by which the young lady would be helped
+to perceive his unvoiced solider gifts.
+
+Nataly observed them, thinking of Victor's mastering subtlety.  She had
+hoped (having clearly seen the sheep's eye in the shepherd) that Mr.
+Barmby would be watchful to act as a block between them; and therefore
+she had stipulated for his presence on the journey.  She remembered
+Victor's rapid look of readiness to consent:--he reckoned how naturally
+Mr. Barmby would serve as a foil to any younger man.  Mr. Barmby had
+tried all along to perform his part: he had always been thwarted; notably
+once at Gisors, where by some cunning management he and mademoiselle
+found themselves in the cell of the prisoner's Nail-wrought work while
+Nesta had to take Sowerby's hand for help at a passage here and there
+along the narrow outer castle-walls.  And Mr. Barmby, upon occasions, had
+set that dimple in Nesta's cheek quivering, though Simeon Fenellan was
+not at hand, and there was no telling how it was done, beyond the
+evidence that Victor willed it so.
+
+From the day of the announcement of Lakelands, she had been brought more
+into contact with his genius of dexterity and foresight than ever
+previously: she had bent to the burden of it more; had seen herself and
+everybody else outstripped--herself, of course; she did not count in a
+struggle with him.  But since that red dawn of Lakelands, it was almost
+as if he had descended to earth from the skies.  She now saw his
+mortality in the miraculous things he did.  The reason of it was, that
+through the perceptible various arts and shifts on her level, an opposing
+spirit had plainer view of his aim, to judge it.  She thought it a mean
+one.
+
+The power it had to hurry her with the strength of a torrent to an end
+she dreaded, impressed her physically; so far subduing her mind, in
+consequence, as to keep the idea of absolute resistance obscure, though
+her bosom heaved with the breath; but what was her own of a mind hung
+hovering above him, criticizing; and involuntarily, discomfortingly.
+She could have prayed to be led blindly or blindly dashed on: she could
+trust him for success; and her critical mind seemed at times a treachery.
+Still she was compelled to judge.
+
+When he said to her at night, pressing both her hands: 'This is the news
+of the day, my love!  It's death at last.  We shall soon be thanking
+heaven for freedom'; her fingers writhed upon his and gripped them in a
+torture of remorse on his behalf.  A shattering throb of her heart gave
+her sight of herself as well.  For so it is with the woman who loves in
+subjection, she may be a critic of the man, she is his accomplice.'
+
+'You have a letter, Victor?'
+
+'Confirmation all round: Fenellan, Themison, and now Skepsey.'
+
+He told her the tale of Skepsey and Jarniman, colouring it, as any
+interested animated conduit necessarily will.  Neither of them smiled.
+
+The effort to think soberly exhausted and rolled her back on credulity.
+
+It might not be to-day or next week or month: but so much testimony
+pointed to a day within the horizon, surely!
+
+She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness.  The murderous hope stood
+up, stood out in forms and pictures.  There was one of a woman at her
+ease at last in the reception of guests; contrasting with an ironic
+haunting figure of the woman of queenly air and stature under a finger of
+scorn for a bold-faced impostor.  Nataly's lips twitched at the
+remembrance of quaint whimpers of complaint to the Fates, for directing
+that a large instead of a rather diminutive woman should be the social
+offender fearing exposure.  Majesty in the criminal's dock, is a
+confounding spectacle.  To the bosom of the majestic creature, all her
+glorious attributes have become the executioner's implements.  She must
+for her soul's health believe that a day of release and exoneration
+approaches.
+
+'Barmby!--if my dear girl would like him best,' Victor said, in tenderest
+undertones, observing the shadowing variations of her face; and pierced
+her cruelly, past explanation or understanding;--not that she would have
+objected to the Rev. Septimus as officiating clergyman.
+
+She nodded.  Down rolled the first big tear.
+
+We cry to women; Land, ho!--a land of palms after storms at sea; and at
+once they inundate us with a deluge of eye-water.
+
+'Half a minute, dear Victor, not longer,' Nataly said, weeping, near on
+laughing over his look of wanton abandonment to despair at sight of her
+tears.  'Don't mind me.  I am rather like Fenellan's laundress, the
+tearful woman whose professional apparatus was her soft heart and a cake
+of soap.  Skepsey has made his peace with you?'
+
+Victor answered: 'Yes, yes; I see what he has been about.  We're a mixed
+lot, all of us-the best!  You've noticed, Skepsey has no laugh: however
+absurd the thing he tells you, not a smile!'
+
+'But you trust his eyes; you look fathoms into them.  Captain Dartrey
+thinks him one of the men most in earnest of any of his country.'
+
+'So Nataly of course thinks the same.  And he's a worthy little
+velocipede, as Fenellan calls him.  One wishes Colney had been with us.
+Only Colney!--pity one can't cut his talons for the space before they
+grow again.'
+
+Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would not have been so
+encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with Dudley Sowerby!  It was the
+very manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was
+to her father.  Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition,
+feeling it a certainty.  We are easily prophets, sure of being justified,
+when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
+delicately perfect.  History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
+with us to inspire.  In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
+for offering counsel where Victor for his soul's sake needed it, was
+beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
+mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.
+
+It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement.
+A pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her at
+her next sight of Nesta.  She had not taken in her front mind the
+contrast of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which
+the guilty was by a transient ceremony released.  Nature could at a push
+be eloquent to defend the guilty.  Not a word of vindicating eloquence
+rose up to clear the innocent.  Nothing that she could do; no
+devotedness, not any sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy
+to come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child.  She dreamed of
+the succour in eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact
+spoke over the population, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard
+word.  But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred to
+Nesta.  It seemed a cruel mystery.  How was it permitted by the Merciful
+Disposer!  .  .  .  Nataly's intellect and her reverence clashed.  They
+clash to the end of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as
+a remote Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about this or
+that issue, instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we
+will; marking on us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount to
+the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of body or mind.  She was
+in her error, from judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of
+individuals.  Chiefly her error was, to try to be thinking at all amid
+the fevered tangle of her sensations.
+
+A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when
+her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of
+existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal
+footing with the world while yet she lived.  She hated herself for taking
+pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard, ill-
+balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not to
+be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome
+the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person had a greater
+than common need of the protection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
+
+That Mausoleum at Dreux may touch to lift us.  History, pleads for the
+pride of the great discrowned Family giving her illumination there.  The
+pride is reverently postured, the princely mourning-cloak it wears
+becomingly braided at the hem with fair designs of our mortal humility in
+the presence of the vanquisher; against whom, acknowledgeing a visible
+conquest of the dust, it sustains a placid contention in coloured glass
+and marbles.
+
+Mademoiselle de Seilles, a fervid Orleanist, was thanked for having
+advised the curvature of the route homeward to visit 'the spot of so
+impressive a monument': as it, was phrased by the Rev. Septimus Barmby;
+whose exposition to Nesta of the beautiful stained-glass pictures of
+incidents in the life of the crusading St. Louis, was toned to be
+likewise impressive:--Colney Durance not being at hand to bewail the
+pathos of his exhaustless 'whacking of the platitudes'; which still
+retain their tender parts, but cry unheard when there is no cynic near.
+Mr. Barmby laid-on solemnly.
+
+Professional devoutness is deemed more righteous on such occasions than
+poetic fire.  It robes us in the cloak of the place, as at a funeral.
+Generally, Mr. Barmby found, and justly, that it is in superior
+estimation among his countrymen of all classes.  They are shown by
+example how to look, think, speak; what to do.  Poets are disturbing;
+they cannot be comfortably imitated, they are unsafe, not certainly the
+metal, unless you have Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and
+decorations; and these are but one at a time-and a quotation may remind
+us of a parody, to convulse the sacred dome!  Established plain prose
+officials do better for our English.  The audience moved round with heads
+of undertakers.
+
+Victor called to recollection Fenellan's 'Rev. Glendoveer' while Mr.
+Barmby pursued his discourse, uninterrupted by tripping wags.  And those
+who have schemes, as well as those who are startled by the criticism in
+laughter to discover that they have cause for shunning it, rejoice when
+wits are absent.  Mr. Sowerby and Nesta interchanged a comment on Mr.
+Barmby's remarks: The Fate of Princes!  The Paths of Glory!  St. Louis
+was a very distant Roman Catholic monarch; and the young gentleman of
+Evangelical education could admire him as a Crusader.  St. Louis was for
+Nesta a figure in the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to homeliness
+by tears.  She doated on a royalty crowned with the Saint's halo, that
+swam down to us to lift us through holy human showers.  She listened to
+Mr. Barmby, hearing few sentences, lending his eloquence all she felt:
+he rolled forth notes of a minster organ, accordant with the devotional
+service she was holding mutely.  Mademoiselle upon St. Louis: 'Worthy to
+be named King of Kings!' swept her to a fount of thoughts, where the
+thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the mother
+emotions.  Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and deeply
+moved.  The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open to be
+musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales.  This crypt of the
+recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the
+passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an
+altar-piece of History.  But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion
+leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message from death.  With such
+a King, there would be union of the old order and the new, cessation to
+political turmoil: Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of things
+with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable, obliterate
+the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and garden were,
+would be appeased, transfigured.  She hoped, she prayed for that glorious
+leader's advent.
+
+On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not intelligibly, not
+communicably: a subject thickly veiled; one which struck at her through
+her sex and must, she thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young creature
+saw it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams of a body
+rageing with fire behind the veil): on this one subject, her hopes and
+prayers were dumb in her bosom.  It signified shame.  She knew not the
+how, for she had no power to contemplate it: there was a torment of earth
+and a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse.  But if the
+new crusading Hero were to come attacking that--if some born prince nobly
+man would head the world to take away the withering scarlet from the face
+of women, she felt she could kiss the print of his feet upon the ground.
+Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the inmost forest-well of
+mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of good aspiration
+through their obscurities find much akin to them.
+
+She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these French Princes
+had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and the
+old result--poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly!
+What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the slow parade,
+and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification of a holiday
+on arrested legs.  Dudley Sowerby's attention to him, in elucidating the
+scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her.  The Rev. Septimus of
+course occupied her chiefly.
+
+Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of
+gratitude for the route she had counselled.  Without personal objections
+to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming
+too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble
+muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and
+certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
+in the sentence of French.  Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong
+sentiment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility
+of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in England:
+an all but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon
+mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at his reading of
+a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony involving his
+favourite Bishop for bridegroom: a report to make one glow like Hymen
+rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying slipper.
+He remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the slumbering
+features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower, entering into
+nuptials in his fifty-fourth year.  Why not?  But we ask it of Heaven and
+Man, why not?  Mademoiselle was pleasant: she was young or youngish; her
+own clergy were celibates, and--no, he could not argue the matter with a
+young or youngish person of her sex.  Could it be a reasonable woman--
+a woman!--who, disapproved the holy nuptials of the pastors of the
+flocks?  But we are forbidden to imagine the conducting of an argument
+thereon with a lady.
+
+Luther .  .  .  but we are not in Luther's time:--Nature .  .  .  no,
+nor can there possibly be allusions to Nature.  Mr. Barmby wondered at
+Protestant parents taking a Papistical governess for their young flower
+of English womanhood.  However, she venerated St. Louis; he cordially
+also; there they met; and he admitted, that she had, for a Frenchwoman,
+a handsome face, and besides an agreeably artificial ingenuousness in
+the looks which could be so politely dubious as to appear only dubiously
+adverse.
+
+The spell upon Nesta was not blown away on English ground; and when her
+father and mother were comparing their impressions, she could not but
+keep guard over the deeper among her own.  At the Chateau de Gisors,
+leftward off Vernon on Seine, it had been one of romance and wonderment,
+with inquisitive historic soundings of her knowledge and mademoiselle's,
+a reverence for the prisoner's patient holy work, and picturings of his
+watchful waiting daily, Nail in hand, for the heaven-sent sunlight on the
+circular dungeon-wall through the slits of the meurtrieres.  But the
+Mausoleum at Dreux spake religiously; it enfolded Mr. Barmby, his voice
+re-edified it.  The fact that he had discoursed there, though not a word
+of the discourse was remembered, allied him to the spirit of a day rather
+increasing in sacredness as it receded and left her less the possessor of
+it, more the worshipper.
+
+Mademoiselle had to say to herself: 'Impossible!' after seeing the drift
+of her dear Nesta's eyes in the wake of the colossal English clergyman.
+She fed her incredulousness indignantly on the evidence confounding it.
+Nataly was aware of unusual intonations, treble-stressed, in the Bethesda
+and the Galilee of Mr. Barmby on Concert evenings: as it were, the
+towering wood-work of the cathedral organ in quake under emission of its
+multitudinous outroar.  The 'Which?' of the Rev. Septimus, addressed to
+Nesta, when song was demanded of him; and her 'Either'; and his gentle
+hesitation, upon a gaze at her for the directing choice, could not be
+unnoticed by women.
+
+Did he know a certain thing?--and dream of urging the suit, as an
+indulgent skipper of parental pages?
+
+Such haunting interrogations were the conspirators' daggers out at any
+instant, or leaping in sheath, against Nataly's peace of mind.  But she
+trusted her girl's laughing side to rectify any little sentimental
+overbalancing.  She left the ground where maternal meditations are
+serious, at an image of Mr. Barmby knocking at Nesta's heart as a lover.
+Was it worth inquiry?
+
+A feminine look was trailed across the eyes of mademoiselle, with mention
+of Mr. Barmby's name.
+
+Mademoiselle rippled her shoulders.  'We are at present much enamoured of
+Bethesda.'
+
+That watchfullest showing no alarm, the absurdity of the suspicion
+smothered it.
+
+Nataly had moreover to receive startling new guests:
+
+Lady Rodwell Blachington: Mrs. Fanning, wife of the General: young Mrs.
+Blathenoy, wife of the great bill-broker: ladies of Wrensham and about.
+And it was a tasking of her energies equal to the buffeting of recurrent
+waves on deep sea.  The ladies were eager for her entry into Lakelands.
+She heard that Victor had appointed Lady Blachington's third son to the
+coveted post of clerk in the Indian house of Inchling and Radnor.  These
+are the deluge days when even aristocracy will cry blessings on the man
+who procures a commercial appointment for one of its younger sons
+offended and rebutted by the barrier of Examinations for the Civil
+Service.  'To have our Adolphus under Mr. Victor Radnor's protection, is
+a step!' Lady Blachington said.  Nataly was in an atmosphere of hints and
+revealings.  There were City Dinners, to which one or other of the
+residents about Lakelands had been taken before he sat at Victor's London
+table.  He was already winning his way, apparently without effort, to be
+the popular man of that neighbourhood.  A subterranean tide or a slipping
+of earth itself seemed bearing her on.  She had his promise indeed, that
+he would not ask of her to enter Lakelands until the day of his freedom
+had risen; but though she could trust to his word, the heart of the word
+went out of it when she heard herself thanked by Lady Blachington (who
+could so well excuse her at such a time of occupation for not returning
+her call, that she called in a friendly way a second time, warmly to
+thank her) for throwing open the Concert room at Lakelands in August, to
+an Entertainment in assistance of the funds for the purpose of erecting
+an East of London Clubhouse, where the children of the poor by day could
+play, and their parents pass a disengaged evening.  Doubtless a worthy
+Charity.  Nataly was alive to the duties of wealth.  Had it been simply a
+demand for a donation, she would not have shown that momentary pucker of
+the brows, which Lady Blachington read as a contrast with the generous
+vivacity of the husband.
+
+Nataly read a leaf of her fate in this announcement.  Nay, she beheld
+herself as the outer world wexedly beholds a creature swung along to the
+doing of things against the better mind.  An outer world is thoughtless
+of situations which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will
+benumbed;--if we do not, as does that outer world, belong to the party of
+the readily heroical.  She scourged her weakness: and the intimation of
+the truth stood over her, more than ever manifest, that the deficiency
+affecting her character lay in her want of language.  A tongue to speak
+and contend, would have helped her to carve a clearer way.  But then
+again, the tongue to speak must be one which could reproach, and strike
+at errors; fence, and continually summon resources to engage the
+electrical vitality of a man like Victor.  It was an exultation of their
+life together, a mark of his holiness for them both, that they had never
+breathed a reproach upon one another.
+
+She dropped away from ideas of remonstrance; faintly seeing, in her sigh
+of submission, that the deficiency affecting her character would have
+been supplied by a greater force of character, pressing either to speech
+or acts.  The confession of a fated inevitable in the mind, is weakness
+prostrate.  She knew it: but she could point to the manner of man she was
+matched with; and it was not a poor excuse.
+
+Mr. Barmby, she thought, deserved her gratitude in some degree for
+stepping between Mr. Sowerby and Nesta.  The girl not having
+inclinations, and the young gentleman being devoid of stratagem, they
+were easily kept from the dangerous count of two.
+
+Mademoiselle would have said, that the shepherd also had rarely if ever a
+minute quite alone with her lamb.  Incredulously she perceived signs of a
+shock.  The secret following the signs was betrayed by Nesta in return
+for a tender grasp of hands and a droll flutter of eyelids.  Out it came,
+on a nod first; then a dreary mention of a date, and an incident, to
+bring it nearer to comprehension.  Mr. Barmby--and decide who will
+whether it is that Love was made to elude or that curates impelled by his
+fires are subtle as nether--had outwitted French watchfulness by stealing
+minutes enough on a day at Lakelands to declare himself.  And no wonder
+the girl looked so forlorn: he had shivered her mediaeval forest-palace
+of illuminated glass, to leave her standing like a mountain hind, that
+sniffs the tainted gale off the crag of her first quick leap from hounds;
+her instincts alarmed, instead of rich imagination colouring and
+fostering.
+
+She had no memory for his words; so, and truly, she told her Louise:
+meaning that she had only a spiceless memory; especially for the word
+love in her ears from the mouth of a man.
+
+There had been a dream of it; with the life-awakening marvel it would be,
+the humbleness it would bring to her soul beneath the golden clothing of
+her body: one of those faint formless dreams, which are as the bend of
+grasses to the breath of a still twilight.  She lived too spiritedly to
+hang on any dream; and had moreover a muffled dread-shadow-sister to the
+virginal desire--of this one, as of a fateful power that might drag her
+down, disorder, discolour.  But now she had heard it: the word, the very
+word itself! in her own ears! addressed to her! in a man's voice!  The
+first utterance had been heard, and it was over; the chapter of the book
+of bulky promise of the splendours and mysteries;--the shimmering woods
+and bushy glades, and the descent of the shape celestial, and the
+recognition--the mutual cry of affinity; and overhead the crimson
+outrolling of the flag of beneficent enterprises hand in hand, all was at
+an end.  These, then, are the deceptions our elders tell of!  That
+masculine voice should herald a new world to the maiden.  The voice she
+had heard did but rock to ruin the world she had been living in.
+
+Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on his person or on
+his conduct.  Nesta had nothing to defend: she walked in a bald waste.
+
+'Can I have been guilty of leading him to think .  .  .?' she said, in a
+tone that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair.
+
+'They choose to think,' mademoiselle replied.  'It is he or another.  My
+dear and dearest, you have entered the field where shots fly thick, as
+they do to soldiers in battle; and it is neither your fault nor any
+one's, if you are hit.'
+
+Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of 'Louise.'
+
+Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty.  'Has it happened
+to me?  I am of the age of eight and twenty; passable, to look at: yes,
+my dear, I have gone through it.  To spare you the questions tormenting
+you, I will tell you, that perhaps our experience of our feelings comes
+nigh on a kind of resemblance.  The first gentleman who did me the honour
+to inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.'
+
+Nesta cried 'Oh!' in a veritable pang of sympathy, and clapped hands to
+her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby's boom of the terrific word attacking
+Louise from that deformed one.
+
+Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision.  A girl of
+quick blood and active though unregulated intellect, she caught at the
+comic of young women's hopes and experiences, in her fear of it.
+
+'My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice there is in the world
+for one like my Louise to have a hunchback to be the first .  .  .  !'
+
+'But, my dear, it did me no harm.'
+
+'But if it had been known!'
+
+'But it was known!'
+
+Nesta controlled a shuddering: 'It is the knowledge of it in ourselves--
+that it has ever happened;--you dear Louise, who deserve so much better!
+And one asks--Oh, why are we not left in peace!  And do look at the
+objects it makes of us!'  Mademoiselle: could see, that the girl's
+desperation had got hold of her humour for a life-buoy.  'It is really
+worse to have it unknown--when you are compelled to be his partner in
+sharing the secret, and feel as if it were a dreadful doll you conceal
+for fear that everybody will laugh at its face.'
+
+She resumed her seriousness: 'I find it so hard to be vexed with him and
+really really like him.  For he is a good man; but he will not let one
+shake him off.  He distresses: because we can't quite meet as we did.
+Last Wednesday Concert evening, he kept away; and I am annoyed that I was
+glad.'
+
+'Moths have to pass through showers, and keep their pretty patterns from
+damage as best they can,' said mademoiselle.
+
+Nesta transformed herself into a disciple of Philosophy on the spot.
+'Yes, all these feelings of ours are moth-dust!  One feels them.  I
+suppose they pass.  They must.  But tell me, Louise, dear soul, was your
+poor dear good little afflicted suitor--was he kindly pitied?'
+
+'Conformably with the regulations prescribed to young damsels who are in
+request to surrender the custody of their hands.  It is easy to commit a
+dangerous excess in the dispensing of that article they call pity of
+them.'
+
+'And he--did he?--vowed to you he could not take No for an answer?'
+
+At this ingenuous question, woefully uttered, mademoiselle was pricked,
+to smile pointedly.  Nesta had a tooth on her under-lip.  Then, shaking
+vapours to the winds, she said: 'It is an honour, to be asked; and we
+cannot be expected to consent.  So I shall wear through it.--Only I do
+wish that Mr. Fenellan would not call him The Inchcape Bell!' She
+murmured this to herself.
+
+Mr. Barmby was absent for two weeks.  'Can anything have offended him?'
+Victor inquired, in some consternation, appreciating the man's worth, and
+the grand basso he was; together with the need for him at the Lakelands
+Concert in August.
+
+Nataly wrote Mr. Barmby a direct invitation.  She had no reply.  Her
+speculations were cut short by Victor, who handed her a brief note
+addressed to him and signed by the Rev. Septimus, petitioning for a
+private interview.
+
+The formality of the request incensed Victor.  'Now, dear love, you see
+Colney's meaning, when he says, there are people who have no intimacy in
+them.  Here's a man who visits me regularly once a week or more, has been
+familiar for years--four, at least; and he wants to speak to me, and must
+obtain the "privilege" by special appointment!  What can be the meaning
+of it?'
+
+'You will hear to-morrow afternoon,' Nataly said, seeing one paved way to
+the meaning--a too likely meaning. . . 'He hasn't been .  .  .  nothing
+about Fredi, surely!'
+
+'I have had no information.'
+
+'Impossible!  Barmby has good sense; Bottesini can't intend to come
+scraping on that string.  But we won't lose him; he's one of us.  Barmby
+counts for more at a Charity Concert than all the catalogue, and
+particularly in the country.  But he's an excellent fellow--eh?'
+
+'That he is,' Nataly agreed.
+
+Victor despatched a cheerful curt consent to see Mr. Barmby privately on
+the late afternoon of the day to follow.
+
+Nesta, returning home from the park at that hour of the interview,
+ignorant of Mr. Barmby's purpose though she was, had her fires
+extinguished by the rolling roar of curfew along the hall-passage,
+out of the library.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer Orpheus took that
+downward way, coming in sight of old Cerberus centiceps, he astutely
+feigned inattention to the hostile appearances of the multiple beast, and
+with a wave of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the stroke
+raised voice.  This much you know.  It may be communicated to you, that
+there was then beheld the most singular spectacle ever exhibited on the
+dizzy line of division between the living and the dead.  For those
+unaccustomed musical tones in the last thin whiff of our sustaining air
+were so smartingly persuasive as to pierce to the vitals of the faithful
+Old Dog before his offended sentiments had leisure to rouse their heads
+against a beggar of a mortal.  The terrible sugariness which poured into
+him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a wrestling: his battery
+of jaws expressed it.  They gaped.  At the same time, his eyeballs gave
+up.  All the Dog, that would have barked the breathing intruder an
+hundredfold back to earth, was one compulsory centurion yawn.  Tears,
+issue of the frightful internal wedding of the dulcet and the sour
+(a ravishing rather of the latter by the former), rolled off his muzzles.
+
+Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent simile shall be
+composed of exactly the like notes in another octave, you will catch the
+fine flavour of analogy and be wafted in a beat of wings across the scene
+of the application of the Rev. Septimus Barmby to Mr. Victor Radnor, that
+he might enter the house in the guise of suitor for the hand of Nesta
+Victoria.  It is the excelling merit of similes and metaphors to spring
+us to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary places.  But, as with the
+visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them.  Beware, moreover,
+of examining them too scrupulously: they have a trick of wearing to
+vapour if closely scanned.  Let it be gratefully for their aid.
+
+So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby passed: he was at
+liberty to pursue his quest.
+
+Victor could not explain how he had been brought to grant it.  He was at
+pains to conceal the bewilderment Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make
+Nataly see the smallness of the grant:--both of them were unwilling to
+lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about Fredi, he said; and
+why should not poor Barmby have his chance with the others in the race!
+--and his Nataly knew that he hated to speak unkindly: he could cry the
+negative like a crack of thunder in the City.  But such matters as these!
+and a man pleading merely for the right to see the girl!--and pleading in
+a tone .  .  .  'I assure you, my love, he touched chords.'
+
+'Did he allude to advantages in the alliance with him?' Nataly asked
+smoothly.
+
+'His passion--nothing else.  Candid enough.  And he had a tone--he has a
+tone, you know.  It 's not what he said.  Some allusion to belief in a
+favourable opinion of him .  .  .  encouragement .  .  .  on the part of
+the mama.  She would have him travelling with us!  I foresaw it.'
+
+'You were astonished when it came.'
+
+'We always are.'
+
+Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr. Barmby.
+
+She had thought in her heart--not seriously; on a sigh of despondency--
+that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled prospect: and
+a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to detect
+Victor's cunning to cover his own: a thing imaginable of him previously
+in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly printed on
+her mind.  It did not draw her to read him with a novel familiarity; it
+drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations of the man he was
+--irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive.  Nor did he seem in
+this instance humanely considerate: if mademoiselle's estimate of the
+mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby's position would be both
+a ridiculous and a cruel one.  She had some silly final idea that the
+poor man might now serve permanently to check the more dreaded applicant:
+a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness was blunted.
+
+Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to have his
+weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation, of a loss of her
+natural cheerfulness, and promised amendment, with a steely smile, that
+his lips mimicked fondly; and her smile softened.  To strengthen the dear
+soul's hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,
+of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the tragic depths he
+struck or of the burden he gave her heart to bear.  Her look alarmed him.
+She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp, and was in a
+moment marble to sight and touch.  She looked like the old engravings of
+martyrs taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.
+
+He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the awful grip of
+fingers from the outside of life.
+
+The seizure was over before it could be called ominous.  When it was once
+over, and she had smiled again and rebuked him for excessive anxiety, his
+apprehensions no longer troubled him, but subsided sensationally in wrath
+at the crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of her ailments
+instantly to perish and spare this dear one annoyance.
+
+Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual mental penance for
+it.  In consequence, the wrath, and the wish, and the penitence, haunted
+him, each swelling to possession of him in turn; until they united to
+head a plunge into retrospects; which led to his reviewing the army of
+charges against Mrs. Burman.
+
+And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the morbid indulgence in
+reflection: a disease never afflicting him anterior to the stupid fall on
+London Bridge.  He rubbed instinctively for the punctilio-bump, and could
+cheat his fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below, half an
+inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist, invited by Nataly in
+old days, had marked philo-progenitiveness on his capacious and enviable
+cerebrum.  He knew well it was a fancy.  But it was a fact also, that
+since the day of the fall (never, save in merest glimpses, before that
+day), he had taken to look behind him, as though an eye had been knocked
+in the back of his head.
+
+Then, was that day of the announcement of Lakelands to Nataly, to be
+accounted a gloomy day?  He would not have it so.
+
+She was happily occupied with her purchases of furniture, Fredi with her
+singing lessons, and he with his business; a grasp of many ribands,
+reining-in or letting loose; always enjoyable in the act.  Recently only
+had he known when at home, a relaxation, a positive pleasure in looking
+forward to the hours of the City office.  This was odd, but so it was;
+and looking homeward from the City, he had a sense of disappointment when
+it was not Concert evening.  The Cormyns, the Yatts, and Priscilla
+Graves, and Pempton, foolish fellow, and that bothering Barmby, and
+Peridon and Catkin, were the lineing of his nest.  Well, and so they had
+been before Lakelands rose.  What had induced!  .  .  .  he suddenly felt
+foreign to himself.  The shrouded figure of his lost Idea on London
+Bridge went by.
+
+A peep into the folds of the shroud was granted him:--Is it a truth, that
+if we are great owners of money, we are so swollen with a force not
+native to us, as to be precipitated into acts the downright contrary of
+our tastes?
+
+He inquired it of his tastes, which have the bad habit of unmeasured
+phrasing when they are displeased, and so they yield no rational answer.
+Still he gave heed to violent extraneous harpings against money.
+Epigrams of Colney's; abuse of it and the owners of it by Socialist
+orators reported in some newspaper corner; had him by the ears.
+
+They ceased in the presence of Lady Grace Halley, who entered his office
+to tell him she was leaving town for Whinfold, her husband's family-seat,
+where the dear man lay in evil case.  She signified her resignation to
+the decrees from above, saying generously:
+
+'You look troubled, my friend.  Any bad City news?'
+
+'I look troubled?' Victor said laughing, and bethought him of what the
+trouble might be.  'City news would not cause the look.  Ah, yes;--I was
+talking in the street to a friend of mine on horseback the other day, and
+he kept noticing his horse's queer starts.  We spied half a dozen
+children in the gutter, at the tail of the horse, one of them plucking at
+a hair.  "Please, sir, may I have a hair out of your horse's tail?"  said
+the mite.  We patted the poor horse that grew a tail for urchins to pluck
+at.  Men come to the fathers about their girls.  It's my belief that
+mothers more easily say no.  If they learn the word as maids, you'll say!
+However, there's no fear about my girl.  Fredi's hard to snare.  And what
+brings you Cityward?'
+
+'I want to know whether I shall do right in selling out of the Tiddler
+mine.'
+
+'You have multiplied your investment by ten.'
+
+'If it had been thousands!'
+
+'Clearly, you sell; always jump out of a mounted mine, unless you're at
+the bottom of it.'
+
+'There are City-articles against the mine this morning--or I should have
+been on my way to Whinfold at this moment.  The shares are lower.'
+
+'The merry boys are at work to bring your balloon to the ground, that you
+may quit it for them to ascend.  Tiddler has enemies, like the best of
+mines: or they may be named lovers, if you like.  And mines that have
+gone up, go down for a while before they rise again; it's an affair of
+undulations; rocket mines are not so healthy.  The stories are false, for
+the time.  I had the latest from Dartrey Fenellan yesterday.  He's here
+next month; some time in August.'
+
+'He is married, is he not?'
+
+'Was.'
+
+Victor's brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.
+
+'Is he not a soldier?' she said.
+
+'Soldiers and parsons!' Victor interjected.
+
+Now she saw.  She understood the portent of Mr. Barmby's hovering offer
+of the choice of songs, and the recent tremulousness of the welling
+Bethesda.
+
+But she had come about her own business; and after remarking, that when
+there is a prize there must be competition, or England will have to lower
+her flag, she declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler, exclaiming: 'It's
+only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a dream of the past!'
+
+'The Riviera green field on the rock is always open to you,' said Victor.
+
+She put out her hand to be taken.  'Not if you back me here.  It really
+is not gambling when yours is the counsel I follow.  And if I'm to be a
+widow, I shall have to lean on a friend, gifted like you.  I love
+adventure, danger;--well, if we two are in it; just to see my captain in
+a storm.  And if the worst happens, we go down together.  It 's the
+detestation of our deadly humdrum of modern life; some inherited love of
+fighting.'
+
+'Say, brandy.'
+
+'Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to the brandy novel?'
+
+'Colney may call it what he pleases.  If I read fiction, let it be
+fiction; airier than hard fact.  If I see a ballet, my troop of short
+skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen.  I can't read dull
+analytical stuff or "stylists" when I want action--if I'm to give my mind
+to a story.  I can supply the reflections.  I'm English--if Colney 's
+right in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of
+supernaturalism.
+
+I don't ask for bloodshed: that's what his "brandy" means.'
+
+'But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect it
+where there's love; it's part of the balance, and justifies one's
+excitement.  How otherwise do you get any real crisis?  I must read and
+live something unlike this flat life around us.'
+
+'There's the Adam life and the Macadam life, Fenellan says.  Pass it in
+books, but in life we can have quite enough excitement coming out of our
+thoughts.  No brandy there!  And no fine name for personal predilections
+or things done in domino!'  Victor said, with his very pleasant face,
+pressing her hand, to keep the act of long holding it in countenance and
+bring it to a well-punctuated conclusion: thinking involuntarily of the
+other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed a beaten visage
+despite--or with that poor kind of--trust in her captain.  But the
+thought was not guilty of drawing comparisons.  'This is one that I could
+trust, as captain or mate,' he pressed the hand again before dropping it.
+
+'You judge entirely by the surface, if you take me for a shifty person at
+the trial,' said Lady Grace.
+
+Skepsey entered the room with one of his packets, and she was reminded of
+trains and husbands.
+
+She left Victor uncomfortably rufed: and how? for she had none of the
+physical charms appealing peculiarly to the man who was taken with
+grandeur of shape.  She belonged rather to the description physically
+distasteful to him.
+
+It is a critical comment on a civilization carelessly distilled from the
+jealous East, when visits of fair women to City offices can have this
+effect.  If the sexes are separated for an hour, the place where one is
+excluded or not common to see, becomes inflammable to that appearing
+spark.  He does outrage to a bona Dea: she to the monasticism of the
+Court of Law: and he and she awaken unhallowed emotions.  Supposing,
+however, that western men were to de-orientalize their gleeful notions of
+her, and dis-Turk themselves by inviting the woman's voluble tongue to
+sisterly occupation there in the midst of the pleading Court, as in the
+domestic circle: very soon would her eyes be harmless: unless directed
+upon us with intent.
+
+That is the burning core of the great Question, our Armageddon in
+Morality: Is she moral?  Does she mean to be harmless?  Is she not
+untamable Old Nature?  And when once on an equal footing with her lordly
+half, would not the spangled beauty, in a turn, like the realistic
+transformation-trick of a pantomime, show herself to be that wanton old
+thing--the empress of disorderliness?  You have to recollect, as the
+Conservative acutely suggests, that her timidities, at present urging her
+to support Establishments, pertain to her state of dependence.  The party
+views of Conservatism are, must be, founded, we should remember, on an
+intimate acquaintance with her in the situations where she is almost
+unrestrictedly free and her laughter rings to confirm the sentences of
+classical authors and Eastern sages.  Conservatives know what they are
+about when they refuse to fling the last lattice of an ancient harem open
+to air and sun-the brutal dispersers of mystery, which would despoil an
+ankle of its flying wink.
+
+Victor's opinions were those of the entrenched majority; objecting to the
+occult power of women, as we have the women now, while legislating to
+maintain them so; and forbidding a step to a desperately wicked female
+world lest the step should be to wickeder.  His opinions were in the
+background, rarely stirred; but the lady had brought them forward; and he
+fretted at his restlessness, vexed that it should be due to the intrusion
+of the sex instead of to the charms of the individual.  No sting of the
+sort had bothered him, he called to mind, on board the Channel boat-
+nothing to speak of.  'Why does she come here!  Why didn't she go to her
+husband!  She gets into the City scramble blindfold, and catches at the
+nearest hand to help her out!  Nice woman enough.'  Yes, but he was
+annoyed with her for springing sensations that ran altogether heartless
+to the object, at the same time that they were disloyal to the dear woman
+their natural divinity.  And between him and that dear woman, since the
+communication made by Skepsey in the town of Dreux, nightly the dividing
+spirit of Mrs. Burman lay cold as a corpse.  They both felt her there.
+They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night.
+
+Next afternoon the announcement by Skepsey of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby,
+surprised Victor's eyebrows at least, and caused him genially to review
+the visit of Lady Grace.
+
+Whether or not Colney Durance drew his description of a sunken nobility
+from the 'sick falcon' distinguishing the handsome features of Mr.
+Sowerby, that beaked invalid was particularly noticeable to Victor during
+the statement of his case, although the young gentleman was far from
+being one, in Colney's words, to enliven the condition of domestic fowl
+with an hereditary turn for 'preying'; eminently the reverse; he was of
+good moral repute, a worker, a commendable citizen.  But there was the
+obligation upon him to speak--it is expected in such cases, if only as a
+formality--of his 'love': hard to do even in view and near to the
+damsel's reddening cheeks: it perplexed him.  He dropped a veil on the
+bashful topic; his tone was the same as when he reverted to the material
+points; his present income, his position in the great Bank of Shotts and
+Co., his prospects, the health of the heir to the Cantor earldom.  He
+considered that he spoke to a member of the City merchants, whose
+preference for the plain positive, upon the question of an alliance
+between families by marriage, lends them for once a resemblance to lords.
+When a person is not read by character, the position or profession is
+called on to supply raised print for the finger-ends to spell.
+
+Hard on poor Fredi! was Victor's thought behind the smile he bent on this
+bald Cupid.  She deserved a more poetical lover!  His paternal sympathies
+for the girl besought in love, revived his past feelings as a wooer;
+nothing but a dread of the influence of Mr. Barmby's toned eloquence upon
+the girl, after her listening to Dudley Sowerby's addresses, checked his
+contempt for the latter.  He could not despise the suitor he sided with
+against another and seemingly now a more dangerous.  Unable quite to
+repress the sentiment, he proceeded immediately to put it to his uses.
+For we have no need to be scrupulously formal and precise in the
+exposition of circumstances to a fellow who may thank the stars if such a
+girl condescends to give him a hearing.  He had this idea through the
+conception of his girl's generosity.  And furthermore, the cognizant eye
+of a Lucretian Alma Mater having seat so strongly in Victor, demanded as
+a right an effusion of the promising amorous graces on the part of the
+acceptable applicant to the post of husband of that peerless.  These
+being absent, evidently non-existent, it seemed sufficient for the
+present, after the fashion of the young gentleman, to capitulate the few
+material matters briefly.
+
+They were dotted along with a fine disregard of the stateliness of the
+sum to be settled on Nesta Victoria, and with a distant but burning wish
+all the while, that the suitor had been one to touch his heart and open
+it, inspiriting it--as could have been done--to disclose for good and all
+the things utterable.  Victor loved clear honesty, as he loved light: and
+though he hated to be accused of not showing a clean face in the light,
+he would have been moved and lifted to confess to a spot by the touch at
+his heart.  Dudley Sowerby's deficiencies, however, were outweighed by
+the palpable advantages of his birth, his prospects, and his good repute
+for conduct; add thereto his gentlemanly manners.  Victor sighed again
+over his poor Fredi; and in telling Mr. Sowerby that the choice must be
+left to her, he had the regrets of a man aware of his persuasive arts and
+how they would be used, to think that he was actually making the choice.
+
+Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine of it; he is no
+longer the man of his tastes or of his principles; he is on a line of
+rails for a terminus; and he may cast languishing eyes across waysides to
+right and left, he has doomed himself to proceed, with a self-devouring
+hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at the embrace of it.
+This may be or not, but Nature has decreed to him the forfeit of
+pleasure.  She bids us count the passage of a sober day for the service
+of the morrow; that is her system; and she would have us adopt it, to
+keep in us the keen edge for cutting, which is the guarantee of
+enjoyment: doing otherwise, we lose ourselves in one or other of the
+furious matrix instincts; we are blunt to all else.
+
+Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with Miss Radnor; he
+alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments.  He was waxing to
+fervidness.  He said he must expect competitors; adding, on a start, that
+he was to say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to
+present Miss Radnor at Court .  .  .  .
+
+Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head had come out
+of hot water.  He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities, under a kind of
+sneer at its functions: 'Court!  my girl?  But the arduous duties are
+over for the season.  We are a democratic people retaining the seductions
+of monarchy, as a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count
+among the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court
+presentations; no harm.  Only there's plenty of time .  .  .  very young
+girls have their heads turned--though I don't say, don't imagine, my girl
+would.  By and by perhaps.'
+
+Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling's room and introduced to the figure-
+head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor: a respectable City
+merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse of the downright
+contrast to his partner.  He had heard casual remarks on the respectable
+City of London merchant from Colney Durance.  A short analytical gaze at
+him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man who kept him up.  Mr.
+Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a line of City
+merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as drovers, they tell
+us, can single one from another of their round-bellied beasts.  Formerly
+the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of restiveness,
+kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor's obedient cart-horse.  He
+sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when, like trouts in
+the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good things to
+fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated
+interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to
+make it our national Poem.
+
+Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still
+somehow constantly allotted to him.  His wife believed in Victor, and
+deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain.  Since that
+lamentable loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory
+of Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad
+against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the
+pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man who
+speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried onward and
+onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction, in
+perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at a
+turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor.  He had
+never forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous purchase of
+Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his share
+of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the
+bargain had come to Victor.  Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion
+from that disquieting period.  He assented to the praise of Victor's
+genius, admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and consequently
+his head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his quondam
+comfortable feeling of security.  And if you will imagine the sprite of
+the aggregate English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the malignant who
+has despoiled him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once had from his
+God Neptune against invaders, you will comprehend the state of Mr.
+Inchling's mind in regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very
+disturbing partner.
+
+He thanked heaven to his wife often, that he had nothing to do with North
+American or South American mines and pastures or with South Africa and,
+gold and diamonds: and a wife must sometimes listen, mastering her inward
+comparisons.  Dr. Schlesien had met and meditated on this example of the
+island energy.  Mr. Inchling was not permitted by his wife to be much the
+guest of the Radnor household, because of the frequent meeting there with
+Colney Durance; Colney's humour for satire being instantly in bristle at
+sight of his representative of English City merchants: 'over whom,' as he
+wrote of the venerable body, 'the disciplined and instructed Germans not
+deviously march; whom acute and adventurous Americans, with half a cock
+of the eye in passing, compassionately outstrip.'  He and Dr. Schlesien
+agreed upon Mr. Inchling.  Meantime the latter gentleman did his part at
+the tables of the wealthier City Companies, and retained his appearance
+of health; he was beginning to think, upon a calculation of the increased
+treasures of those Companies and the country, that we, the Taxpayer,
+ought not to leave it altogether to Providence to defend them;
+notwithstanding the watchful care of us hitherto shown by our briny
+Providence, to save us from anxiety and expense.  But there are, he said,
+'difficulties'; and the very word could stop him, as commonly when our
+difficulty lies in the exercise of thinking.
+
+Victor's African room, containing large wall-maps of auriferous regions,
+was inspected; and another, where clerks were busy over miscellaneous
+Continents.  Dudley Sowerby hoped he might win the maiden.
+
+He and Victor walked in company Westward.  The shop of Boyle and
+Luckwort, chemists, was not passed on this occasion.  Dudley grieved that
+he had to be absent from the next Concert for practise, owing to his
+engagement to his mother to go down to the family seat near Tunbridge
+Wells.  Victor mentioned his relatives, the Duvidney maiden ladies,
+residing near the Wells.  They measured the distance between Cronidge and
+Moorsedge, the two houses, as for half an hour on horseback.
+
+Nesta told her father at home that the pair of them had been observed
+confidentially arm in arm, and conversing so profoundly.
+
+'Who, do you think, was the topic?' Victor asked.
+
+She would not chase the little blue butterfly of a guess.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Ask not why, where reason never was
+Cover of action as an escape from perplexity
+Honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction
+Judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals
+Memory inspired by the sensations
+Nature could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty
+Satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher
+Slave of existing conventions
+Startled by the criticism in laughter
+The impalpable which has prevailing weight
+There is little to be learnt when a little is known
+They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night
+Who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4472 ***
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9f9f5b4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #4472 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4472)
diff --git a/old/4472.txt b/old/4472.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..440f006
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4472.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3049 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of One of Our Conquerors, v2,
+by George Meredith
+#78 in our series by George Meredith
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg file.
+
+We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your own disk,
+thereby keeping an electronic path open for future readers.
+
+Please do not remove this.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to
+view the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission.
+The words are carefully chosen to provide users with the information
+they need to understand what they may and may not do with the etext.
+To encourage this, we have moved most of the information to the end,
+rather than having it all here at the beginning.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These Etexts Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and
+further information, is included below.  We need your donations.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
+organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541
+Find out about how to make a donation at the bottom of this file.
+
+
+
+Title: One of Our Conquerors, v2
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4472]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 19, 2002]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of One of Our Conquerors, v2, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named 4472.txt or 4472.zip********
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep etexts in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+The "legal small print" and other information about this book
+may now be found at the end of this file.  Please read this
+important information, as it gives you specific rights and
+tells you about restrictions in how the file may be used.
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS
+
+By George Meredith
+
+1897
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+XII.      TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
+          HAVING ONE HEART
+XIII.     THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+XIV.      DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+XV.       A PATRIOT ABROAD
+XVI.      ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED
+          NATALY
+XVII.     CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
+XVIII.    SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD HAVING ONE
+HEART
+
+Two that live together in union are supposed to be intimate on every
+leaf.  Particularly when they love one another and the cause they have
+at heart is common to them in equal measure, the uses of a cordial
+familiarity forbid reserves upon important matters between them, as we
+think; not thinking of an imposed secretiveness, beneath the false
+external of submissiveness, which comes of an experience of repeated
+inefficiency to maintain a case in opposition, on the part of the
+loquently weaker of the pair.  In Constitutional Kingdoms a powerful
+Government needs not to be tyrannical to lean oppressively; it is more
+serviceable to party than agreeable to country; and where the alliance
+of men and women binds a loving couple, of whom one is a torrent of
+persuasion, their differings are likely to make the other resemble a log
+of the torrent.  It is borne along; it dreams of a distant corner of the
+way for a determined stand; it consents to its whirling in anticipation
+of an undated hour when it will no longer be neutral.
+
+There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the fellow breast,
+a mutually sensitive nerve to protest against intrusion of light or
+sound.  The cloud over the name of their girl could now strike Nataly and
+Victor dumb in their taking of counsel.  She divined that his hint had
+encouraged him to bring the crisis nearer, and he that her comprehension
+had become tremblingly awake.  They shrank, each of them, the more from
+an end drawing closely into view.  All subjects glooming off or darkening
+up to it were shunned by them verbally, and if they found themselves
+entering beneath that shadow, conversation passed to an involuntary
+gesture, more explicit with him, significant of the prohibited, though
+not acknowledging it.
+
+All the stronger was it Victor's purpose, leaping in his fashion to the
+cover of action as an escape from perplexity, to burn and scheme for the
+wedding of their girl--the safe wedding of that dearest, to have her
+protected, secure, with the world warm about her.  And he well knew why
+his Nataly had her look of a closed vault (threatening, if opened, to
+thunder upon Life) when he dropped his further hints.  He chose to call
+it feminine inconsistency, in a woman who walked abroad with a basket of
+marriage-ties for the market on her arm.  He knew that she would soon
+have to speak the dark words to their girl; and the idea of any doing of
+it, caught at his throat.  Reasonably she dreaded the mother's task;
+pardonably indeed.  But it is for the mother to do, with a girl.
+He deputed it lightly to the mother because he could see himself stating
+the facts to a son.  'And, my dear boy, you will from this day draw your
+five thousand a year, and we double it on the day of your marriage,
+living at Lakelands or where you will.'
+
+His desire for his girl's protection by the name of one of our great
+Families, urged him to bind Nataly to the fact, with the argument, that
+it was preferable for the girl to hear their story during her green early
+youth, while she reposed her beautiful blind faith in the discretion of
+her parents, and as an immediate step to the placing of her hand in a
+husband's.  He feared that her mother required schooling to tell the
+story vindicatingly and proudly, in a manner to distinguish instead of
+degrading or temporarily seeming to accept degradation.
+
+The world would weigh on her confession of the weight of the world on her
+child; she would want inciting and strengthening, if one judged of her
+capacity to meet the trial by her recent bearing; and how was he to do
+it!  He could not imagine himself encountering the startled, tremulous,
+nascent intelligence in those pure brown darklashed eyes of Nesta; he
+pitied the poor mother.  Fancifully directing her to say this and that to
+the girl, his tongue ran till it was cut from his heart and left to wag
+dead colourless words.
+
+The prospect of a similar business of exposition, certainly devolving
+upon the father in treaty with the fortunate youth, gripped at his vitals
+a minute, so intense was his pride in appearing woundless and scarless,
+a shining surface, like pure health's, in the sight of men.  Nevertheless
+he skimmed the story, much as a lecturer strikes his wand on the
+prominent places of a map, that is to show us how he arrived at the
+principal point, which we are all agreed to find chiefly interesting.
+This with Victor was the naming of Nesta's bridal endowment.  He rushed
+to it.  'My girl will have ten thousand a year settled on her the day of
+her marriage.'  Choice of living at Lakelands was offered.
+
+It helped him over the unpleasant part of that interview.  At the same
+time, it moved him to a curious contempt of the youth.  He had to
+conjure-up an image of the young man in person, to correct the
+sentiment:--and it remained as a kind of bruise only half cured.
+
+Mr. Dudley Sowerby was not one of the youths whose presence would rectify
+such an abstract estimate of the genus pursuer.  He now came frequently
+of an evening, to practise a duet for flutes with Victor;--a Mercadante,
+honeyed and flowing; too honeyed to suit a style that, as Fenellan
+characterized it to Nataly, went through the music somewhat like an
+inquisitive tourist in a foreign town, conscientious to get to the end of
+the work of pleasure; until the notes had become familiar, when it rather
+resembled a constable's walk along the midnight streets into collision
+with a garlanded roysterer; and the man of order and the man of passion,
+true to the measure though they were, seeming to dissent, almost to
+wrangle, in their different ways of winding out the melody, on to the
+last movement; which was plainly a question between home to the strayed
+reveller's quarters or off to the lockup.  Victor was altogether the
+younger of the two.  But his vehement accompaniment was a tutorship;
+Mr. Sowerby improved; it was admitted by Nesta and mademoiselle that
+he gained a show of feeling; he had learnt that feeling was wanted.
+Passion, he had not a notion of: otherwise he would not be delaying;
+the interview, dramatized by the father of the young bud of womanhood,
+would be taking place, and the entry into Lakelands calculable, for
+Nataly's comfort, as under the aegis of the Cantor earldom.  Gossip flies
+to a wider circle round the members of a great titled family, is
+inaudible; or no longer the diptherian whisper the commonalty hear of the
+commonalty: and so we see the social uses of our aristocracy survive.  We
+do not want the shield of any family; it is the situation that wants it;
+Nataly ought to be awake to the fact.  One blow and we have silenced our
+enemy: Nesta's wedding-day has relieved her parents.
+
+Victor's thoughts upon the instrument for striking that, blow, led him to
+suppose Mr. Sowerby might be meditating on the extent of the young lady's
+fortune.  He talked randomly of money, in a way to shatter Nataly's
+conception of him.  He talked of City affairs at table, as it had been
+his practice to shun the doing; and hit the resounding note on mines,
+which have risen in the market like the crest of a serpent, casting a
+certain spell upon the mercantile understanding.  'Fredi's diamonds from
+her own mine, or what once was--and she still reserves a share,' were to
+be shown to Mr. Sowerby.
+
+Nataly respected the young fellow for not displaying avidity at the
+flourish of the bait, however it might be affecting him; and she fancied
+that he did laboriously, in his way earnestly, study her girl, to sound
+for harmony between them, previous to a wooing.  She was a closer reader
+of social character than Victor; from refraining to run on the broad
+lines which are but faintly illustrative of the individual one in being
+common to all--unless we have hit by chance on an example of the
+downright in roguery or folly or simple goodness.  Mr. Sowerby'g bearing
+to Nesta was hardly warmed by the glitter of diamonds.  His next visit
+showed him livelier in courtliness, brighter, fresher; but that was
+always his way at the commencement of every visit, as if his reflections
+on the foregone had come to a satisfactory conclusion; and the labours of
+the new study of the maiden ensued again in due course to deaden him.
+
+Gentleman he was.  In the recognition of his quality as a man of
+principle and breeding, Nataly was condemned by thoughts of Nesta's
+future to question whether word or act of hers should, if inclination on
+both sides existed, stand between her girl and a true gentleman.  She
+counselled herself, as if the counsel were in requisition, to be passive;
+and so doing, she more acutely than Victor--save in his chance flashes--
+discerned the twist of her very nature caused by their false position.
+And her panacea for ills, the lost little cottage, would not have averted
+it: she would there have had the same coveting desire to name a man of
+breeding, honour, station, for Nesta's husband.  Perhaps in the cottage,
+choosing at leisure, her consent to see the brilliant young creature tied
+to the best of dull men would have been unready, without the girl to push
+it.  For the Hon. Dudley was lamentably her pupil in liveliness; he took
+the second part, as it is painful for a woman with the old-fashioned
+ideas upon the leading of the sexes to behold; resembling in his look the
+deaf, who constantly require to have an observation repeated; resembling
+the most intelligent of animals, which we do not name, and we reprove
+ourselves for seeing likeness.
+
+Yet the likeness or apparent likeness would suggest that we have not so
+much to fear upon the day of the explanation to him.  Some gain is there.
+Shameful thought!  Nataly hastened her mind to gather many instances or
+indications testifying to the sterling substance in young Mr. Sowerby,
+such as a mother would pray for her son-in-law to possess.  She
+discovered herself feeling as the burdened mother, not providently for
+her girl, in the choice of a mate.  The perception was clear, and not the
+less did she continue working at the embroidery of Mr. Sowerby on the
+basis of his excellent moral foundations, all the while hoping, praying,
+that he might not be lured on to the proposal for Nesta.  But her
+subservience to the power of the persuasive will in Victor--which was
+like the rush of a conflagration--compelled her to think realizingly of
+any scheme he allowed her darkly to read.
+
+Opposition to him, was comparable to the stand of blocks of timber before
+flame.  Colney Durance had done her the mischief we take from the
+pessimist when we are overweighted: in darkening the vision of external
+aid from man or circumstance to one who felt herself mastered.  Victor
+could make her treacherous to her wishes, in revolt against them, though
+the heart protested.  His first conquest of her was in her blood, to
+weaken a spirit of resistance.  For the precedent of submission is a
+charm upon the faint-hearted through love: it unwinds, unwills them.
+Nataly resolved fixedly, that there must be a day for speaking; and she
+had her moral sustainment in the resolve; she had also a tormenting
+consciousness of material support in the thought, that the day was not
+present, was possibly distant, might never arrive.  Would Victor's
+release come sooner?  And that was a prospect bearing resemblance to
+hopes of the cure of a malady through a sharp operation.
+
+These were matters going on behind the curtain; as wholly vital to her,
+and with him at times almost as dominant, as the spiritual in memory,
+when flesh has left but its shining track in dust of a soul outwritten;
+and all their talk related to the purchase of furniture, the expeditions
+to Lakelands, music, public affairs, the pardonable foibles of friends
+created to amuse their fellows, operatic heroes and heroines, exhibitions
+of pictures, the sorrows of Crowned Heads, so serviceable ever to mankind
+as an admonition to the ambitious, a salve to the envious!--in fine,
+whatsoever can entertain or affect the most social of couples,
+domestically without a care to appearance.  And so far they partially--
+dramatically--deceived themselves by imposing on the world while they
+talked and duetted; for the purchase of furniture from a flowing purse
+is a cheerful occupation; also a City issuing out of hospital, like this
+poor City of London, inspires good citizens to healthy activity.  But the
+silence upon what they were most bent on, had the sinister effect upon
+Victor, of obscuring his mental hold of the beloved woman, drifting her
+away from him.  In communicating Fenellan's news through the lawyer
+Carling of Mrs. Burman's intentions, he was aware that there was an
+obstacle to his being huggingly genial, even candidly genial with her,
+until he could deal out further news, corroborative and consecutive,
+to show the action of things as progressive.  Fenellan had sunk into his
+usual apathy:--and might plead the impossibility of his moving faster
+than the woman professing to transform herself into, beneficence out of
+malignity;--one could hear him saying the words!  Victor had not seen him
+since last Concert evening, and he deemed it as well to hear the words
+Fenellan's mouth had to say.  He called at an early hour of the Westward
+tidal flow at the Insurance Office looking over the stormy square of the
+first of Seamen.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
+
+After cursory remarks about the business of the Office and his friend's
+contributions to periodical literature, in which he was interested for as
+long as he had assurance that the safe income depending upon official
+duties was not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and fro.
+Fenellan waited for him to lead.
+
+'Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?'
+
+'I have dined with Mr. Carling:--capital claret.'
+
+Emptiness was in the reply.
+
+Victor curbed himself and said: 'By the way, you're not likely to have
+dealings with Blathenoy.  The fellow has a screw to the back of a shifty
+eye; I see it at work to fix the look for business.  I shall sit on the
+Board of my Bank.  One hears things.  He lives in style at Wrensham.  By
+the way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney from Creckholt staying with her.
+You said of little Mabsy--"Here she comes into the room all pink and
+white, like a daisy."  She's the daisy still; reminds us of our girl at
+that age.--So, then, we come to another dead block!'
+
+'Well, no; it's a chemist's shop, if that helps us on,' said Fenellan,
+settling to a new posture in his chair.  'She's there of an afternoon for
+hours.'
+
+'You mean it's she?'
+
+'The lady.  I 'll tell you.  I have it from Carling, worthy man; and
+lawyers can be brought to untruss a point over a cup of claret.  He's a
+bit of a "Mackenzie Man," as old aunts of mine used to say at home--a Man
+of Feeling.  Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted a
+lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it's an exposition of
+positive human nature when they've pulled down our noses to the worst
+parts--if there's a worse where all are useful: but the Realism of the
+dogs is to have us by the nose:--excite it and befoul it, and you're
+fearfully credible!  You don't read that olfactory literature.  However,
+friend Carling is a conciliatory carle.  Three or four days of the week
+the lady, he says, drives to her chemist's, and there she sits in the
+shop; round the corner, as you enter; and sees all Charing in the shop
+looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if
+Carling's picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet
+striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green
+shade over her forehead.  Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders
+of applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind
+of a prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she 'll try it
+herself.  It's a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent's Park
+pretty well every day.'
+
+'Ha! Regent's Park!' exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the
+district and the number of the house, dismal to him.  London buried the
+woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London.  'A
+chemist's shop!  She sits there?'
+
+'Mrs. Burman.  We pass by the shop.'
+
+'She had always a turn for drugs.--Not far from here, did you say?  And
+every day! under a green shade?'
+
+'Dear fellow, don't be suggesting ballads; we'll go now,' said Fenellan.
+'It 's true it's like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.'
+
+He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the
+office.
+
+'You've done nothing?' Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.
+
+'Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.'
+
+'Where did you hear?'
+
+'Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady's chemists.  I called
+the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board Meeting.'
+
+'The Themison?'
+
+'The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much in
+request for it.'
+
+'There's one of your echoes of Colney!' Victor cried.  'One gets dead
+sick of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors.  They don't kill, you know
+very well.  It 's not to their interest to kill.  They may take the
+relish out of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the
+patient living!'
+
+Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through his
+friend.
+
+'The City's mending; it's not the weary widow woman of the day when we
+capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,' he said, as they trod
+the pavement.  'Funny people, the English!  They give you all the
+primeing possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for
+the exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not,
+you're marched off to penitence.  I complain, that they have no
+philosophical appreciation of human nature.'
+
+'We pass the shop?' Victor interrupted him.
+
+'You're in view of it in a minute.  And what a square, for recreative
+dancing!  And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political
+agitation!  And what a country, where from morning to night it's an
+endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence!  Old Colney
+seems right now and then: they 're the offspring of pirates, and they 've
+got the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of
+quarrelling everlastingly over the booty.  I 'd have band-music here for
+a couple of hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the
+East; and that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South
+too.  But just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this
+London of ours, it 's only too sadly true that the people are in the
+first rumble of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives.  Now
+you see the shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.'
+
+Victor looked.  He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
+swelled it, ahemming.  'That shop?' said he.  And presently: 'Fenellan,
+I'm not superstitious, I think.  Now listen; I declare to you, on the day
+of our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked home
+up this way across the square, and I was about to step into that
+identical shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having
+forgotten Nataly's favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I'm
+stating a fact--I distinctly--I 'm sure of the shop--felt myself plucked
+back by the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a
+foot backward to keep your equilibrium.'
+
+So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item
+for the colouring of history.
+
+He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in
+amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as
+being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish
+tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder's
+experience.
+
+Fenellan smiled indulgently.  'Queer things happen.  I recollect reading
+in my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where
+he was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at
+midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight of
+the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice, when at
+his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of
+undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform,
+not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted twice;
+and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and he jumped
+up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them providentially over
+the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into the boat awaiting
+them, and had them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon of
+gratitude for the special deliverance.  There was a Warning!  and it
+might well be called, as he called it, from within.  We're cared for,
+never doubt.  Aide-toi.  Be ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity,
+or you'll not stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the
+burnt.  That sounds like the moral.'
+
+'She could have seen me,' Victor threw out an irritable suggestion.  The
+idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.
+
+'Scarcely likely.  I'm told she sits looking on her lap, under the
+beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
+mixture that strikes her fancy.  It's possible to do more suicidal things
+than sit the afternoons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get
+their different passports to Orcus.'
+
+Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
+chemical wash.  The woman might be inside there now!  She might have seen
+his figure in the shop-mirror!  And she there!  The wonder of it all
+seemed to be, that his private history was not walking the streets.
+The thinness of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day's
+immunity: because this woman would live in London, in order to have her
+choice of a central chemist's shop, where she could feed a ghastly
+imagination on the various recipes .  .  .  and while it would have been
+so much healthier for her to be living in a recess of the country!
+
+He muttered: 'Diseases--drugs!'
+
+Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
+woman going.
+
+'And deadly spite.'  That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
+conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.
+
+In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
+the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.
+
+A little further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He confessed to himself, that
+latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous in
+thought, as never before.  He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
+tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
+Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving.  He accused her of dragging
+him down to humanity's lowest.
+
+But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.
+
+Her station in the chemist's shop he passed almost daily, appeared to him
+as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a short
+drive from the house in Regent's Park; but having shaken-off that house,
+he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it.  The woman certainly
+had a power.
+
+He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his capacity for winning
+men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of his
+energies: men and, individually, women.  Individually, the women were to
+be counted on as well; warm supporters.
+
+It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them
+collectively.  Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them.  Glancing at
+congregated women, he had a chill.  The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly
+judicial assembly: that is, the phantom of the offended collective woman:
+that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of civilized
+life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the tolerable, the
+legal, and banish the rebellious: these maintained an aspect of the stand
+against him.
+
+Did Nataly read the case: namely, that the crowned collective woman is
+not to be subdued?  And what are we to say of the indefinite but forcible
+Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
+Nataly!
+
+Victor's novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
+to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight.  Not
+many of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that
+index: nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure of
+value left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides.  The
+passing by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to sit
+beneath her green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a henbane-visage!--
+had precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract verity:
+and it opens on to new realms, which are a new world to the practical
+mind.  But he made no advance.  He stopped in a fever of sensibility,
+to contemplate the powerful formless vapour rolling from a source that
+was nothing other than yonder weak lonely woman.
+
+In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school of
+its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums done
+on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the
+creditor on the defaulter.  Debtors are always paying like those who are
+guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth, they have
+made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in soul; and
+the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete burden is
+undischarged.  You know the Liar; you must have seen him diminishing,
+until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to humanity's
+preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on
+our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of things, he must
+from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive nimbleness, up to
+the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it again.  There is a
+repentance that does reconstitute!  It may help to the traceing to
+springs of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out of the wood.
+
+Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every debt
+with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt apologies for
+a short brush of his temper.  Nay, he had such a conscience for the
+smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a
+friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge, softened
+his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once.  Although this
+man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature which drives to
+unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen at its beating
+after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for the reverse of
+lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship.  So social a man
+could not otherwise incline.  But when it came to the examination of
+accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of physical revulsion,
+loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out of Court.  To men,
+it was impossible for him to speak the torments of those days of the
+monstrous alliance.  The heavens were cognizant.  He pleaded his case
+in their accustomed hearing:--a youngster tempted by wealth, attracted,
+besought, snared, revolted, etc.  And Mrs. Burman, when roused to
+jealousy, had shown it by teazing him for a confession of his admiration
+of splendid points in the beautiful Nataly, the priceless fair woman
+living under their roof, a contrast of very life, with the corpse and
+shroud; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her breath about
+him, her voice incessantly upon every chord of his being!
+
+He pleaded successfully.  But the silence following the verdict was
+heavy; the silence contained an unheard thunder.  It was the sound, as
+when out of Court the public is dissatisfied with a verdict.  Are we
+expected to commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
+public?--Imagine it for a moment as done.  Men are ours at a word--or at
+least a word of invitation.  Women we woo; fluent smooth versions of our
+tortures, mixed with permissible courtship, win the individual woman.
+And that unreasoning collective woman, icy, deadly, condemns the poor
+racked wretch who so much as remembers them!  She is the enemy of
+Nature.--Tell us how?  She is the slave of existing conventions.--
+And from what cause?  She is the artificial production of a state that
+exalts her so long as she sacrifices daily and hourly to the artificial.
+
+Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman--the foe of Nature: who, with her
+arts and gold lures, has now possession of the Law (the brass idol
+worshipped by the collective) to drive Nature into desolation.
+
+He placed himself to the right of Mrs. Burman, for the world to behold
+the couple: and he lent the world a sigh of disgust.
+
+What he could not do, as in other matters he did, was to rise above the
+situation, in a splendid survey and rapid view of the means of reversing
+it.  He was too social to be a captain of the socially insurgent;
+imagination expired.
+
+But having a courageous Nataly to second him!--how then?  It was the
+succour needed.  Then he would have been ready to teach the world that
+Nature--honest Nature--is more to be prized than Convention: a new Era
+might begin.
+
+The thought was tonic for an instant and illuminated him springingly.  It
+sank, excused for the flaccidity by Nataly's want of common adventurous
+daring.  She had not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture
+from a flowing purse with a heavy heart--unfeminine, one might say; she
+preferred to live obscurely; she did not, one had to think--but it was
+unjust: and yet the accusation, that she did not cheerfully make a strain
+and spurt on behalf of her child, pressed to be repeated.
+
+These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the verberant
+twang of a musical instrument that has had a smart blow, and wails away
+independent of the player's cunning hand.  He would have said, that he
+was more his natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to make
+him praise and uplift his beloved: mightily would it have astonished him
+to contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he
+invoked.  But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she
+in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes.  Men call
+on her for their defence, as a favourable witness: she is a note of their
+rhetoric.  They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not, as
+women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour.  It is not an effort at
+epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she most supports.
+
+An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.
+
+'How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians!  Well, now, the Germans
+have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German
+emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner
+has done.  He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod's Romeo
+et Juliette--and we don't gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for the
+melody gone; think of the little shepherd's pipeing in Mireille; and
+there's another in Sapho-delicious.  I held out against Wagner as long as
+I could.  The Italians don't much more than Wagnerize in exchange for the
+loss of melody.  They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese,
+Campagnole.  The Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
+master.  Aida and Otello, no.  I confess to a weakness for the old
+barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade.  Aren't you seduced by
+cadences?  Never mind Wagner's tap of his paedagogue's baton--a cadence
+catches me still.  Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps!  There's a
+march in Verdi's Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I'm in military step
+when I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera.  Fredi
+takes little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night.  Enough to make us
+old ones envious!  You remember your first Opera, Fenellan?  Sonnambula,
+with me.  I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if
+you like--showing all that's noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
+describe its effect on me.  I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for a
+year after.  The Huguenots to-night.  Not the best suited for little
+Mabsy; but she'll catch at the Rataplan.  Capital Opera; we used to think
+it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the
+Meistersinger.'
+
+Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
+the Huguenots.  That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him.  He
+drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying.  The return of a lively
+disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the yoke
+of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist's shop; save
+that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the picture; she
+threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him through his
+nostrils.  He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need for it;
+singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour abreast with
+Armandine's kitchen-clock.  Fenellan proposed a glass of sherry and
+bitters at his Club over the way.  He had forgotten a shower of black-
+balls (attributable to the conjurations of old Ate) on a certain past
+day.  Without word of refusal, Victor entered a wine-merchant's office,
+where he was unknown, and stating his wish for bitters and dry sherry,
+presently received the glass, drank, nodded to the administering clerk,
+named the person whom he had obliged and refreshed, and passed out,
+remarking to Fenellan: 'Colney on Clubs!  he's right; they're the
+mediaeval in modern times, our Baron's castles, minus the Baron; dead
+against public life and social duties.  Business excuses my City Clubs;
+but I shall take my name off my Club up West.'
+
+'More like monasteries, with a Committee for Abbot, and Whist for the
+services,' Fenellan said.  'Or tabernacles for the Chosen, and
+Grangousier playing Divinity behind the veil.  Well, they're social.'
+
+'Sectionally social, means anything but social, my friend.  However--and
+the monastery had a bell for the wanderer!  Say, I'm penniless or
+poundless, up and down this walled desert of a street, I feel, I must
+feel, these palaces--if we're Christian, not Jews: not that the Jews
+are uncharitable; they set an: example, in fact .  .  .  .  '
+
+He rambled, amusingly to the complacent hearing of Fenellan, who thought
+of his pursuit of wealth and grand expenditure.
+
+Victor talked as a man having his mind at leaps beyond the subject.
+He was nearing to the Idea he had seized and lost on London Bridge.
+
+The desire for some good news wherewith to inspirit Nataly, withdrew him
+from his ineffectual chase.  He had nought to deliver; on the contrary,
+a meditation concerning her comfort pledged him to concealment which was
+the no step, or passive state, most abhorrent to him.
+
+He snatched at the name of Themison.
+
+With Dr. Themison fast in his grasp, there was a report of progress to be
+made to Nataly; and not at all an empty report.
+
+Themison, then: he leaned on Themison.  The woman's doctor should have an
+influence approaching to authority with her.
+
+Land-values in the developing Colonies, formed his theme of discourse to
+Fenellan: let Banks beware.
+
+Fenellan saw him shudder and rub the back of his head.  'Feel the wind?'
+he said.
+
+Victor answered him with that humane thrill of the deep tones, which at
+times he had: 'No: don't be alarmed; I feel the devil.  If one has wealth
+and a desperate wish, he will speak.  All he does, is to make me more
+charitable to those who give way to him.  I believe in a devil.'
+
+'Horns and tail?'
+
+'Bait and hook.'
+
+'I haven't wealth, and I wish only for dinner,' Fenellan said.
+
+'You know that Armandine is never two minutes late.  By the way, you
+haven't wealth--you have me.'
+
+'And I thank God for you!' said Fenellan, acutely reminiscent of his
+having marked the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Burman, the Rev. Groseman
+Buttermore, as a man who might be useful to his friend.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
+
+A fortnight later, an extremely disconcerting circumstance occurred:
+Armandine was ten minutes behind the hour with her dinner.  But the
+surprise and stupefaction expressed by Victor, after glances at his
+watch, were not so profound as Fenellan's, on finding himself exchangeing
+the bow with a gentleman bearing the name of Dr. Themison.  His friend's
+rapidity in pushing the combinations he conceived, was known: Fenellan's
+wonder was not so much that Victor had astonished him again, as that he
+should be called upon again to wonder at his astonishment.  He did; and
+he observed the doctor and Victor and Nataly: aided by dropping remarks.
+Before the evening was over, he gathered enough of the facts, and had to
+speculate only on the designs.  Dr. Themison had received a visit from
+the husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor concerning her state of health.  At an
+interview with the lady, laughter greeted him; he was confused by her
+denial of the imputation of a single ailment: but she, to recompose him,
+let it be understood, that she was anxious about her husband's condition,
+he being certainly overworked; and the husband's visit passed for a
+device on the part of the wife.  She admitted a willingness to try a
+change of air, if it was deemed good for her husband.  Change of air was
+prescribed to each for both.  'Why not drive to Paris?' the doctor said,
+and Victor was taken with the phrase.
+
+He told Fenellan at night that Mrs. Burman, he had heard, was by the sea,
+on the South coast.  Which of her maladies might be in the ascendant,
+he did not know.  He knew little.  He fancied that Dr. Themison was
+unsuspicious of the existence of a relationship between him and Mrs.
+Burman: and Fenellan opined, that there had been no communication upon
+private affairs.  What, then, was the object in going to Dr. Themison?
+He treated her body merely; whereas the Rev. Groseman Buttermore could
+be expected to impose upon her conduct.  Fenellan appreciated his own
+discernment of the superior uses to which a spiritual adviser may be put,
+and he too agreeably flattered himself for the corrective reflection to
+ensue, that he had not done anything.  It disposed him to think a happy
+passivity more sagacious than a restless activity.  We should let Fortune
+perform her part at the wheel in working out her ends, should we not?--
+for, ten to one, nine times out of ten we are thwarting her if we stretch
+out a hand.  And with the range of enjoyments possessed by Victor, why
+this unceasing restlessness?  Why, when we are not near drowning, catch
+at apparent straws, which may be instruments having sharp edges?
+Themison, as Mrs. Burman's medical man, might tell the lady tales
+that would irritate her bag of venom.
+
+Rarely though Fenellan was the critic on his friend, the shadow cast over
+his negligent hedonism by Victor's boiling pressure, drove him into the
+seat of judgement.  As a consequence, he was rather a dull table-guest in
+the presence of Dr. Themison, whom their host had pricked to anticipate
+high entertainment from him.  He did nothing to bridge the crevasse and
+warm the glacier air at table when the doctor, anecdotal intentionally to
+draw him out, related a decorous but pungent story of one fair member of
+a sweet new sisterhood in agitation against the fixed establishment of
+our chain-mail marriage-tie.  An anecdote of immediate diversion was
+wanted, expected: and Fenellan sat stupidly speculating upon whether the
+doctor knew of a cupboard locked.  So that Dr. Themison was carried on by
+Lady Grace Halley's humourous enthusiasm for the subject to dilate and
+discuss and specify, all in the irony of a judicial leaning to the side
+of the single-minded social adventurers, under an assumed accord with his
+audience; concluding: 'So there's an end of Divorce.'
+
+'By the trick of multiplication,' Fenellan, now reassured, was content to
+say.  And that did not extinguish the cracker of a theme; handled very
+carefully, as a thing of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young
+women being present.
+
+Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an alertness shown by Mr.
+Sowerby to second her by crossing the dialogue.  As regarded her personal
+feelings, she was hardened, so long as the curtains were about her to
+keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition upon one of its
+culprits.  But her anxiety was vigilant to guard her girl from an
+infusion of any of the dread facts of life not coming through the
+mother's lips: and she was a woman having the feminine mind's pudency
+in that direction, which does not consent to the revealing of much.
+Here was the mother's dilemma: her girl--Victor's girl, as she had to
+think in this instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth,
+seemed, and might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off the
+table of knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific heights of
+surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful healthiness brought
+her down to grass and flowers.  She had once or twice received the
+electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts
+in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the
+circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a
+newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities:
+and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how
+witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent creature
+shocked her sensibility.  She foresaw the need to such a flameful soul,
+as bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very princeliest of men in
+gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide.  And the provident mother
+knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his wife.
+
+Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
+imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
+perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
+nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
+to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
+before the public.  Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was
+her father's child.
+
+At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
+so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
+maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
+simplicity.  If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
+partook of the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian independence likened her
+somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl.  Her
+high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
+carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
+set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
+various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
+praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
+tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on the cheeks, or assumptions
+of the frigid mask, or indicated reserve-cajoleries.  Neither ignorantly
+nor advisedly did she play on these or other bewitching strings of her
+sex, after the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast of
+Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
+ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded meet an artful serenader,
+that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked by their performances, and
+knows anthropologically the nature behind the devious show; a sciential
+rascal; as little to be excluded from our modern circles as Eve's own old
+deuce from Eden's garden whereupon, opportunity inviting, both the fool
+and the cunning, the pure donkey princess of insular eulogy, and the sham
+one, are in a perilous pass.
+
+Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be ignorant utterly amid
+a world where the hints are hourly scattering seed of the inklings; when
+vileness is not at work up and down our thoroughfares, proclaiming its
+existence with tableau and trumpet.  Nataly encountered her girl's
+questions, much as one seeks to quiet an enemy.  The questions had soon
+ceased.  Excepting repulsive and rejected details, there is little to be
+learnt when a little is known: in populous communities, density only will
+keep the little out.  Only stupidity will suppose that it can be done for
+the livelier young.  English mothers forethoughtful for their girls, have
+to take choice of how to do battle with a rough-and-tumble Old England,
+that lumbers bumping along, craving the precious things, which can be had
+but in semblance under the conditions allowed by laziness to subsist, and
+so curst of its shifty inconsequence as to worship in the concrete an
+hypocrisy it abhors in the abstract.  Nataly could smuggle or confiscate
+here and there a newspaper; she could not interdict or withhold every one
+of them, from a girl ardent to be in the race on all topics of popular
+interest: and the newspapers are occasionally naked savages; the streets
+are imperfectly garmented even by day; and we have our stumbling social
+anecdotist, our spot-mouthed young man, our eminently silly woman; our
+slippery one; our slimy one, the Rahab of Society; not to speak of Mary
+the maid and the footman William.  A vigilant mother has to contend with
+these and the like in an increasing degree.  How best?
+
+There is a method: one that Colney Durance advocated.  The girl's
+intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it.  Since, as he argued,
+we cannot keep the poisonous matter out, mothers should prepare and
+strengthen young women for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil,
+baring the world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they
+have to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
+collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our life in
+youth:--this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine disease of the
+time, common to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
+the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.
+
+Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for English
+hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences.  Besides he was a
+bachelor; therefore but a theorist.  And his illustrations of his theory
+were grotesque; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to consume,
+in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man.  The satirist
+too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher.  Nataly had
+excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.
+
+One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at the thought,
+that the day drew near for her speaking fully to Nesta; when, between
+what she then said and what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike
+the girl and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with them
+then;--in softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it seemed
+painfully possible to be sowing in the girl's mind something like the
+reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing the way to a rebelliousness
+partly or wholly similar to her own.  But Nataly's chief and her
+appeasing reason for pursuing the conventional system with this
+exceptional young creature, referred to the sentiments on that subject
+of the kind of young man whom a mother elects from among those present
+and eligible, as perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of
+good promise in the moral department.  She had Mr. Dudley Sowerby under
+view; far from the man of her choice and still the practice of decorum,
+discretion, a pardonable fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any
+forecast of the behaviour of young men or may trust the faces they see,
+to, promise a future stability in the husband.  Assuredly a Dudley
+Sowerby would be immensely startled to find in his bride a young woman
+more than babily aware of the existence of one particular form of
+naughtiness on earth.
+
+Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right education of the
+young of the sex.  Repression and mystery, he considered wholesome for
+girls; and he considered the enlightening of them--to some extent--a
+prudential measure for their defence; and premature instruction is a
+fire-water to their wild-in-woods understanding; and histrionic innocence
+is no doubt the bloom on corruption; also the facts of current human
+life, in the crude of the reports or the cooked of the sermon in the
+newspapers, are a noxious diet for our daughters; whom nevertheless we
+cannot hope to be feeding always on milk: and there is a time when their
+adorable pretty ignorance, if credibly it exists out of noodledom, is
+harmful:--but how beautiful the shining simplicity of our dear young
+English girls!  He was one of the many men to whose minds women come in
+pictures and are accepted much as they paint themselves.  Like his
+numerous fellows, too, he required a conflict with them, and a worsting
+at it, to be taught, that they are not the mere live stock we scheme to
+dispose of for their good: unless Love should interpose, he would have
+exclaimed.  He broke from his fellows in his holy horror of a father's
+running counter to love.  Nesta had only to say, that she loved another,
+for Dudley Sowerby to be withdrawn into the background of aspirants.
+But love was unknown to the girl.
+
+Outwardly, the plan of the Drive to Paris had the look of Victor's
+traditional hospitality.  Nataly smiled at her incorrigibly lagging
+intelligence of him, on hearing that he had invited a company: 'Lady
+Grace, for gaiety; Peridon and Catkin, fiddles; Dudley Sowerby and
+myself, flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by the dear
+old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage, as in old times; towers
+of Dieppe in the morning-light; and the lovely road to the capital!  Just
+three days in Paris, and home by any of the other routes.  It's the drive
+we want.  Boredom in wet weather, we defy; we have our Concert--an hour
+at night and we're sure of sleep.'  It had a sweet simple air, befitting
+him; as when in bygone days they travelled with the joy of children.
+For travelling shook Nataly out of her troubles and gave her something of
+the child's inheritance of the wisdom of life--the living ever so little
+ahead of ourselves; about as far as the fox in view of the hunt.  That is
+the soul of us out for novelty, devouring as it runs, an endless feast;
+and the body is eagerly after it, recording the pleasures, a daily chase.
+Remembrance of them is almost a renewal, anticipation a revival.  She
+enraptured Victor with glimpses of the domestic fun she had ceased to
+show sign of since the revelation of Lakelands.  Her only regret was on
+account of the exclusion of Colney Durance from the party, because of
+happy memories associating him with the Seine-land, and also that his
+bilious criticism of his countrymen was moderated by a trip to the
+Continent.  Fenellan reported Colney to be 'busy in the act of distilling
+one of his Prussic acid essays.'  Fenellan would have jumped to go.  He
+informed Victor, as a probe, that the business of the Life Insurance was
+at periods 'fearfully necrological!  Inexplicably, he was not invited.
+Did it mean, that he was growing dull?  He looked inside instead of out,
+and lost the clue.
+
+His behaviour on the evening of the departure showed plainly what would
+have befallen Mr. Sowerby on the expedition, had not he as well as Colney
+been excluded.  Two carriages and a cab conveyed the excursionists, as
+they merrily called themselves, to the terminus.  They were Victor's
+guests; they had no trouble, no expense, none of the nipper reckonings
+which dog our pleasures; the state of pure bliss.  Fenellan's enviousness
+drove him at the Rev. Mr. Barmby until the latter jumped to the seat
+beside Nesta in her carriage, Mademoiselle de Seilles and Mr. Sowerby
+facing them.  Lady Grace Halley, in the carriage behind, heard Nesta's
+laugh; which Mr. Barmby had thought vacuous, beseeming little girls, that
+laugh at nothings.  She questioned Fenellan.
+
+'Oh,' said he, 'I merely mentioned that the Rev. gentleman carries his
+musical instrument at the bottom of his trunk.'
+
+She smiled: 'And who are in the cab?'
+
+'Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and Catkin.  Those two
+would have writhed like head and tail of a worm, at a division on the way
+to the station.  Point a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through the
+body.  They're a fabulous couple.'
+
+Victor cut him short.  'I deny that those two are absurd.'
+
+'And Catkin's toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon.'
+
+Nataly strongly denied it.  Peridon and Catkin pertained to their genial
+picture of the dear sweet nest in life; a dale never traversed by the
+withering breath they dreaded.
+
+Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his way as Colney,
+fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, with a
+pitchfork's exaltation of the sacred attachment of the divergently
+meritorious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles in
+the principles of each.  The pair were offending the amatory corner in
+the generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly
+protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities, except
+by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of Miss
+Graves.  Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla
+Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge.  She wondered at
+having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her
+repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among
+those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed
+now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the
+Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
+are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
+tribulation-bell.  Fenellan's graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman
+seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons--abominations of
+emptiness--to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the one
+most wretched light is Inebriation's nose; and of the vegetarian
+violoncello's horror at his vision of the long procession of the flocks
+and herds into his lady's melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and delighted
+her antipathy.  She was amused to transports at the station, on hearing
+Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark: 'No, I carry no
+instrument.'  The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not
+forgotten when it sounded.
+
+Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just
+under Victor's ear: 'Where are those two?'
+
+'Bid me select the couple,' said he.
+
+She rejoined: 'Silly man'; and sleepily gave him her hand for good night,
+and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued junction by
+saying more than he intended: 'If they come to an understanding!'
+
+'Plain enough on one side.'
+
+'You think it suitable?'
+
+'Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.'  'This is really
+my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.'
+
+'Go on.'
+
+'How?'
+
+'Number your loves.  It would tax your arithmetic.'
+
+'I can hate.'
+
+'Not me?'
+
+Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers declared it;
+and they broke the link, neither of them sensibly hurt; though a leaf
+or two of the ingenuities, which were her thoughts, turned over in the
+phantasies of the lady; and the gentleman was taught to feel that a never
+so slightly lengthened compression of the hand female shoots within us
+both straight and far and round the corners.  There you have Nature, if
+you want her naked in her elements, for a text.  He loved his Nataly
+truly, even fervently, after the twenty years of union; he looked about
+at no other woman; it happened only that the touch of one, the chance
+warm touch, put to motion the blind forces of our mother so remarkably
+surcharging him.  But it was without kindling.  The lady, the much cooler
+person, did nurse a bit of flame.  She had a whimsical liking for the man
+who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries; and it became a
+fascination, by extreme contrast, at the reminder of his adventurous
+enterprises in progress while he could so childishly enjoy.  Women who
+dance with the warrior-winner of battles, and hear him talk his ball-room
+trifles to amuse, have similarly a smell of gunpowder to intoxicate them.
+
+For him, a turn on the deck brought him into new skies.  Nataly lay in
+the cabin.  She used to be where Lady Grace was lying.  A sort of
+pleadable, transparent, harmless hallucination of the renewal of old
+service induced him to refresh and settle the fair semi-slumberer's
+pillow, and fix the tarpaulin over her silks and wraps; and bend his head
+to the soft mouth murmuring thanks.  The women who can dare the nuit
+blanche, and under stars; and have a taste for holiday larks after their
+thirtieth, are rare; they are precious.  Nataly nevertheless was approved
+for guarding her throat from the nightwind.  And a softer southerly
+breath never crossed Channel!  The very breeze he had wished for!  Luck
+was with him.
+
+Nesta sat by the rails of the vessel beside her Louise.  Mr. Sowerby in
+passing, exchanged a description of printed agreement with her, upon the
+beauty of the night--a good neutral topic for the encounter of the sexes
+not that he wanted it neutral; it furnished him with a vocabulary.  Once
+he perceptibly washed his hands of dutiful politeness, in addressing
+Mademoiselle de Seilles, likewise upon the beauty of the night; and the
+French lady, thinking--too conclusively from the breath on the glass at
+the moment, as it is the Gallic habit--that if her dear Nesta must
+espouse one of the uninteresting creatures called men in her native land,
+it might as well be this as another, agreed that the night was very
+beautiful.
+
+'He speaks grammatical French,' Nesta commented on his achievement.
+'He contrives in his walking not to wet his boots,' mademoiselle
+rejoined.
+
+Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders, despite an
+inferior pretension to accent.  He burned to be near these ladies, and
+he passed them but once.  His enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was
+notorious.  Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her
+demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for the man
+who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen, or eminently she among
+them, must have their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they
+can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales.  And say, that she is
+uprooted;--he does but roll a log.  Mr. Peridon's efforts to perfect
+himself in the French tongue touched her.
+
+A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate wink of
+the eye of light.  Mr. Barmby, an exile from the ladies by reason of an
+addiction to tobacco, quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first
+greying.  Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for
+the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs.
+The gentle waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an
+interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily
+grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for
+refuge on any far fisher-sail.
+
+Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed.
+The girl's cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born.
+They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was a
+languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.
+Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair
+were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and
+securest of slumbers.
+
+Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly.  Both the ladies were in their oblivion;
+the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably framed, elevating
+to behold; a reproach to the reminiscence of pipes.  He was near; and
+quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him.  Her look was grave,
+straight, uninquiring, soon accurately perusing; an arrow of Artemis for
+penetration.  He went by, with the sound in the throat of a startled
+bush-bird taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as if that
+young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof.  Man could not be more
+guiltless, yet her look had perturbed him; nails conspired; in his
+vexation, he execrated tobacco.  And ask not why, where reason never was.
+
+Nesta woke babbling on the subject she had relinquished for sleep.
+Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her hair and hood during their
+silvery French chimes.
+
+Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with encomiums, after
+they had been observing every variation in it.  He spoke happily of the
+pleasant passage, and of the agreeable night; particularly of the
+excellent idea of the expedition by this long route at night; the
+prospect of which had disfigured him with his grimace of speculation--
+apparently a sourness that did not exist.  Nesta had a singular notion,
+coming of a girl's mingled observation and intuition, that the
+impressions upon this gentleman were in arrear, did not strike him till
+late.  Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she remembered to
+have noticed the same in many small things.  And it was a pointed
+perception.
+
+Victor sent his girl down to Nataly, with a summons to hurry up and see
+sunlight over the waters.  Nataly came; she looked, and the outer wakened
+the inner, she let the light look in on her, her old feelings danced to
+her eyes like a, string of bubbles in ascent.  'Victor, Victor, it seems
+only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back--was it?--and in May,
+and saw the shoal of porpoises, and five minutes after, Dieppe in view.
+Dear French people!  I share your love for France.'
+
+'Home of our holidays!--the "drives"; and they may be the happiest.
+And fifty minutes later we were off the harbour; and Natata landed, a
+stranger; and at night she was the heroine of the town.'
+
+Victor turned to a stately gentleman and passed his name to Nataly: 'Sir
+Rodwell Balchington, a neighbour of Lakelands!  She understood that Lady
+Grace Halley was acquainted with Sir Rodwell:--hence this dash of brine
+to her lips while she was drinking of happy memories, and Victor
+evidently was pluming himself upon his usual luck in the fortuitous
+encounter with an influential neighbour of Lakelands.  He told Sir
+Rodwell the story of how they had met in the salle a manger of the hotel
+the impresario of a Concert in the town, who had in his hand the doctor's
+certificate of the incapacity of the chief cantatrice to appear, and
+waved it, within a step of suicide.  'Well, to be brief, my wife--"noble
+dame Anglaise," as the man announced her on the Concert platform,
+undertook one of the songs, and sang another of her own-pure contralto
+voice, as you will say; with the result that there was a perfect tumult
+of enthusiasm.  Next day, the waiters of the hotel presented her with a
+bouquet of Spring flowers, white, and central violets.  It was in the
+Paris papers, under the heading: Une amie d'outre Manche--I think that
+was it?' he asked Nataly.
+
+'I forget,' said she.
+
+He glanced at her: a cloud had risen.  He rallied her, spoke of the old
+Norman silver cross which the manager of the Concert had sent, humbly
+imploring her to accept the small memento of his gratitude.  She nodded
+an excellent artificial brightness.
+
+And there was the coast of France under young sunlight over the waters.
+Once more her oft-petitioning wish through the years, that she had
+entered the ranks of professional singers, upon whom the moral scrutiny
+is not so microscopic, invaded her, resembling a tide-swell into rock-
+caves, which have been filled before and left to emptiness, and will be
+left to emptiness again.  Nataly had the intimation visiting us when,
+in a decline of physical power, the mind's ready vivacity to conjure
+illusions forsakes us; and it was, of a wall ahead, and a force impelling
+her against it, and no hope of deviation.  And this is the featureless
+thing, Destiny; not without eyes, if we have a conscience to throw them
+into it to look at us.
+
+Counsel to her to live in the hour, came, as upon others on the vessel,
+from an active breath of the salt prompting to healthy hunger; and hardly
+less from the splendour of the low full sunlight on the waters, the
+skimming and dancing of the thousands of golden shells away from under
+the globe of fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A PATRIOT ABROAD
+
+Nine days after his master's departure, Daniel Skepsey, a man of some
+renown of late, as a subject of reports and comments in the newspapers,
+obtained a passport, for the identification, if need were, of his missing
+or misapprehended person in a foreign country, of the language of which
+three unpronounceable words were knocking about his head to render the
+thought of the passport a staff of safety; and on the morning that
+followed he was at speed through Normandy, to meet his master rounding
+homeward from Paris, at a town not to be spoken as it is written, by
+reason of the custom of the good people of the country, with whom we
+would fain live on neighbourly terms:--yes, and they had proof of it,
+not so very many years back, when they were enduring the worst which can
+befall us--though Mr. Durance, to whom he was indebted for the writing of
+the place of his destination large on a card, and the wording of the
+French sound beside it, besides the jotting down of trains and the
+station for the change of railways, Mr. Durance could say, that the
+active form of our sympathy consisted in the pouring of cheeses upon
+them when they were prostrate and unable to resist!
+
+A kind gentleman, Mr. Durance, as Daniel Skepsey had recent cause to
+know, but often exceedingly dark; not so patriotic as desireable, it was
+to be feared; and yet, strangely indeed, Mr. Durance had said cogent
+things on the art of boxing and on manly exercises, and he hoped--he was
+emphatic in saying he hoped--we should be regenerated.  He must have
+meant, that boxing--on a grand scale would contribute to it.  He said,
+that a blow now and then was wholesome for us all.  He recommended a
+monthly private whipping for old gentlemen who decline the use of the
+gloves, to disperse their humours; not excluding Judges and Magistrates:
+he could hardly be in earnest.  He spoke in a clergyman's voice, and said
+it would be payment of good assurance money, beneficial to their souls:
+he seemed to mean it.  He said, that old gentlemen were bottled vapours,
+and it was good for them to uncork them periodically.  He said, they
+should be excused half the strokes if they danced nightly--they resented
+motion.  He seemed sadly wanting in veneration.
+
+But he might not positively intend what he said.  Skepsey could overlook
+everything he said, except the girding at England.  For where is a braver
+people, notwithstanding appearances!  Skepsey knew of dozens of gallant
+bruisers, ready for the cry to strip to the belt; worthy, with a little
+public encouragement, to rank beside their grandfathers of the Ring, in
+the brilliant times when royalty and nobility countenanced the manly art,
+our nursery of heroes, and there was not the existing unhappy division of
+classes.  He still trusted to convince Mr. Durance, by means of argument
+and happy instances, historical and immediate, that the English may
+justly consider themselves the elect of nations, for reasons better than
+their accumulation of the piles of gold-better than 'usurers' reasons,'
+as Mr. Durance called them.  Much that Mr. Durance had said at intervals
+was, although remembered almost to the letter of the phrase, beyond his
+comprehension, and he put it aside, with penitent blinking at his
+deficiency.
+
+All the while, he was hearing a rattle of voluble tongues around him, and
+a shout of stations, intelligible as a wash of pebbles, and blocks in a
+torrent.  Generally the men slouched when they were not running.  At
+Dieppe he had noticed muscular fellows; he admitted them to be nimbler on
+the legs than ours; and that may count both ways, he consoled a patriotic
+vanity by thinking; instantly rebuking the thought; for he had read
+chapters of Military History.  He sat eyeing the front row of figures in
+his third-class carriage, musing on the kind of soldiers we might, heaven
+designing it, have to face, and how to beat them; until he gazed on
+Rouen, knowing by the size of it and by what Mr. Durance had informed him
+of the city on the river, that it must be the very city of Rouen, not so
+many years back a violated place, at the mercy of a foreign foe.  Strong
+pity laid hold of Skepsey.  He fortified the heights for defence, but saw
+at a glance that it was the city for modern artillery to command, crush
+and enter.  He lost idea of these afflicted people as foes, merely
+complaining of their attacks on England, and their menaces in their
+Journals and pamphlets; and he renounced certain views of the country to
+be marched over on the road by this route to Paris, for the dictation of
+terms of peace at the gates of the French capital, sparing them the
+shameful entry; and this after the rout of their attempt at an invasion
+of the Island!
+
+A man opposite him was looking amicably on his lively grey eyes.  Skepsey
+handed a card from his pocket.  The man perused it, and crying: 'Dreux?'
+waved out of the carriage-window at a westerly distance, naming Rouen as
+not the place, not at all, totally other.  Thus we are taught, that a
+foreign General, ignorant of the language, must confine himself to
+defensive operations at home; he would be a child in the hands of the
+commonest man he meets.  Brilliant with thanks in signs, Skepsey drew
+from his friend a course of instruction in French names, for our
+necessities on a line of march.  The roads to Great Britain's metropolis,
+and the supplies of forage and provision at every stage of a march on
+London, are marked in the military offices of these people; and that,
+with their barking Journals, is a piece of knowledge to justify a
+belligerent return for it.  Only we pray to be let live peacefully.
+
+Fervently we pray it when this good man, a total stranger to us, conducts
+an ignorant foreigner from one station to another through the streets of
+Rouen, after a short stoppage at the buffet and assistance in the
+identification of coins; then, lifting his cap to us, retires.
+
+And why be dealing wounds and death?  It is a more blessed thing to keep
+the Commandments.  But how is it possible to keep the Commandments if you
+have a vexatious wife?
+
+Martha Skepsey had given him a son to show the hereditary energy in his
+crying and coughing; and it was owing, he could plead, to her habits and
+her tongue, that he sometimes, that he might avoid the doing of worse--
+for she wanted correction and was improved by it--courted the excitement
+of a short exhibition of skill, man to man, on publicans' first floors.
+He could have told the magistrates so, in part apology for the
+circumstances dragging him the other day, so recently, before his
+Worship; and he might have told it, if he had not remembered Captain
+Dartrey Fenellan's words about treating women chivalrously which was
+interpreted by Skepsey as correcting them, when called upon to do it,
+but never exposing them only, if allowed to account for the circumstances
+pushing us into the newspapers, we should not present so guilty a look
+before the public.
+
+Furthermore, as to how far it is the duty of a man to serve his master,
+there is likewise question: whether is he, while receiving reproof and
+punishment for excess of zeal in the service of his master, not to
+mention the welfare of the country, morally--without establishing it as a
+principle--exonerated?  Miss Graves might be asked save that one would
+not voluntarily trouble a lady on such subjects.  But supposing, says the
+opposing counsel, now at work in Skepsey's conscience, supposing this
+act, for which, contraveneing the law of the land, you are reproved and
+punished, to be agreeable to you, how then?  We answer, supposing it--and
+we take uncomplainingly the magistrate's reproof and punishment--morally
+justified can it be expected of us to have the sense of guilt, although
+we wear and know we wear a guilty look before the public?
+
+His master and the dear ladies would hear of it; perhaps they knew of it
+now; with them would rest the settlement of the distressing inquiry.  The
+ladies would be shocked ladies cannot bear any semblance of roughness,
+not even with the gloves:--and knowing, as they must, that our practise
+of the manly art is for their protection.
+
+Skepsey's grievous prospect of the hour to come under judgement of a sex
+that was ever a riddle unread, clouded him on the approach to Dreux.  He
+studied the country and the people eagerly; he forbore to conduct great
+military operations.  Mr. Durance had spoken of big battles round about
+the town of Dreux; also of a wonderful Mausoleum there, not equally
+interesting.  The little man was in deeper gloom than a day sobering on
+crimson dusk when the train stopped and his quick ear caught the sound of
+the station, as pronounced by his friend at Rouen.
+
+He handed his card to the station-master.  A glance, and the latter
+signalled to a porter, saying: 'Paradis'; and the porter laid hold of
+Skepsey's bag.  Skepsey's grasp was firm; he pulled, the porter pulled.
+Skepsey heard explanatory speech accompanying a wrench.  He wrenched back
+with vigour, and in his own tongue exclaimed, that he held to the bag
+because his master's letters were in the bag, all the way from England.
+For a minute, there was a downright trial of muscle and will: the porter
+appeared furiously excited, Skepsey had a look of cooled steel.  Then the
+Frenchman, requiring to shrug, gave way to the Englishman's eccentric
+obstinacy, and signified that he was his guide.  Quite so, and Skepsey
+showed alacrity and confidence in following; he carried his bag.  But
+with the remembrance of the kindly serviceable man at Rouen, he sought to
+convey to the porter, that the terms of their association were cordial.
+A waving of the right hand to the heavens ratified the treaty on the
+French side.  Nods and smiles and gesticulations, with across-Channel
+vocables, as it were Dover cliffs to Calais sands and back, pleasantly
+beguiled the way down to the Hotel du Paradis, under the Mausoleum
+heights, where Skepsey fumbled at his pocket for coin current; but the
+Frenchman, all shaken by a tornado of negation, clapped him on the
+shoulder, and sang him a quatrain.  Skepsey had in politeness to stand
+listening, and blinking, plunged in the contrition of ignorance,
+eclipsed.  He took it to signify something to the effect, that money
+should not pass between friends.  It was the amatory farewell address of
+Henri IV. to his Charmante Gabrielle; and with
+
+                        'Perce de mille lords,
+                         L'honneur m'appelle
+                         Au champ de Mars,'
+
+the Frenchman, in a backing of measured steps, apologized for his
+enforced withdrawal from the stranger who had captured his heart.
+
+Skepsey's card was taken in the passage of the hotel.  A clean-capped
+maid, brave on the legs, like all he had seen of these people, preceded
+him at quick march to an upper chamber.  When he descended, bag in hand,
+she flung open the salon-door of a table d'hote, where a goodly number
+were dining and chattering; waiters drew him along to the section
+occupied by his master's party.  A chair had been kept vacant for him;
+his master waved a hand, his dear ladies graciously smiled; he struck the
+bag in front of a guardian foot, growing happy.  He could fancy they had
+not seen the English newspapers.  And his next observation of the table
+showed him wrecked and lost: Miss Nesta's face was the oval of a woeful O
+at his wild behaviour in England during their absence.  She smiled.
+Skepsey had nevertheless to consume his food--excellent, very tasty soup-
+with the sour sauce of the thought that he must be tongue-tied in his
+defence for the time of the dinner.
+
+'No, dear Skips, please! you are to enjoy yourself,' said Nesta.
+
+He answered confusedly, trying to assure her that he was doing so,
+and he choked.
+
+His master had fixed his arrival for twenty minutes earlier.  Skepsey
+spoke through a cough of long delays at stations.  The Rev. Septimus
+Barmby, officially peacemaker, sounded the consequent excuse for a
+belated comer.  It was final; such is the power of sound.  Looks were
+cast from the French section of the table at the owner of the prodigious
+organ.  Some of the younger men, intent on the charms of Albion's
+daughters, expressed in a, sign and a word or two alarm at what might be
+beneath the flooring: and 'Pas encore Lui!' and 'Son avant-courrier!' and
+other flies of speech passed on a whiff, under politest of cover, not to
+give offence.  But prodigies, claim attention.
+
+Our English, at the close of the dinner, consented to say it was good,
+without specifying a dish, because a selection of this or that would have
+seemed to italicize, and commit, them, in the presence of ladies, to a
+notice of the matter of-course, beneath us, or the confession of a low
+sensual enjoyment; until Lady Grace Halley named the particular dressing
+of a tete de veau approvingly to Victor; and he stating, that he had
+offered a suggestion for the menu of the day, Nataly exclaimed, that she
+had suspected it: upon which Mr. Sowerby praised the menu, Mr. Barmby,
+Peridon and Catkin named other dishes, there was the right after-dinner
+ring in Victor's ears, thanks to the woman of the world who had travelled
+round to nature and led the shackled men to deliver themselves heartily.
+One tap, and they are free.  That is, in the moments after dinner, when
+nature is at the gates with them.  Only, it must be a lady and a
+prevailing lady to give the tap.  They need (our English) and will for
+the ages of the process of their transformation need a queen.
+
+Skepsey, bag in hand, obeyed the motion of his master's head and followed
+him.
+
+He was presently back, to remain with the ladies during his master's
+perusal of letters.  Nataly had decreed that he was not to be troubled;
+so Nesta and mademoiselle besought him for a recital of his French
+adventures; and strange to say, he had nothing to tell.  The journey,
+pregnant at the start, exciting in the course of it, was absolutely blank
+at the termination.  French people had been very kind; he could not say
+more.  But there was more; there was a remarkable fulness, if only he
+could subordinate it to narrative.  The little man did not know, that
+time was wanted for imagination to make the roadway or riverway of a true
+story, unless we press to invent; his mind had been too busy on the way
+for him to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage of incidents
+at the call for them.  Things had happened, numbers of interesting minor
+things, but they all slipped as water through the fingers; and he being
+of the band of honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction,
+drearily he sat before the ladies, confessing to an emptiness he was far
+from feeling.
+
+Nesta professed excessive disappointment.  'Now, if it had been in
+England, Skips!' she said, under her mother's gentle gloom of brows.
+
+He made show of melancholy submission.
+
+'There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,' Nataly said.
+
+And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent to prove to us
+that they can be a blessing; instead of the dreadful cry to Providence
+for the reason of the spread of the race of man by their means!  He
+declared his readiness, rejecting excuses, to state his case to them, but
+for his fear of having it interpreted as an appeal for their kind aid in
+obtaining his master's forgiveness.  Mr. Durance had very considerately
+promised to intercede.  Skepsey dropped a hint or two of his naughty
+proceedings drily aware that their untutored antipathy to the manly art
+would not permit of warmth.
+
+Nesta said: 'Do you know, Skips, we saw a grand exhibition of fencing in
+Paris.'
+
+He sighed.  'Ladies can look on at fencing!  foils and masks!  Captain
+Dartrey Fenellan has shown me, and says, the French are our masters at
+it.'  He bowed constrainedly to mademoiselle.
+
+'You box, M. Skepsey!' she said.
+
+His melancholy increased: 'Much discouragement from Government, Society!
+If ladies .  .  .  but I do not venture.  They are not against Games.
+But these are not a protection .  .  .  to them, when needed; to the
+country.  The country seems asleep to its position.  Mr. Durance has
+remarked on it:--though I would not always quote Mr. Durance .  .  .
+indeed, he says, that England has invested an Old Maid's All in the
+Millennium, and is ruined if it delays to come.  "Old Maid," I do not
+see.  I do not--if I may presume to speak of myself in the same breath
+with so clever a gentleman, agree with Mr. Durance in everything.  But
+the chest-measurement of recruits, the stature of the men enlisted, prove
+that we are losing the nursery of our soldiers.'
+
+'We are taking them out of the nursery, Skips, if you 're for quoting
+Captain Dartrey,' said Nesta.  'We'll never haul down our flag, though,
+while we have him!'
+
+'Ah!  Captain Dartrey!' Skepsey was refreshed by the invocation of the
+name.
+
+A summons to his master's presence cut short something he was beginning
+to say about Captain Dartrey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED NATALY
+
+His master opened on the bristling business.
+
+'What's this, of your name in the papers, your appearing before a
+magistrate, and a fine?  Tell the tale shortly.'
+
+Skepsey fell upon his attitude for dialectical defence the modest form of
+the two hands at rolling play and the head deferentially sidecast.  But
+knowing that he had gratified his personal tastes in the act of serving
+his master's interests, an interfusion of sentiments plunged him into
+self-consciousness; an unwonted state with him, clogging to a simple
+story.
+
+'First, sir, I would beg you to pardon the printing of your name beside
+mine .  .  .'
+
+'Tush: on with you.'
+
+'Only to say, necessitated by the circumstances of the case.  I read,
+that there was laughter in the court at my exculpation of my conduct--
+as I have to call it; and there may have been.  I may have expressed
+myself .  .  .  .  I have a strong feeling for the welfare of the
+country.'
+
+'So, it seems, you said to the magistrate.  Do you tell me, that the
+cause of your gross breach of the law, was a consideration for the
+welfare of the country?  Run on the facts.'
+
+'The facts--I must have begun badly, sir.'  Skepsey rattled the dry facts
+in his head to right them.  From his not having begun well, they had
+become dry as things underfoot.  It was an error to have led off with the
+sentiments.  'Two very, two very respectable persons--respectable--were
+desirous to witness a short display of my, my system, I would say; of my
+science, they call it.'
+
+'Don't be nervous.  To the point; you went into a field five miles out of
+London, in broad day, and stood in a ring, the usual Tiff-raff about
+you!'
+
+'With the gloves: and not for money, Sir: for the trial of skill; not
+very many people.  I cannot quite see the breach of the law.'
+
+'So you told the magistrate.  You were fined for your inability to quite
+see.  And you had to give security.'
+
+'Mr. Durance was kindly responsible for me, sir: an acquaintance of the
+magistrate.'
+
+'This boxing of yours is a positive mania, Skepsey.  You must try to get
+the better of it--must!  And my name too!  I'm to be proclaimed, as
+having in my service an inveterate pugilist--who breaks the law from
+patriotism!  Male or female, these very respectable persons--the people
+your show was meant for?'
+
+'Male, sir.  Females!  .  .  .  that is, not the respectable ones.'
+
+'Take the opinion of the respectable ones for your standard of behaviour
+in future.'
+
+'It was a mere trial of skill, sir, to prove to one of the spectators,
+that I could be as good as my word.  I wished I may say, to conciliate
+him, partly.  He would not--he judged by size--credit me with .  .  .
+he backed my adversary Jerry Scroom--a sturdy boxer, without the
+knowledge of the first principles.'
+
+'You beat him?'
+
+'I think I taught the man that I could instruct, sir; he was
+complimentary before we parted.  He thought I could not have lasted.
+After the second round, the police appeared.'
+
+'And you ran!'
+
+'No, sir; I had nothing on my conscience.'
+
+'Why not have had your pugilistic display in a publican's room in town,
+where you could have hammer-nailed and ding-donged to your heart's
+content for as long as you liked!'
+
+'That would have been preferable, from the point of view of safety from
+intrusion, I can admit-speaking humbly.  But one of the parties--I had a
+wish to gratify him--is a lover of old English times and habits and our
+country scenes.  He wanted it to take place on green grass.  We drove
+over Hampstead in three carts and a gig, as a company of pleasure--as it
+was.  A very beautiful morning.  There was a rest at a public-house.  Mr.
+Shaplow traces the misfortune to that.  Mr. Jarniman, I hear, thinks it
+what he calls a traitor in the camp.  I saw no sign; we were all merry
+and friendly.'
+
+'Jarniman?' said Victor sharply.  'Who is the Jarniman?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman is, I am to understand from the acquaintance introducing
+us--a Mr. Shaplow I met in the train from Lakelands one day, and again at
+the corner of a street near Drury Lane, a ham and beef shop kept by a
+Mrs. Jarniman, a very stout lady, who does the chief carving in the shop,
+and is the mother of Mr. Jarniman: he is in a confidential place, highly
+trusted.'  Skepsey looked up from the hands he soaped: 'He is a curious
+mixture; he has true enthusiasm for boxing, he believes in ghosts.  He
+mourns for the lost days of prize-fighting, he thinks that spectres are
+on the increase.  He has a very large appetite, depressed spirits.  Mr.
+Shaplow informs me he is a man of substance, in the service of a wealthy
+lady in poor health, expecting a legacy and her appearance to him.  He
+has the look--Mr. Shaplow assures me he does not drink to excess: he is a
+slow drinker.'
+
+Victor straightened: 'Bad way of health, you said?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman spoke of his expectations, as being immediate: he put it,
+that he expected her spirit to be out for him to meet it any day--or
+night.  He desires it.  He says, she has promised it--on oath, he says,
+and must feel that she must do her duty to him before she goes, if she is
+to appear to him with any countenance after.  But he is anxious for her
+in any case to show herself, and says, he should not have the heart to
+reproach her.  He has principles, a tear for suffering; he likes to be
+made to cry.  Mrs. Jarniman, his mother, he is not married, is much the
+same so far, except ghosts; she will not have them; except after strong
+tea, they come, she says, come to her bed.  She is foolish enough to
+sleep in a close-curtained bed.  But the poor lady is so exceedingly
+stout that a puff of cold would carry her off, she fears.'
+
+Victor stamped his foot.  'This man Jarniman serves a lady now in a--
+serious, does he say?  Was he precise?'
+
+'Mr. Jarniman spoke of a remarkable number of diseases; very complicated,
+he says.  He has no opinion of doctors.  He says, that the lady's doctor
+and the chemist--she sits in a chemist's shop and swallows other people's
+prescriptions that take her fancy.  He says, her continuing to live is
+wonderful.  He has no reason to hurry her, only for the satisfaction of a
+natural curiosity.'
+
+'He mentioned her name?'
+
+'No name, sir.'
+
+Skepsey's limpid grey eyes confirmed the negative to Victor, who was
+assured that the little man stood clean of any falsity.
+
+'You are not on equal terms.  You and the magistrate have helped him to
+know who it is you serve, Skepsey.'
+
+'Would you please to direct me, sir.'
+
+'Another time.  Now go and ease your feet with a run over the town.  We
+have music in half an hour.  That you like, I know.  See chiefly to
+amusing yourself.'
+
+Skepsey turned to go; he murmured, that he had enjoyed his trip.
+
+Victor checked him: it was to ask whether this Jarniman had specified
+one, any one of the numerous diseases afflicting his aged mistress.
+
+Now Jarniman had shocked Skepsey with his blunt titles for a couple of
+the foremost maladies assailing the poor lady's decayed constitution: not
+to be mentioned, Skepsey's thought, in relation to ladies; whose organs
+and functions we, who pay them a proper homage by restricting them to the
+sphere so worthily occupied by their mothers up to the very oldest date,
+respectfully curtain; their accepted masters are chivalrous to them,
+deploring their need at times for the doctors and drugs.  He stood
+looking most unhappy.  'She was to appear, sir, in a few--perhaps a week,
+a month.'
+
+A nod dismissed him.
+
+The fun of the expedition (and Dudley Sowerby had wound himself up to
+relish it) was at night in the towns, when the sound of instrumental and
+vocal music attracted crowds beneath the windows of the hotel, and they
+heard zon, zon, violon, fete et basse; not bad fluting, excellent
+fiddling, such singing as a maestro, conducting his own Opera, would have
+approved.  So Victor said of his darlings' voices.  Nesta's and her
+mother's were a perfect combination; Mr. Barmby's trompe in union,
+sufficiently confirmed the popular impression, that they were artistes.
+They had been ceremoniously ushered to their carriages, with expressions
+of gratitude, at the departure from Rouen; and the Boniface at Gisors had
+entreated them to stay another night, to give an entertainment.  Victor
+took his pleasure in letting it be known, that they were a quiet English
+family, simply keeping-up the habits they practiced in Old England: all
+were welcome to hear them while they were doing it; but they did not give
+entertainments.
+
+The pride of the pleasure of reversing the general idea of English
+dulness among our neighbours, was perceived to have laid fast hold of
+Dudley Sowerby at Dreux.  He was at the window from time to time,
+counting heads below.  For this reason or a better, he begged Nesta to
+supplant the flute duet with the soprano and contralto of the Helena
+section of the Mefistofele, called the Serenade: La Luna immobile.  She
+consulted her mother, and they sang it.  The crowds below, swollen to a
+block of the street, were dead still, showing the instinctive good
+manners of the people.  Then mademoiselle astonished them with a
+Provencal or Cevennes air, Huguenot, though she was Catholic; but it
+suited her mezzo-soprano tones; and it rang massively of the martial-
+religious.  To what heights of spiritual grandeur might not a Huguenot
+France have marched!  Dudley Sowerby, heedlessly, under an emotion that
+could be stirred in him with force, by the soul of religion issuing
+through music, addressed his ejaculation to Lady Grace Halley.  She did
+nor shrug or snub him, but rejoined: 'I could go to battle with that song
+in the ears.'  She liked seeing him so happily transformed; and liked the
+effect of it on Nesta when his face shone in talking.  He was at home
+with the girl's eyes, as he had never been.  A song expressing in one of
+the combative and devotional, went to the springs of his blood; for he
+was of an old warrior race, beneath the thick crust of imposed peaceful
+maxims and commercial pursuits and habitual stiff correctness.  As much
+as wine, will music bring out the native bent of the civilized man: endow
+him with language too.  He was as if unlocked; he met Nesta's eyes and
+ran in a voluble interchange, that gave him flattering after-thoughts;
+and at the moment sensibly a new and assured, or to some extent assured,
+station beside a girl so vivid; by which the young lady would be helped
+to perceive his unvoiced solider gifts.
+
+Nataly observed them, thinking of Victor's mastering subtlety.  She had
+hoped (having clearly seen the sheep's eye in the shepherd) that Mr.
+Barmby would be watchful to act as a block between them; and therefore
+she had stipulated for his presence on the journey.  She remembered
+Victor's rapid look of readiness to consent:--he reckoned how naturally
+Mr. Barmby would serve as a foil to any younger man.  Mr. Barmby had
+tried all along to perform his part: he had always been thwarted; notably
+once at Gisors, where by some cunning management he and mademoiselle
+found themselves in the cell of the prisoner's Nail-wrought work while
+Nesta had to take Sowerby's hand for help at a passage here and there
+along the narrow outer castle-walls.  And Mr. Barmby, upon occasions, had
+set that dimple in Nesta's cheek quivering, though Simeon Fenellan was
+not at hand, and there was no telling how it was done, beyond the
+evidence that Victor willed it so.
+
+From the day of the announcement of Lakelands, she had been brought more
+into contact with his genius of dexterity and foresight than ever
+previously: she had bent to the burden of it more; had seen herself and
+everybody else outstripped--herself, of course; she did not count in a
+struggle with him.  But since that red dawn of Lakelands, it was almost
+as if he had descended to earth from the skies.  She now saw his
+mortality in the miraculous things he did.  The reason of it was, that
+through the perceptible various arts and shifts on her level, an opposing
+spirit had plainer view of his aim, to judge it.  She thought it a mean
+one.
+
+The power it had to hurry her with the strength of a torrent to an end
+she dreaded, impressed her physically; so far subduing her mind, in
+consequence, as to keep the idea of absolute resistance obscure, though
+her bosom heaved with the breath; but what was her own of a mind hung
+hovering above him, criticizing; and involuntarily, discomfortingly.
+She could have prayed to be led blindly or blindly dashed on: she could
+trust him for success; and her critical mind seemed at times a treachery.
+Still she was compelled to judge.
+
+When he said to her at night, pressing both her hands: 'This is the news
+of the day, my love!  It's death at last.  We shall soon be thanking
+heaven for freedom'; her fingers writhed upon his and gripped them in a
+torture of remorse on his behalf.  A shattering throb of her heart gave
+her sight of herself as well.  For so it is with the woman who loves in
+subjection, she may be a critic of the man, she is his accomplice.'
+
+'You have a letter, Victor?'
+
+'Confirmation all round: Fenellan, Themison, and now Skepsey.'
+
+He told her the tale of Skepsey and Jarniman, colouring it, as any
+interested animated conduit necessarily will.  Neither of them smiled.
+
+The effort to think soberly exhausted and rolled her back on credulity.
+
+It might not be to-day or next week or month: but so much testimony
+pointed to a day within the horizon, surely!
+
+She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness.  The murderous hope stood
+up, stood out in forms and pictures.  There was one of a woman at her
+ease at last in the reception of guests; contrasting with an ironic
+haunting figure of the woman of queenly air and stature under a finger of
+scorn for a bold-faced impostor.  Nataly's lips twitched at the
+remembrance of quaint whimpers of complaint to the Fates, for directing
+that a large instead of a rather diminutive woman should be the social
+offender fearing exposure.  Majesty in the criminal's dock, is a
+confounding spectacle.  To the bosom of the majestic creature, all her
+glorious attributes have become the executioner's implements.  She must
+for her soul's health believe that a day of release and exoneration
+approaches.
+
+'Barmby!--if my dear girl would like him best,' Victor said, in tenderest
+undertones, observing the shadowing variations of her face; and pierced
+her cruelly, past explanation or understanding;--not that she would have
+objected to the Rev. Septimus as officiating clergyman.
+
+She nodded.  Down rolled the first big tear.
+
+We cry to women; Land, ho!--a land of palms after storms at sea; and at
+once they inundate us with a deluge of eye-water.
+
+'Half a minute, dear Victor, not longer,' Nataly said, weeping, near on
+laughing over his look of wanton abandonment to despair at sight of her
+tears.  'Don't mind me.  I am rather like Fenellan's laundress, the
+tearful woman whose professional apparatus was her soft heart and a cake
+of soap.  Skepsey has made his peace with you?'
+
+Victor answered: 'Yes, yes; I see what he has been about.  We're a mixed
+lot, all of us-the best!  You've noticed, Skepsey has no laugh: however
+absurd the thing he tells you, not a smile!'
+
+'But you trust his eyes; you look fathoms into them.  Captain Dartrey
+thinks him one of the men most in earnest of any of his country.'
+
+'So Nataly of course thinks the same.  And he's a worthy little
+velocipede, as Fenellan calls him.  One wishes Colney had been with us.
+Only Colney!--pity one can't cut his talons for the space before they
+grow again.'
+
+Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would not have been so
+encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with Dudley Sowerby!  It was the
+very manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was
+to her father.  Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition,
+feeling it a certainty.  We are easily prophets, sure of being justified,
+when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
+delicately perfect.  History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
+with us to inspire.  In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
+for offering counsel where Victor for his soul's sake needed it, was
+beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
+mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.
+
+It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement.
+A pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her at
+her next sight of Nesta.  She had not taken in her front mind the
+contrast of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which
+the guilty was by a transient ceremony released.  Nature could at a push
+be eloquent to defend the guilty.  Not a word of vindicating eloquence
+rose up to clear the innocent.  Nothing that she could do; no
+devotedness, not any sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy
+to come, nothing could remove the shadow from her child.  She dreamed of
+the succour in eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact
+spoke over the population, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard
+word.  But eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred to
+Nesta.  It seemed a cruel mystery.  How was it permitted by the Merciful
+Disposer!  .  .  .  Nataly's intellect and her reverence clashed.  They
+clash to the end of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as
+a remote Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about this or
+that issue, instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we
+will; marking on us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount to
+the divine, we and ours who follow, offspring of body or mind.  She was
+in her error, from judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of
+individuals.  Chiefly her error was, to try to be thinking at all amid
+the fevered tangle of her sensations.
+
+A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when
+her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of
+existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal
+footing with the world while yet she lived.  She hated herself for taking
+pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard, ill-
+balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not to
+be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome
+the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person had a greater
+than common need of the protection.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
+
+That Mausoleum at Dreux may touch to lift us.  History, pleads for the
+pride of the great discrowned Family giving her illumination there.  The
+pride is reverently postured, the princely mourning-cloak it wears
+becomingly braided at the hem with fair designs of our mortal humility in
+the presence of the vanquisher; against whom, acknowledgeing a visible
+conquest of the dust, it sustains a placid contention in coloured glass
+and marbles.
+
+Mademoiselle de Seilles, a fervid Orleanist, was thanked for having
+advised the curvature of the route homeward to visit 'the spot of so
+impressive a monument': as it, was phrased by the Rev. Septimus Barmby;
+whose exposition to Nesta of the beautiful stained-glass pictures of
+incidents in the life of the crusading St. Louis, was toned to be
+likewise impressive:--Colney Durance not being at hand to bewail the
+pathos of his exhaustless 'whacking of the platitudes'; which still
+retain their tender parts, but cry unheard when there is no cynic near.
+Mr. Barmby laid-on solemnly.
+
+Professional devoutness is deemed more righteous on such occasions than
+poetic fire.  It robes us in the cloak of the place, as at a funeral.
+Generally, Mr. Barmby found, and justly, that it is in superior
+estimation among his countrymen of all classes.  They are shown by
+example how to look, think, speak; what to do.  Poets are disturbing;
+they cannot be comfortably imitated, they are unsafe, not certainly the
+metal, unless you have Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and
+decorations; and these are but one at a time-and a quotation may remind
+us of a parody, to convulse the sacred dome!  Established plain prose
+officials do better for our English.  The audience moved round with heads
+of undertakers.
+
+Victor called to recollection Fenellan's 'Rev. Glendoveer' while Mr.
+Barmby pursued his discourse, uninterrupted by tripping wags.  And those
+who have schemes, as well as those who are startled by the criticism in
+laughter to discover that they have cause for shunning it, rejoice when
+wits are absent.  Mr. Sowerby and Nesta interchanged a comment on Mr.
+Barmby's remarks: The Fate of Princes!  The Paths of Glory!  St. Louis
+was a very distant Roman Catholic monarch; and the young gentleman of
+Evangelical education could admire him as a Crusader.  St. Louis was for
+Nesta a figure in the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to homeliness
+by tears.  She doated on a royalty crowned with the Saint's halo, that
+swam down to us to lift us through holy human showers.  She listened to
+Mr. Barmby, hearing few sentences, lending his eloquence all she felt:
+he rolled forth notes of a minster organ, accordant with the devotional
+service she was holding mutely.  Mademoiselle upon St. Louis: 'Worthy to
+be named King of Kings!' swept her to a fount of thoughts, where the
+thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the mother
+emotions.  Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and deeply
+moved.  The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open to be
+musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales.  This crypt of the
+recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the
+passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an
+altar-piece of History.  But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion
+leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message from death.  With such
+a King, there would be union of the old order and the new, cessation to
+political turmoil: Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of things
+with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable, obliterate
+the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and garden were,
+would be appeased, transfigured.  She hoped, she prayed for that glorious
+leader's advent.
+
+On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not intelligibly, not
+communicably: a subject thickly veiled; one which struck at her through
+her sex and must, she thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young creature
+saw it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams of a body
+rageing with fire behind the veil): on this one subject, her hopes and
+prayers were dumb in her bosom.  It signified shame.  She knew not the
+how, for she had no power to contemplate it: there was a torment of earth
+and a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse.  But if the
+new crusading Hero were to come attacking that--if some born prince nobly
+man would head the world to take away the withering scarlet from the face
+of women, she felt she could kiss the print of his feet upon the ground.
+Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the inmost forest-well of
+mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of good aspiration
+through their obscurities find much akin to them.
+
+She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these French Princes
+had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and the
+old result--poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly!
+What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the slow parade,
+and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification of a holiday
+on arrested legs.  Dudley Sowerby's attention to him, in elucidating the
+scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her.  The Rev. Septimus of
+course occupied her chiefly.
+
+Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of
+gratitude for the route she had counselled.  Without personal objections
+to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming
+too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble
+muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and
+certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
+in the sentence of French.  Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong
+sentiment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility
+of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in England:
+an all but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon
+mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at his reading of
+a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony involving his
+favourite Bishop for bridegroom: a report to make one glow like Hymen
+rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying slipper.
+He remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the slumbering
+features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower, entering into
+nuptials in his fifty-fourth year.  Why not?  But we ask it of Heaven and
+Man, why not?  Mademoiselle was pleasant: she was young or youngish; her
+own clergy were celibates, and--no, he could not argue the matter with a
+young or youngish person of her sex.  Could it be a reasonable woman--
+a woman!--who, disapproved the holy nuptials of the pastors of the
+flocks?  But we are forbidden to imagine the conducting of an argument
+thereon with a lady.
+
+Luther .  .  .  but we are not in Luther's time:--Nature .  .  .  no,
+nor can there possibly be allusions to Nature.  Mr. Barmby wondered at
+Protestant parents taking a Papistical governess for their young flower
+of English womanhood.  However, she venerated St. Louis; he cordially
+also; there they met; and he admitted, that she had, for a Frenchwoman,
+a handsome face, and besides an agreeably artificial ingenuousness in
+the looks which could be so politely dubious as to appear only dubiously
+adverse.
+
+The spell upon Nesta was not blown away on English ground; and when her
+father and mother were comparing their impressions, she could not but
+keep guard over the deeper among her own.  At the Chateau de Gisors,
+leftward off Vernon on Seine, it had been one of romance and wonderment,
+with inquisitive historic soundings of her knowledge and mademoiselle's,
+a reverence for the prisoner's patient holy work, and picturings of his
+watchful waiting daily, Nail in hand, for the heaven-sent sunlight on the
+circular dungeon-wall through the slits of the meurtrieres.  But the
+Mausoleum at Dreux spake religiously; it enfolded Mr. Barmby, his voice
+re-edified it.  The fact that he had discoursed there, though not a word
+of the discourse was remembered, allied him to the spirit of a day rather
+increasing in sacredness as it receded and left her less the possessor of
+it, more the worshipper.
+
+Mademoiselle had to say to herself: 'Impossible!' after seeing the drift
+of her dear Nesta's eyes in the wake of the colossal English clergyman.
+She fed her incredulousness indignantly on the evidence confounding it.
+Nataly was aware of unusual intonations, treble-stressed, in the Bethesda
+and the Galilee of Mr. Barmby on Concert evenings: as it were, the
+towering wood-work of the cathedral organ in quake under emission of its
+multitudinous outroar.  The 'Which?' of the Rev. Septimus, addressed to
+Nesta, when song was demanded of him; and her 'Either'; and his gentle
+hesitation, upon a gaze at her for the directing choice, could not be
+unnoticed by women.
+
+Did he know a certain thing?--and dream of urging the suit, as an
+indulgent skipper of parental pages?
+
+Such haunting interrogations were the conspirators' daggers out at any
+instant, or leaping in sheath, against Nataly's peace of mind.  But she
+trusted her girl's laughing side to rectify any little sentimental
+overbalancing.  She left the ground where maternal meditations are
+serious, at an image of Mr. Barmby knocking at Nesta's heart as a lover.
+Was it worth inquiry?
+
+A feminine look was trailed across the eyes of mademoiselle, with mention
+of Mr. Barmby's name.
+
+Mademoiselle rippled her shoulders.  'We are at present much enamoured of
+Bethesda.'
+
+That watchfullest showing no alarm, the absurdity of the suspicion
+smothered it.
+
+Nataly had moreover to receive startling new guests:
+
+Lady Rodwell Blachington: Mrs. Fanning, wife of the General: young Mrs.
+Blathenoy, wife of the great bill-broker: ladies of Wrensham and about.
+And it was a tasking of her energies equal to the buffeting of recurrent
+waves on deep sea.  The ladies were eager for her entry into Lakelands.
+She heard that Victor had appointed Lady Blachington's third son to the
+coveted post of clerk in the Indian house of Inchling and Radnor.  These
+are the deluge days when even aristocracy will cry blessings on the man
+who procures a commercial appointment for one of its younger sons
+offended and rebutted by the barrier of Examinations for the Civil
+Service.  'To have our Adolphus under Mr. Victor Radnor's protection, is
+a step!' Lady Blachington said.  Nataly was in an atmosphere of hints and
+revealings.  There were City Dinners, to which one or other of the
+residents about Lakelands had been taken before he sat at Victor's London
+table.  He was already winning his way, apparently without effort, to be
+the popular man of that neighbourhood.  A subterranean tide or a slipping
+of earth itself seemed bearing her on.  She had his promise indeed, that
+he would not ask of her to enter Lakelands until the day of his freedom
+had risen; but though she could trust to his word, the heart of the word
+went out of it when she heard herself thanked by Lady Blachington (who
+could so well excuse her at such a time of occupation for not returning
+her call, that she called in a friendly way a second time, warmly to
+thank her) for throwing open the Concert room at Lakelands in August, to
+an Entertainment in assistance of the funds for the purpose of erecting
+an East of London Clubhouse, where the children of the poor by day could
+play, and their parents pass a disengaged evening.  Doubtless a worthy
+Charity.  Nataly was alive to the duties of wealth.  Had it been simply a
+demand for a donation, she would not have shown that momentary pucker of
+the brows, which Lady Blachington read as a contrast with the generous
+vivacity of the husband.
+
+Nataly read a leaf of her fate in this announcement.  Nay, she beheld
+herself as the outer world wexedly beholds a creature swung along to the
+doing of things against the better mind.  An outer world is thoughtless
+of situations which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will
+benumbed;--if we do not, as does that outer world, belong to the party of
+the readily heroical.  She scourged her weakness: and the intimation of
+the truth stood over her, more than ever manifest, that the deficiency
+affecting her character lay in her want of language.  A tongue to speak
+and contend, would have helped her to carve a clearer way.  But then
+again, the tongue to speak must be one which could reproach, and strike
+at errors; fence, and continually summon resources to engage the
+electrical vitality of a man like Victor.  It was an exultation of their
+life together, a mark of his holiness for them both, that they had never
+breathed a reproach upon one another.
+
+She dropped away from ideas of remonstrance; faintly seeing, in her sigh
+of submission, that the deficiency affecting her character would have
+been supplied by a greater force of character, pressing either to speech
+or acts.  The confession of a fated inevitable in the mind, is weakness
+prostrate.  She knew it: but she could point to the manner of man she was
+matched with; and it was not a poor excuse.
+
+Mr. Barmby, she thought, deserved her gratitude in some degree for
+stepping between Mr. Sowerby and Nesta.  The girl not having
+inclinations, and the young gentleman being devoid of stratagem, they
+were easily kept from the dangerous count of two.
+
+Mademoiselle would have said, that the shepherd also had rarely if ever a
+minute quite alone with her lamb.  Incredulously she perceived signs of a
+shock.  The secret following the signs was betrayed by Nesta in return
+for a tender grasp of hands and a droll flutter of eyelids.  Out it came,
+on a nod first; then a dreary mention of a date, and an incident, to
+bring it nearer to comprehension.  Mr. Barmby--and decide who will
+whether it is that Love was made to elude or that curates impelled by his
+fires are subtle as nether--had outwitted French watchfulness by stealing
+minutes enough on a day at Lakelands to declare himself.  And no wonder
+the girl looked so forlorn: he had shivered her mediaeval forest-palace
+of illuminated glass, to leave her standing like a mountain hind, that
+sniffs the tainted gale off the crag of her first quick leap from hounds;
+her instincts alarmed, instead of rich imagination colouring and
+fostering.
+
+She had no memory for his words; so, and truly, she told her Louise:
+meaning that she had only a spiceless memory; especially for the word
+love in her ears from the mouth of a man.
+
+There had been a dream of it; with the life-awakening marvel it would be,
+the humbleness it would bring to her soul beneath the golden clothing of
+her body: one of those faint formless dreams, which are as the bend of
+grasses to the breath of a still twilight.  She lived too spiritedly to
+hang on any dream; and had moreover a muffled dread-shadow-sister to the
+virginal desire--of this one, as of a fateful power that might drag her
+down, disorder, discolour.  But now she had heard it: the word, the very
+word itself! in her own ears! addressed to her! in a man's voice!  The
+first utterance had been heard, and it was over; the chapter of the book
+of bulky promise of the splendours and mysteries;--the shimmering woods
+and bushy glades, and the descent of the shape celestial, and the
+recognition--the mutual cry of affinity; and overhead the crimson
+outrolling of the flag of beneficent enterprises hand in hand, all was at
+an end.  These, then, are the deceptions our elders tell of!  That
+masculine voice should herald a new world to the maiden.  The voice she
+had heard did but rock to ruin the world she had been living in.
+
+Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on his person or on
+his conduct.  Nesta had nothing to defend: she walked in a bald waste.
+
+'Can I have been guilty of leading him to think .  .  .?' she said, in a
+tone that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair.
+
+'They choose to think,' mademoiselle replied.  'It is he or another.  My
+dear and dearest, you have entered the field where shots fly thick, as
+they do to soldiers in battle; and it is neither your fault nor any
+one's, if you are hit.'
+
+Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of 'Louise.'
+
+Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty.  'Has it happened
+to me?  I am of the age of eight and twenty; passable, to look at: yes,
+my dear, I have gone through it.  To spare you the questions tormenting
+you, I will tell you, that perhaps our experience of our feelings comes
+nigh on a kind of resemblance.  The first gentleman who did me the honour
+to inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.'
+
+Nesta cried 'Oh!' in a veritable pang of sympathy, and clapped hands to
+her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby's boom of the terrific word attacking
+Louise from that deformed one.
+
+Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision.  A girl of
+quick blood and active though unregulated intellect, she caught at the
+comic of young women's hopes and experiences, in her fear of it.
+
+'My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice there is in the world
+for one like my Louise to have a hunchback to be the first .  .  .  !'
+
+'But, my dear, it did me no harm.'
+
+'But if it had been known!'
+
+'But it was known!'
+
+Nesta controlled a shuddering: 'It is the knowledge of it in ourselves--
+that it has ever happened;--you dear Louise, who deserve so much better!
+And one asks--Oh, why are we not left in peace!  And do look at the
+objects it makes of us!'  Mademoiselle: could see, that the girl's
+desperation had got hold of her humour for a life-buoy.  'It is really
+worse to have it unknown--when you are compelled to be his partner in
+sharing the secret, and feel as if it were a dreadful doll you conceal
+for fear that everybody will laugh at its face.'
+
+She resumed her seriousness: 'I find it so hard to be vexed with him and
+really really like him.  For he is a good man; but he will not let one
+shake him off.  He distresses: because we can't quite meet as we did.
+Last Wednesday Concert evening, he kept away; and I am annoyed that I was
+glad.'
+
+'Moths have to pass through showers, and keep their pretty patterns from
+damage as best they can,' said mademoiselle.
+
+Nesta transformed herself into a disciple of Philosophy on the spot.
+'Yes, all these feelings of ours are moth-dust!  One feels them.  I
+suppose they pass.  They must.  But tell me, Louise, dear soul, was your
+poor dear good little afflicted suitor--was he kindly pitied?'
+
+'Conformably with the regulations prescribed to young damsels who are in
+request to surrender the custody of their hands.  It is easy to commit a
+dangerous excess in the dispensing of that article they call pity of
+them.'
+
+'And he--did he?--vowed to you he could not take No for an answer?'
+
+At this ingenuous question, woefully uttered, mademoiselle was pricked,
+to smile pointedly.  Nesta had a tooth on her under-lip.  Then, shaking
+vapours to the winds, she said: 'It is an honour, to be asked; and we
+cannot be expected to consent.  So I shall wear through it.--Only I do
+wish that Mr. Fenellan would not call him The Inchcape Bell!' She
+murmured this to herself.
+
+Mr. Barmby was absent for two weeks.  'Can anything have offended him?'
+Victor inquired, in some consternation, appreciating the man's worth, and
+the grand basso he was; together with the need for him at the Lakelands
+Concert in August.
+
+Nataly wrote Mr. Barmby a direct invitation.  She had no reply.  Her
+speculations were cut short by Victor, who handed her a brief note
+addressed to him and signed by the Rev. Septimus, petitioning for a
+private interview.
+
+The formality of the request incensed Victor.  'Now, dear love, you see
+Colney's meaning, when he says, there are people who have no intimacy in
+them.  Here's a man who visits me regularly once a week or more, has been
+familiar for years--four, at least; and he wants to speak to me, and must
+obtain the "privilege" by special appointment!  What can be the meaning
+of it?'
+
+'You will hear to-morrow afternoon,' Nataly said, seeing one paved way to
+the meaning--a too likely meaning. . . 'He hasn't been .  .  .  nothing
+about Fredi, surely!'
+
+'I have had no information.'
+
+'Impossible!  Barmby has good sense; Bottesini can't intend to come
+scraping on that string.  But we won't lose him; he's one of us.  Barmby
+counts for more at a Charity Concert than all the catalogue, and
+particularly in the country.  But he's an excellent fellow--eh?'
+
+'That he is,' Nataly agreed.
+
+Victor despatched a cheerful curt consent to see Mr. Barmby privately on
+the late afternoon of the day to follow.
+
+Nesta, returning home from the park at that hour of the interview,
+ignorant of Mr. Barmby's purpose though she was, had her fires
+extinguished by the rolling roar of curfew along the hall-passage,
+out of the library.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA
+
+When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer Orpheus took that
+downward way, coming in sight of old Cerberus centiceps, he astutely
+feigned inattention to the hostile appearances of the multiple beast, and
+with a wave of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the stroke
+raised voice.  This much you know.  It may be communicated to you, that
+there was then beheld the most singular spectacle ever exhibited on the
+dizzy line of division between the living and the dead.  For those
+unaccustomed musical tones in the last thin whiff of our sustaining air
+were so smartingly persuasive as to pierce to the vitals of the faithful
+Old Dog before his offended sentiments had leisure to rouse their heads
+against a beggar of a mortal.  The terrible sugariness which poured into
+him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a wrestling: his battery
+of jaws expressed it.  They gaped.  At the same time, his eyeballs gave
+up.  All the Dog, that would have barked the breathing intruder an
+hundredfold back to earth, was one compulsory centurion yawn.  Tears,
+issue of the frightful internal wedding of the dulcet and the sour
+(a ravishing rather of the latter by the former), rolled off his muzzles.
+
+Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent simile shall be
+composed of exactly the like notes in another octave, you will catch the
+fine flavour of analogy and be wafted in a beat of wings across the scene
+of the application of the Rev. Septimus Barmby to Mr. Victor Radnor, that
+he might enter the house in the guise of suitor for the hand of Nesta
+Victoria.  It is the excelling merit of similes and metaphors to spring
+us to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary places.  But, as with the
+visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them.  Beware, moreover,
+of examining them too scrupulously: they have a trick of wearing to
+vapour if closely scanned.  Let it be gratefully for their aid.
+
+So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby passed: he was at
+liberty to pursue his quest.
+
+Victor could not explain how he had been brought to grant it.  He was at
+pains to conceal the bewilderment Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make
+Nataly see the smallness of the grant:--both of them were unwilling to
+lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about Fredi, he said; and
+why should not poor Barmby have his chance with the others in the race!
+--and his Nataly knew that he hated to speak unkindly: he could cry the
+negative like a crack of thunder in the City.  But such matters as these!
+and a man pleading merely for the right to see the girl!--and pleading in
+a tone .  .  .  'I assure you, my love, he touched chords.'
+
+'Did he allude to advantages in the alliance with him?' Nataly asked
+smoothly.
+
+'His passion--nothing else.  Candid enough.  And he had a tone--he has a
+tone, you know.  It 's not what he said.  Some allusion to belief in a
+favourable opinion of him .  .  .  encouragement .  .  .  on the part of
+the mama.  She would have him travelling with us!  I foresaw it.'
+
+'You were astonished when it came.'
+
+'We always are.'
+
+Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr. Barmby.
+
+She had thought in her heart--not seriously; on a sigh of despondency--
+that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled prospect: and
+a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to detect
+Victor's cunning to cover his own: a thing imaginable of him previously
+in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly printed on
+her mind.  It did not draw her to read him with a novel familiarity; it
+drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations of the man he was
+--irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive.  Nor did he seem in
+this instance humanely considerate: if mademoiselle's estimate of the
+mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby's position would be both
+a ridiculous and a cruel one.  She had some silly final idea that the
+poor man might now serve permanently to check the more dreaded applicant:
+a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness was blunted.
+
+Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to have his
+weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation, of a loss of her
+natural cheerfulness, and promised amendment, with a steely smile, that
+his lips mimicked fondly; and her smile softened.  To strengthen the dear
+soul's hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,
+of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the tragic depths he
+struck or of the burden he gave her heart to bear.  Her look alarmed him.
+She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp, and was in a
+moment marble to sight and touch.  She looked like the old engravings of
+martyrs taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.
+
+He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the awful grip of
+fingers from the outside of life.
+
+The seizure was over before it could be called ominous.  When it was once
+over, and she had smiled again and rebuked him for excessive anxiety, his
+apprehensions no longer troubled him, but subsided sensationally in wrath
+at the crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of her ailments
+instantly to perish and spare this dear one annoyance.
+
+Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual mental penance for
+it.  In consequence, the wrath, and the wish, and the penitence, haunted
+him, each swelling to possession of him in turn; until they united to
+head a plunge into retrospects; which led to his reviewing the army of
+charges against Mrs. Burman.
+
+And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the morbid indulgence in
+reflection: a disease never afflicting him anterior to the stupid fall on
+London Bridge.  He rubbed instinctively for the punctilio-bump, and could
+cheat his fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below, half an
+inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist, invited by Nataly in
+old days, had marked philo-progenitiveness on his capacious and enviable
+cerebrum.  He knew well it was a fancy.  But it was a fact also, that
+since the day of the fall (never, save in merest glimpses, before that
+day), he had taken to look behind him, as though an eye had been knocked
+in the back of his head.
+
+Then, was that day of the announcement of Lakelands to Nataly, to be
+accounted a gloomy day?  He would not have it so.
+
+She was happily occupied with her purchases of furniture, Fredi with her
+singing lessons, and he with his business; a grasp of many ribands,
+reining-in or letting loose; always enjoyable in the act.  Recently only
+had he known when at home, a relaxation, a positive pleasure in looking
+forward to the hours of the City office.  This was odd, but so it was;
+and looking homeward from the City, he had a sense of disappointment when
+it was not Concert evening.  The Cormyns, the Yatts, and Priscilla
+Graves, and Pempton, foolish fellow, and that bothering Barmby, and
+Peridon and Catkin, were the lineing of his nest.  Well, and so they had
+been before Lakelands rose.  What had induced!  .  .  .  he suddenly felt
+foreign to himself.  The shrouded figure of his lost Idea on London
+Bridge went by.
+
+A peep into the folds of the shroud was granted him:--Is it a truth, that
+if we are great owners of money, we are so swollen with a force not
+native to us, as to be precipitated into acts the downright contrary of
+our tastes?
+
+He inquired it of his tastes, which have the bad habit of unmeasured
+phrasing when they are displeased, and so they yield no rational answer.
+Still he gave heed to violent extraneous harpings against money.
+Epigrams of Colney's; abuse of it and the owners of it by Socialist
+orators reported in some newspaper corner; had him by the ears.
+
+They ceased in the presence of Lady Grace Halley, who entered his office
+to tell him she was leaving town for Whinfold, her husband's family-seat,
+where the dear man lay in evil case.  She signified her resignation to
+the decrees from above, saying generously:
+
+'You look troubled, my friend.  Any bad City news?'
+
+'I look troubled?' Victor said laughing, and bethought him of what the
+trouble might be.  'City news would not cause the look.  Ah, yes;--I was
+talking in the street to a friend of mine on horseback the other day, and
+he kept noticing his horse's queer starts.  We spied half a dozen
+children in the gutter, at the tail of the horse, one of them plucking at
+a hair.  "Please, sir, may I have a hair out of your horse's tail?"  said
+the mite.  We patted the poor horse that grew a tail for urchins to pluck
+at.  Men come to the fathers about their girls.  It's my belief that
+mothers more easily say no.  If they learn the word as maids, you'll say!
+However, there's no fear about my girl.  Fredi's hard to snare.  And what
+brings you Cityward?'
+
+'I want to know whether I shall do right in selling out of the Tiddler
+mine.'
+
+'You have multiplied your investment by ten.'
+
+'If it had been thousands!'
+
+'Clearly, you sell; always jump out of a mounted mine, unless you're at
+the bottom of it.'
+
+'There are City-articles against the mine this morning--or I should have
+been on my way to Whinfold at this moment.  The shares are lower.'
+
+'The merry boys are at work to bring your balloon to the ground, that you
+may quit it for them to ascend.  Tiddler has enemies, like the best of
+mines: or they may be named lovers, if you like.  And mines that have
+gone up, go down for a while before they rise again; it's an affair of
+undulations; rocket mines are not so healthy.  The stories are false, for
+the time.  I had the latest from Dartrey Fenellan yesterday.  He's here
+next month; some time in August.'
+
+'He is married, is he not?'
+
+'Was.'
+
+Victor's brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.
+
+'Is he not a soldier?' she said.
+
+'Soldiers and parsons!' Victor interjected.
+
+Now she saw.  She understood the portent of Mr. Barmby's hovering offer
+of the choice of songs, and the recent tremulousness of the welling
+Bethesda.
+
+But she had come about her own business; and after remarking, that when
+there is a prize there must be competition, or England will have to lower
+her flag, she declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler, exclaiming: 'It's
+only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a dream of the past!'
+
+'The Riviera green field on the rock is always open to you,' said Victor.
+
+She put out her hand to be taken.  'Not if you back me here.  It really
+is not gambling when yours is the counsel I follow.  And if I'm to be a
+widow, I shall have to lean on a friend, gifted like you.  I love
+adventure, danger;--well, if we two are in it; just to see my captain in
+a storm.  And if the worst happens, we go down together.  It 's the
+detestation of our deadly humdrum of modern life; some inherited love of
+fighting.'
+
+'Say, brandy.'
+
+'Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to the brandy novel?'
+
+'Colney may call it what he pleases.  If I read fiction, let it be
+fiction; airier than hard fact.  If I see a ballet, my troop of short
+skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen.  I can't read dull
+analytical stuff or "stylists" when I want action--if I'm to give my mind
+to a story.  I can supply the reflections.  I'm English--if Colney 's
+right in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of
+supernaturalism.
+
+I don't ask for bloodshed: that's what his "brandy" means.'
+
+'But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect it
+where there's love; it's part of the balance, and justifies one's
+excitement.  How otherwise do you get any real crisis?  I must read and
+live something unlike this flat life around us.'
+
+'There's the Adam life and the Macadam life, Fenellan says.  Pass it in
+books, but in life we can have quite enough excitement coming out of our
+thoughts.  No brandy there!  And no fine name for personal predilections
+or things done in domino!'  Victor said, with his very pleasant face,
+pressing her hand, to keep the act of long holding it in countenance and
+bring it to a well-punctuated conclusion: thinking involuntarily of the
+other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed a beaten visage
+despite--or with that poor kind of--trust in her captain.  But the
+thought was not guilty of drawing comparisons.  'This is one that I could
+trust, as captain or mate,' he pressed the hand again before dropping it.
+
+'You judge entirely by the surface, if you take me for a shifty person at
+the trial,' said Lady Grace.
+
+Skepsey entered the room with one of his packets, and she was reminded of
+trains and husbands.
+
+She left Victor uncomfortably rufed: and how? for she had none of the
+physical charms appealing peculiarly to the man who was taken with
+grandeur of shape.  She belonged rather to the description physically
+distasteful to him.
+
+It is a critical comment on a civilization carelessly distilled from the
+jealous East, when visits of fair women to City offices can have this
+effect.  If the sexes are separated for an hour, the place where one is
+excluded or not common to see, becomes inflammable to that appearing
+spark.  He does outrage to a bona Dea: she to the monasticism of the
+Court of Law: and he and she awaken unhallowed emotions.  Supposing,
+however, that western men were to de-orientalize their gleeful notions of
+her, and dis-Turk themselves by inviting the woman's voluble tongue to
+sisterly occupation there in the midst of the pleading Court, as in the
+domestic circle: very soon would her eyes be harmless: unless directed
+upon us with intent.
+
+That is the burning core of the great Question, our Armageddon in
+Morality: Is she moral?  Does she mean to be harmless?  Is she not
+untamable Old Nature?  And when once on an equal footing with her lordly
+half, would not the spangled beauty, in a turn, like the realistic
+transformation-trick of a pantomime, show herself to be that wanton old
+thing--the empress of disorderliness?  You have to recollect, as the
+Conservative acutely suggests, that her timidities, at present urging her
+to support Establishments, pertain to her state of dependence.  The party
+views of Conservatism are, must be, founded, we should remember, on an
+intimate acquaintance with her in the situations where she is almost
+unrestrictedly free and her laughter rings to confirm the sentences of
+classical authors and Eastern sages.  Conservatives know what they are
+about when they refuse to fling the last lattice of an ancient harem open
+to air and sun-the brutal dispersers of mystery, which would despoil an
+ankle of its flying wink.
+
+Victor's opinions were those of the entrenched majority; objecting to the
+occult power of women, as we have the women now, while legislating to
+maintain them so; and forbidding a step to a desperately wicked female
+world lest the step should be to wickeder.  His opinions were in the
+background, rarely stirred; but the lady had brought them forward; and he
+fretted at his restlessness, vexed that it should be due to the intrusion
+of the sex instead of to the charms of the individual.  No sting of the
+sort had bothered him, he called to mind, on board the Channel boat-
+nothing to speak of.  'Why does she come here!  Why didn't she go to her
+husband!  She gets into the City scramble blindfold, and catches at the
+nearest hand to help her out!  Nice woman enough.'  Yes, but he was
+annoyed with her for springing sensations that ran altogether heartless
+to the object, at the same time that they were disloyal to the dear woman
+their natural divinity.  And between him and that dear woman, since the
+communication made by Skepsey in the town of Dreux, nightly the dividing
+spirit of Mrs. Burman lay cold as a corpse.  They both felt her there.
+They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night.
+
+Next afternoon the announcement by Skepsey of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby,
+surprised Victor's eyebrows at least, and caused him genially to review
+the visit of Lady Grace.
+
+Whether or not Colney Durance drew his description of a sunken nobility
+from the 'sick falcon' distinguishing the handsome features of Mr.
+Sowerby, that beaked invalid was particularly noticeable to Victor during
+the statement of his case, although the young gentleman was far from
+being one, in Colney's words, to enliven the condition of domestic fowl
+with an hereditary turn for 'preying'; eminently the reverse; he was of
+good moral repute, a worker, a commendable citizen.  But there was the
+obligation upon him to speak--it is expected in such cases, if only as a
+formality--of his 'love': hard to do even in view and near to the
+damsel's reddening cheeks: it perplexed him.  He dropped a veil on the
+bashful topic; his tone was the same as when he reverted to the material
+points; his present income, his position in the great Bank of Shotts and
+Co., his prospects, the health of the heir to the Cantor earldom.  He
+considered that he spoke to a member of the City merchants, whose
+preference for the plain positive, upon the question of an alliance
+between families by marriage, lends them for once a resemblance to lords.
+When a person is not read by character, the position or profession is
+called on to supply raised print for the finger-ends to spell.
+
+Hard on poor Fredi! was Victor's thought behind the smile he bent on this
+bald Cupid.  She deserved a more poetical lover!  His paternal sympathies
+for the girl besought in love, revived his past feelings as a wooer;
+nothing but a dread of the influence of Mr. Barmby's toned eloquence upon
+the girl, after her listening to Dudley Sowerby's addresses, checked his
+contempt for the latter.  He could not despise the suitor he sided with
+against another and seemingly now a more dangerous.  Unable quite to
+repress the sentiment, he proceeded immediately to put it to his uses.
+For we have no need to be scrupulously formal and precise in the
+exposition of circumstances to a fellow who may thank the stars if such a
+girl condescends to give him a hearing.  He had this idea through the
+conception of his girl's generosity.  And furthermore, the cognizant eye
+of a Lucretian Alma Mater having seat so strongly in Victor, demanded as
+a right an effusion of the promising amorous graces on the part of the
+acceptable applicant to the post of husband of that peerless.  These
+being absent, evidently non-existent, it seemed sufficient for the
+present, after the fashion of the young gentleman, to capitulate the few
+material matters briefly.
+
+They were dotted along with a fine disregard of the stateliness of the
+sum to be settled on Nesta Victoria, and with a distant but burning wish
+all the while, that the suitor had been one to touch his heart and open
+it, inspiriting it--as could have been done--to disclose for good and all
+the things utterable.  Victor loved clear honesty, as he loved light: and
+though he hated to be accused of not showing a clean face in the light,
+he would have been moved and lifted to confess to a spot by the touch at
+his heart.  Dudley Sowerby's deficiencies, however, were outweighed by
+the palpable advantages of his birth, his prospects, and his good repute
+for conduct; add thereto his gentlemanly manners.  Victor sighed again
+over his poor Fredi; and in telling Mr. Sowerby that the choice must be
+left to her, he had the regrets of a man aware of his persuasive arts and
+how they would be used, to think that he was actually making the choice.
+
+Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine of it; he is no
+longer the man of his tastes or of his principles; he is on a line of
+rails for a terminus; and he may cast languishing eyes across waysides to
+right and left, he has doomed himself to proceed, with a self-devouring
+hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at the embrace of it.
+This may be or not, but Nature has decreed to him the forfeit of
+pleasure.  She bids us count the passage of a sober day for the service
+of the morrow; that is her system; and she would have us adopt it, to
+keep in us the keen edge for cutting, which is the guarantee of
+enjoyment: doing otherwise, we lose ourselves in one or other of the
+furious matrix instincts; we are blunt to all else.
+
+Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with Miss Radnor; he
+alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments.  He was waxing to
+fervidness.  He said he must expect competitors; adding, on a start, that
+he was to say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to
+present Miss Radnor at Court .  .  .  .
+
+Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head had come out
+of hot water.  He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities, under a kind of
+sneer at its functions: 'Court!  my girl?  But the arduous duties are
+over for the season.  We are a democratic people retaining the seductions
+of monarchy, as a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count
+among the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court
+presentations; no harm.  Only there's plenty of time .  .  .  very young
+girls have their heads turned--though I don't say, don't imagine, my girl
+would.  By and by perhaps.'
+
+Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling's room and introduced to the figure-
+head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor: a respectable City
+merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse of the downright
+contrast to his partner.  He had heard casual remarks on the respectable
+City of London merchant from Colney Durance.  A short analytical gaze at
+him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man who kept him up.  Mr.
+Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a line of City
+merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as drovers, they tell
+us, can single one from another of their round-bellied beasts.  Formerly
+the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of restiveness,
+kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor's obedient cart-horse.  He
+sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when, like trouts in
+the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good things to
+fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated
+interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to
+make it our national Poem.
+
+Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still
+somehow constantly allotted to him.  His wife believed in Victor, and
+deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain.  Since that
+lamentable loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory
+of Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad
+against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the
+pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man who
+speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried onward and
+onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction, in
+perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at a
+turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor.  He had
+never forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous purchase of
+Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his share
+of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the
+bargain had come to Victor.  Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion
+from that disquieting period.  He assented to the praise of Victor's
+genius, admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and consequently
+his head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his quondam
+comfortable feeling of security.  And if you will imagine the sprite of
+the aggregate English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the malignant who
+has despoiled him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once had from his
+God Neptune against invaders, you will comprehend the state of Mr.
+Inchling's mind in regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very
+disturbing partner.
+
+He thanked heaven to his wife often, that he had nothing to do with North
+American or South American mines and pastures or with South Africa and,
+gold and diamonds: and a wife must sometimes listen, mastering her inward
+comparisons.  Dr. Schlesien had met and meditated on this example of the
+island energy.  Mr. Inchling was not permitted by his wife to be much the
+guest of the Radnor household, because of the frequent meeting there with
+Colney Durance; Colney's humour for satire being instantly in bristle at
+sight of his representative of English City merchants: 'over whom,' as he
+wrote of the venerable body, 'the disciplined and instructed Germans not
+deviously march; whom acute and adventurous Americans, with half a cock
+of the eye in passing, compassionately outstrip.'  He and Dr. Schlesien
+agreed upon Mr. Inchling.  Meantime the latter gentleman did his part at
+the tables of the wealthier City Companies, and retained his appearance
+of health; he was beginning to think, upon a calculation of the increased
+treasures of those Companies and the country, that we, the Taxpayer,
+ought not to leave it altogether to Providence to defend them;
+notwithstanding the watchful care of us hitherto shown by our briny
+Providence, to save us from anxiety and expense.  But there are, he said,
+'difficulties'; and the very word could stop him, as commonly when our
+difficulty lies in the exercise of thinking.
+
+Victor's African room, containing large wall-maps of auriferous regions,
+was inspected; and another, where clerks were busy over miscellaneous
+Continents.  Dudley Sowerby hoped he might win the maiden.
+
+He and Victor walked in company Westward.  The shop of Boyle and
+Luckwort, chemists, was not passed on this occasion.  Dudley grieved that
+he had to be absent from the next Concert for practise, owing to his
+engagement to his mother to go down to the family seat near Tunbridge
+Wells.  Victor mentioned his relatives, the Duvidney maiden ladies,
+residing near the Wells.  They measured the distance between Cronidge and
+Moorsedge, the two houses, as for half an hour on horseback.
+
+Nesta told her father at home that the pair of them had been observed
+confidentially arm in arm, and conversing so profoundly.
+
+'Who, do you think, was the topic?' Victor asked.
+
+She would not chase the little blue butterfly of a guess.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Ask not why, where reason never was
+Cover of action as an escape from perplexity
+Honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction
+Judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals
+Memory inspired by the sensations
+Nature could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty
+Satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher
+Slave of existing conventions
+Startled by the criticism in laughter
+The impalpable which has prevailing weight
+There is little to be learnt when a little is known
+They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night
+Who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+**********************************************************************
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of One of Our Conquerors, v2, by Meredith
+********This file should be named gm78v10.txt or gm78v10.zip**********
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, gm78v11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gm78v10a.txt
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+More information about this book is at the top of this file.
+
+We are now trying to release all our etexts one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+https://gutenberg.org or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+etexts, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+The most recent list of states, along with all methods for donations
+(including credit card donations and international donations), may be
+found online at https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information at:
+
+https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this etext,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart
+and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.]
+[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales
+of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or
+software or any other related product without express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END*
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of One of Our Conquerors, v2,
+by George Meredith
+
diff --git a/old/4472.zip b/old/4472.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..feb2bbd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4472.zip