6 files changed, 4401 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/4478-0.txt b/4478-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4605e14
--- /dev/null
+++ b/4478-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1993 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4478 ***
+
+LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA.
+
+By George Meredith
+
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+VI.       IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR
+VII.      EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES
+VIII.     MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY
+IX.       A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR
+X.        A SHORT PASSAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO
+XI.       THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR
+
+Up in Aminta's amber dressing-room; Mrs. Nargett Pagnell alluded sadly to
+the long month of separation, and begged her niece to let her have in
+plain words an exact statement of the present situation; adding, "Items
+will do."  Thereupon she slipped into prattle and held the field.
+
+She was the known, worthy, good, intolerable woman whom the burgess turns
+out for his world in regiments, that do and look and all but step alike;
+and they mean well, and have conventional worships and material
+aspirations, and very peculiar occult refinements, with a blind head and
+a haphazard gleam of acuteness, impressive to acquaintances, convincing
+themselves that they impersonate sagacity.  She had said this, done that;
+and it was, by proof, Providence consenting, the right thing.  A niece,
+written down in her girlhood, because of her eyes and her striking air
+and excellent deportment, as mate for a nobleman, marries, him before she
+is out of her teens.  "I said, She shall be a countess."  A countess she
+is.  Providence does not comply with our predictions in order to stultify
+us.  Admitting the position of affairs for the moment as extraordinary,
+we are bound by what has happened to expect they will be conformable in
+the end.  Temporarily warped, we should say of them.
+
+She could point to the reason: it was Lord Ormont's blunt
+misunderstanding of her character.  The burgess's daughter was refining
+to an appreciation of the exquisite so rapidly that she could criticize
+patricians.  My lord had never forgiven her for correcting him in his
+pronunciation of her name by marriage.  Singular indeed; but men, even
+great men, men of title, are so, some of them, whom you could least
+suspect of their being so.  He would speak the "g" in Nargett, and he,
+declined--after a remonstrance he declined--to pass Pagnell under the
+cedilla.  Lord Ormont spoke the name like a man hating it, or an English
+rustic: "Nargett Pagnell," instead, of the soft and elegant "Naryett
+Pagnell," the only true way of speaking it; and she had always taken that
+pronunciation of her name for a test of people's breeding.  The
+expression of his lordship's countenance under correction was memorable.
+Naturally, in those honeymoony days, the young Countess of Ormont sided
+with her husband the earl; she declared that her aunt had never dreamed
+of the cedilla before the expedition to Spain.  When, for example, Alfred
+Nargett Pagnell had a laughing remark, which Aminta in her childhood must
+have heard: "We rhyme with spaniel!"
+
+That was the secret of Lord Ormont's prepossession against Aminta's aunt;
+and who can tell? perhaps of much of his behaviour to the beautiful young
+wife he at least admired, sincerely admired, though he caused her to hang
+her head--cast a cloud on the head so dear to him!
+
+Otherwise there was no interpreting his lordship.  To think of herself as
+personally disliked by a nobleman stupefied Mrs. Pagnell, from her just
+expectation of reciprocal dealings in high society; for she confessed
+herself a fly to a title.  Where is the shame, if titles are created to
+attract?  Elsewhere than in that upper circle, we may anticipate hard
+bargains; the widow of a solicitor had not to learn it.  But when a
+distinguished member and ornament of the chosen seats above blew cold
+upon their gesticulatory devotee, and was besides ungrateful; she was
+more than commonly assured of his being, as she called him, "a sphinx."
+His behaviour to his legally wedded wife confirmed the charge.
+
+She checked her flow to resume the question.  "So, then, where are we
+now?  He allows you liberally for pin-money in addition to your own small
+independent income.  Satisfaction with that would warrant him to suppose
+his whole duty done by you."
+
+"We are where we were, aunty; the month has made no change," said Aminta
+in languor.
+
+"And you as patient as ever?"
+
+"I am supposed to have everything a woman can require."
+
+"Can he possibly think it?  And I have to warn you, child, that lawyers
+are not so absolving as the world is with some of the ladies Lord Ormont
+allows you to call your friends.  I have been hearing--it is not mere
+airy tales one hears from lawyers about cases in Courts of Law.  Tighten
+your lips as you like; I say nothing to condemn or reflect on Mrs.
+Lawrence Finchley.  I have had my eyes a little opened, that is all.  Oh,
+I know my niece Aminta, when it's a friend to stand by; but our position
+--thanks to your inscrutable lord and master--demands of us the utmost
+scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl and scandal flying about, and
+those lawyers picking up and putting together.  I have had a difficulty
+to persuade them!... and my own niece! whom I saw married at the British
+Embassy in Madrid, as I take good care to tell everybody; for it was my
+doing; I am the responsible person! and by an English Protestant
+clergyman, to all appearance able to walk erect in and out of any of
+these excellent new Life Assurance offices they are starting for the
+benefit of widows and orphans, and deceased within six days of the
+ceremony--if ceremony one may call the hasty affair in those foreign
+places.  My dear, the instant I heard it I had a presentiment, 'All has
+gone well up to now.'  I remember murmuring the words.  Then your letter,
+received in that smelly Barcelona: Lord Ormont was carrying you off to
+Granada--a dream of my infancy!  It may not have been his manoeuvre, but
+it was the beginning of his manoeuvres."
+
+Aminta shuddered.  "And tra-la-la, and castanets, and my Cid! my Cid! and
+the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di me, Alhama; and Boabdil el
+Chico and el Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida!"  She flung out the rattle,
+yawning, with her arms up and her head back, in the posture of a woman
+wounded.  One of her aunt's chance shots had traversed her breast,
+flashing at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness on
+sword-edges of shade,--and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping mask,
+romance in its anatomy, cold English mist.  Ah, what a background is the
+present when we have the past to the fore!  That filmy past is diaphanous
+on heaving ribs.
+
+She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip.  "Don't speak of manaoeuvres,
+dear aunt.  And we'll leave Granada to the poets.  I'm tired.  Talk of
+our own people, on your side and my father's, and as much as you please
+of the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me.  Do they go on marrying?"
+
+"Why, my child, how could they go on without it?"
+
+Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids.  "Oh, me!" she sighed, feeling
+the tear come with a sting from checked laughter.  "But there are
+marriages, aunty, that don't go on, though Protestant clergymen
+officiated.  Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell."
+
+"You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?"
+
+"Lady Charlotte Eglett?  No syllable.  Or wait--my lord's secretary was
+with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose."
+
+"There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make a man
+like Lord Ormont afraid of her.  And no doubt she is of our old
+aristocracy.  And they tell me she is coarse in her conversation--like a
+man.  Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation.  Years back,
+I am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an
+example.  Lawyers hear next to everything.  I am told she lifted her
+horsewhip on a gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him
+down.  You will say, the sister of your husband.  No; not to make my
+niece a countess, would I, if I had known the kind of family!  Then one
+asks, Is she half as much afraid of him?  In that case, no wonder they
+have given up meeting.  Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties.  Well,
+Lady Eglett, and Aminta, Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as
+they call it, let her only have her dues.  My dear, I would--if I ever
+did--swear the woman is jealous."
+
+"Of me, aunty!"
+
+"I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if
+somebody had his twitch of jealousy.  Wives may be too meek.  Cases and
+cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought to
+his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most
+innocent of wives.  A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are
+poisons that cure.  It might come into the courts; and the nearer the
+proofs the happier he in withdrawing from his charge and effecting a
+reconciliation.  Short of guilt, of course.  Men are so strange.  Imagine
+now, if a handsome young woman were known to be admired rather more than
+enough by a good-looking gentleman near about her own age.  Oh, I've no
+patience with, the man for causing us to think and scheme!  Only there
+are men who won't be set right unless we do. My husband used to say,
+change is such a capital thing in life's jogtrot; that men find it
+refreshing if we now and then, reverse the order of our pillion-riding
+for them.  A spiritless woman in a wife is what they bear least of all.
+Anything rather.  Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's
+house as usual?"
+
+Aminta's cheeks unrolled their deep damask rose at the abrupt intrusion
+of the name.  "I meet him there."
+
+"Lord Adderwood, Sir John Randeller; and the rest?"
+
+"Two or three times a week."
+
+"And the lady, wife of the captain, really a Lady Fair--Mrs....  month of
+May: so I have to get at it."
+
+"She may be seen there."
+
+"Really a contrast, when you two are together!  As to reputation, there
+is an exchange of colours.  Those lawyers hold the keys of the great
+world, and a naughty world it is, I fear--with exceptions, who are the
+salt, but don't taste so much.  I can't help enjoying the people at Mrs.
+Lawrence Finchley's.  I like to feel I can amuse them, as they do me.
+One puzzles for what they say--in somebody's absence, I mean.  They must
+take Lord Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to
+think they may despise him, or suppose him indifferent.  Oh, that upper
+class!  It's a garden, and we can't help pushing to enter it; and fair
+flowers, indeed, but serpents too, like the tropics.  It tries us more
+than anything else in the world--well, just as good eating tries the
+constitution.  He ought to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the
+protection of his name, instead of--not that he denies: I have brought
+him to that point; he cannot deny it with me.  But not to present her--to
+shun the Court; not to introduce her to his family, to appear ashamed of
+her!  My darling Aminta, a month of absence for reflection on your
+legally-wedded husband's conduct increases my astonishment.  For usually
+men old enough to be the grandfathers of their wives--"
+
+"Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray!" Aminta cried, and her body writhed.  "No
+more to-night.  You mean well, I am sure.  Let us wait.  I shall sleep,
+perhaps, if I go to bed early.  I dare say I am spiritless--not worth
+more than I get.  I gave him the lead altogether; he keeps it.  In
+everything else he is kind; I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe
+them.  Kiss me and say good night."
+
+Aminta made it imperative by rising.  Her aunt stood up, kissed, and
+exclaimed, "I tell you you are a queenly creature, not to be treated as
+any puny trollop of a handmaid.  And although he is a great nobleman, he
+is not to presume to behave any longer, my dear, as if your family had no
+claim on his consideration.  My husband, Alfred Pagnell, would have laid
+that before him pretty quick.  You are the child of the Farrells and the
+Solers, both old families; on your father's side you are linked with the
+oldest nobility in Europe.  It flushes one to think of it!  Your
+grandmother, marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the legitimate
+daughter of a Grandee of Spain; as I have told Lord Ormont often, and I
+defy him to equal that for a romantic marriage in the annals of his
+house, or boast of bluer blood.  Again, the Solers--"
+
+"We take the Solers for granted, aunty, good night."
+
+"Commoners, if you like; but established since the Conquest.  That is,
+we trace the pedigree.  And to be treated, even by a great nobleman, as
+if we were stuff picked up out of the ditch!  I declare, there are times
+when I sit and think and boil.  Is it chivalrous, is it generous--is it,
+I say, decent--is it what Alfred would have called a fair fulfilment of a
+pact, for your wedded husband--?  You may close my mouth!  But he
+pretends to be chivalrous and generous, and he has won a queen any
+wealthy gentleman in England--I know of one, if not two--would be proud
+to have beside him in equal state; and what is he to her?  He is an
+extinguisher.  Or is it the very meanest miserliness, that he may keep
+you all to himself?  There we are again!  I say he is an unreadable
+sphinx."
+
+Aminta had rung the bell for her maid.  Mrs. Pagnell could be counted on
+for drawing in her tongue when the domestics were near.
+
+A languor past delivery in sighs was on the young woman's breast.  She
+could have heard without a regret that the heart was to cease beating.
+Had it been downright misery she would have looked about her with less of
+her exanimate glassiness.  The unhappy have a form of life: until they
+are worn out, they feel keenly.  She felt nothing.  The blow to her pride
+of station and womanhood struck on numbed sensations.  She could complain
+that the blow was not heavier.
+
+A letter lying in her jewel-box called her to read it, for the chance of
+some slight stir.  The contents were known.  The signature of Adolphus
+Morsfield had a new meaning for her eyes, and dashed her at her husband
+in a spasm of revolt and wrath against the man exposing her to these
+letters, which a motion of her hand could turn to blood, and abstention
+from any sign maintained in a Satanic whisper, saying, "Here lies one way
+of solving the riddle."  It was her husband who drove her to look that
+way.
+
+The look was transient, and the wrath: she could not burn.  A small
+portion of contempt lodged in her mind to shadow husbands precipitating
+women on their armoury for a taste of vengeance.  Women can always be
+revenged--so speedily, so completely: they have but to dip.  Husbands
+driving wives to taste their power execrate the creature for her fall
+deep downward.  They are forgetful of causes.
+
+Does it matter?  Aminta's languor asked.  The letter had not won a reply.
+Thought of the briefest of replies was a mountain of effort, and she
+moaned at her nervelessness in body and mind.  To reply, to reproach the
+man, to be flame--an image of herself under the form she desired--gave
+her a momentary false energy, wherein the daring of the man, whose life
+was at a loss for the writing of this letter, hung lighted.  She had
+therewith a sharp vision of his features, repellent in correctness, Greek
+in lines, with close eyes, hollow temples, pressed lips--a face
+indicating the man who can fling himself on a die.  She had heard tales
+of women and the man.  Some had loved him, report said.  Here were words
+to say that he loved her.  They might, poor man, be true.  Otherwise she
+had never been loved.
+
+Memory had of late been paying visits to a droopy plant in the golden
+summer drought on a gorgeous mid-sea island, and had taken her on board
+to refresh her with voyages, always bearing down full sail on a couple of
+blissful schools, abodes of bloom and briny vigour, sweet merriment,
+innocent longings, dreams the shyest, dreams the mightiest.  At night
+before sleep, at morn before rising, often during day, and when vexed or
+when dispirited, she had issued her command for the voyage.  Sheer
+refreshment followed, as is ever the case if our vessel carries no
+freight of hopes.  There could be no hopes.  It was forgotten that they
+had ever been seriously alive.  But it carried an admiration.  Now, an
+admiration may endure, and this one had been justified all round.  The
+figure heroical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed Aminta's past.  The
+past of a bitterly  humiliated Aminta was a garden in the coming kiss of
+sunset, with that godlike figure of young manhood to hallow it.  There he
+stayed, perpetually assuring her of his triumphs to come.
+
+She could have no further voyages.  Ridicule convulsed her home of
+refuge.  For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was
+one thing; but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for
+the thirst of glory, accused his nature.  He so certainly involved her in
+the burlesque of the transformation that she had to quench memory.
+
+She was, therefore, having smothered a good part of herself, accountably
+languid--a condition alternating with fire in Aminta; and as Mr.
+Morsfield's letter supplied the absent element, her needy instinct pushed
+her to read his letter through.  She had not yet done that with
+attention.
+
+Whether a woman loves a man or not, he is her lover if he dare tell her
+he loves her, and is heard with attention.  Aware that the sentences were
+poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step
+proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the
+madness.  Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to
+read?  or rather, to brood upon what she read.  The brooding ensued, was
+the thirst of her malady.  The best antidote she could hit on was the
+writer's face.  Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage--gifts she
+respected in him, found wanting in herself.  Read by Lord Ormont, this
+letter would mean a deadly thing.
+
+Aminta did her lord the justice to feel sure of him, that with her name
+bearing the superscription, it might be left on her table, and world not
+have him to peruse it.  If he manoeuvred, it was never basely.  Despite
+resentment, her deepest heart denied his being indifferent either to her
+honour or his own in relation to it.  He would vindicate both at a
+stroke, for a sign.  Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly.  She
+charged on him the guilt of the small preludes, archeries, anglings,
+veilings, evasions, all done with the eyelids and the mute of the lips,
+or a skirmisher word or a fan's flourish, and which, intended to pique
+the husband rather than incite the lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Finchley
+to murmur at her ear, in close assembly, without a distinct designation
+of Mr. Morsfield, "Dangerous man to play little games with!"  It had
+brought upon her this letter of declaration, proposal, entreaty.
+
+This letter was the man's life in her hands, and safe, of course.  But
+surely it was a proof that the man loved her?
+
+Aminta was in her five-and-twentieth year; when the woman who is
+uncertain of the having been loved, and she reputed beautiful, desirable,
+is impelled by a sombre necessity to muse on a declaration, and nibble at
+an idea of a test.  If "a dangerous man to play little games with," he
+could scarcely be dangerous to a woman having no love for him at all.  It
+meant merely that he would soon fall to writing letters like this, and he
+could not expect an answer to it.  But her heart really thanked him, and
+wished the poor gentleman to take its dumb response as his reward, for
+being the one sole one who had loved her.
+
+Aminta dwelt on "the one sole one."  Lord Ormont's treatment had detached
+her from any belief in love on his part; and the schoolboy, now ambitions
+to become a schoolmaster, was behind the screen unlikely to be lifted
+again by a woman valuing her pride of youth, though he had--behold our
+deceptions!--the sympathetic face entirely absent from that of Mr.
+Adolphus Morsfield, whom the world would count quite as handsome--nay, it
+boasted him.  He enjoyed the reputation of a killer of ladies.  Women
+have odd tastes, Aminta thought, and examined the gentleman's
+handwriting.  It pleased her better.  She studied it till the
+conventional phrases took a fiery hue, and came at her with an invasive
+rush.
+
+The letter was cast back into the box, locked up; there an end to it, or
+no interdiction of sleep.
+
+Sleep was a triumph.  Aminta's healthy frame rode her over petty
+agitations of a blood uninflamed, as lightly as she swam the troubled
+sea-waters her body gloried to cleave.  She woke in the morning peaceful
+and mildly reflective, like one who walks across green meadows.  Only by
+degrees, by glimpses, was she drawn to remember the trotting, cantering,
+galloping, leaping of an active heart during night.  We cannot, men or
+woman, control the heart in sleep at night.  There had been wild
+leapings.  Night will lead an unsatisfied heart of a woman, by way of
+sleep, to scale black mountains, jump jagged chasms.  Sleep is a horse
+that laughs at precipices and abysses.  We bid women, moreover, be all
+heart.  They are to cultivate their hearts, pay much heed to their
+hearts.  The vast realm of feeling is open to these appointed keepers of
+the sanctuary household, who may be withering virgins, may be childless
+matrons, may be unhusbanded wives.  Wandering in the vast realm which
+they are exhorted to call their own, for the additional attractiveness it
+gives them, an unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat audaciously cross
+the borderland a single step into the public road of the vast realm of
+thinking.  Once there, and but a single step on the road, she is a rebel
+against man's law for her sex.  Nor is it urgent on her that she should
+think defiantly in order to feel herself the rebel.  She may think
+submissively; with a heart (the enlarged, the scientifically plumped, the
+pasture of epicurean man), with her coveted heart in revolt, and from the
+mere act of thinking at all.
+
+Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the near-to-
+happiness ratings over-night.  She thinned her lips, and her cheeks
+glowed.  An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her.  The choice
+now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think.  She took the
+latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women
+educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held
+a candle in a windy darkness.  She saw no Justice there.  The sensational
+immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required for
+the true sublime.  And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any
+realm!  Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they
+feel when it is refused them.  When they know they feel, they have begun
+to reflect.  The void of Justice is  a godless region.  Women, to whom
+the solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes
+of their storm, ask themselves whether they are God's creatures or man's.
+The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their
+human masters.  Young women, animated by the passions their feeling
+bosoms of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish
+an abstract justice from a concrete.  They are of the tribe too long
+hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract.  So it is with them, that
+their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of
+boys.  He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter--the
+Biblical Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to
+confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance.  By such a
+maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth.  If
+women can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they
+belong to God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they will
+set the one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other, urging
+them unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and his laws
+altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who shines in
+thought.  It is a manner whereby the desperately harried among these
+creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an agreeable,
+almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.
+
+There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
+sensible to the pulses of his audience.  Justice compels at times.  In
+truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
+comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
+unexplained.  Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
+traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft brown
+of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
+overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
+as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
+heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.
+
+Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him.  Her
+will could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her to
+pique the mailed veteran.  Every poor innocent little bit of an art had
+been exhausted.  Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually slave.
+A luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly
+enfranchised set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord
+Adderwood; Sir John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May,
+notorious wife of a fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and other
+ladies, other gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not yet
+paired: gossip raged.  Aminta was of a disposition too generously cordial
+to let her be the rigorous critic of people with whom she was in touch.
+But her mind knew relief when she recollected that her humble little
+school-mate, Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in old days,
+was coming up to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a week.
+However much a slave and an unloved woman, she could be a constant and
+protecting friend.  Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little Selina.
+She thought of his remarks about the modest-minded girl after first
+seeing her.  From that she struck upon a notion of reserves of humaneness
+being in him, if she might find the path to them: and thence, fortified
+by the repose her picture of little Selina's merit had bestowed, she
+sprang to the idea of valiancy, that she would woo him to listen to her,
+without inflicting a scene.  He had been a listening lover, seeming
+lover, once, later than the Granada sunsets.  The letter in her jewel-box
+urged Aminta to clear her conscience by some means, for leaving it
+unburnt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES
+
+The rules in Lord Ormont's household assisted to shelter him for some
+hours of the day from the lady who was like a blast of sirocco under his
+roof.  He had his breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it at Olmer;
+a dislike of a common table in the morning was a family trait with both.
+At ten o'clock the secretary arrived, and they were shut up together.
+At the luncheon table Aminta usually presided.  If my lord dined at home,
+he had by that time established an equanimity rendering, his constant
+civility to Mrs. Pagnell less arduous.  The presence of a woman of
+tongue, perpetually on the spring to gratify him and win him, was among
+the burdens he bore for his Aminta.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the secretary was in favour.  My lord
+and this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes of conversation, upon which the
+wary aunt of her niece did not gaze like the wintry sun with the distant
+smile her niece displayed over discussions concerning military
+biographies, Hannibal's use of his elephants and his Numidian horse, the
+Little St. Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, English and
+Genoese bowmen, Napoleon's tactics, his command to the troopers to "give
+point,"  and English officers' neglect of sword exercise, and the "devil
+of a day" Old England is to have on a day to come.  My lord connected our
+day of trial with India.  Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious
+interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might
+know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying
+exalted minds.  Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated
+gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.
+
+The secretary behaved with a pretty civility.  Aminta shook herself to
+think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put
+interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal's example and train
+elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of
+our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from
+their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised of
+being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense of
+the excellent motive which impelled them.  Even to the Countess of
+Ormont, she could have replied, "We might have given them a higher idea
+of us"--if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field
+beside her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta.  She hinted as much
+subsequently, and Aminta's consciousness of the troth was touched.  The
+young schoolmaster's company sat on her spirits, deadened her vocabulary.
+Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the two gentlemen
+loudly laughing.  It seemed subserviency on the fallen young hero's part.
+His tastes were low.  He frequented the haunts of boxing men; her lord
+informed her of his having made, or of his making, matches to run or swim
+or walk certain distances against competitors or within a given time.
+He had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom he raced out of town
+on Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to form.
+
+But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where was a
+blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's cap on the head whose golden
+helm was fired by Pallas?
+
+Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger
+on his meanness of nature.
+
+Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if
+she consents to an exchange of letters--shameful indeed, but not such a
+feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an
+object of admiration degraded.  Bad she may be; and she may be deceived,
+vilely treated, in either case.  And what is a woman's pride but the
+staff and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts?  He who wounds it cannot
+be forgiven--never!--he has killed the best of her.  Aminta found herself
+sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a girl's
+worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an
+infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman's possible reckless
+fit of giddiness.  And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct
+it.  Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent
+about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the
+discovered meanness of the girl's idol.  Her wicked memory was caused
+by his having plunged her low.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu of
+the countess, who seemed to find it a task to sit at the luncheon table
+with him, when Lady Ormont was absent.  "Just peeped in," she said as she
+entered the library, "to see if all was comfortable;" and gossip ensued,
+not devoid of object.  She extracted an astonishingly smooth description
+of Lady Charlotte.  Weyburn was brightness in speaking of the much-
+misunderstood lady.  "She's one of the living women of the world."
+
+"You are sure you don't mean one of the worldly women?" Mrs. Pagnell
+rejoiced.
+
+"She has to be known to be liked," he owned.
+
+"And you were, one hears, among the favoured?"
+
+"I can scarcely pretend to that, ma'am."
+
+"You were recommended."
+
+"Lady Charlotte is devoted to her brother."
+
+Mrs. Pagnell's bosom heaved.  "How strange Lord Ormont is!  One would
+suppose, with his indignation at the country for its treatment of him,
+admirers would be welcome.  Oh dear, no! that is not the way.  On board
+the packet, on our voyage to Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring
+mercy of Neptune, as they say, I heard of Lord Ormont among the
+passengers.  I could hardly credit my ears.  For I had been hearing of
+him from my niece ever since her return from a select establishment for
+the education of young ladies, not much more than a morning's drive out
+of London, though Dover was my residence.  She had got a hero!  It was
+Lord Ormont!  Lord Ormont! all day: and when the behaviour of the country
+to him became notorious, Aminta--my niece the countess--she could hardly
+contain herself.  A secret:--I promised her--it's not known to Lord
+Ormont himself:--a printed letter in a metropolitan paper, copied into
+the provincial papers, upholding him for one of the greatest of our
+patriot soldiers and the saviour of India, was the work of her hands.
+You would, I am sure, think it really well written.  Meeting him on deck
+--the outline of the coast of Portugal for an introductory subject, our
+Peninsular battles and so forth--I spoke of her enthusiasm.  The effect
+was, to cut off all communication between us.  I had only to appear, Lord
+Ormont vanished.  I said to myself, this is a character.  However, the
+very mention of him to my niece, as one of the passengers on board--
+medicine, miraculous!  She was up in half an hour, out pacing the deck
+before evening, hardly leaning on my arm, and the colour positively
+beginning to show on her cheeks again.  He fled, of coarse.  I had
+prepared her for his eccentricities.  Next morning she was out by
+herself.  In the afternoon Lord Ormont strode up to us his--military
+step--and most courteously requested the honour of an introduction.  I
+had broken the ice at last; from that moment he was cordiality itself,
+until--I will not say, until he had called her his own--a few little
+misunderstandings!--not with his countess.  You see, a resident aunt is
+translated mother-in-law by husbands; though I spare them pretty
+frequently; I go to friends, they travel. Here in London she must have a
+duenna.  The marriage at Madrid, at the Embassy:--well, perhaps it was a
+step for us, for commoners, though we rank with the independent.  Has her
+own little pin-money--an inheritance.  Perhaps Lady Eglett gives the
+world her version.  She may say, there was aiming at station.  I reply,
+never was there a more whole-hearted love-match!  Absolutely the girl's
+heart has been his from the period of her school-days.  Oh! a little
+affair--she was persecuted by a boy at a neighbouring school.  Her
+mistress wrote me word--a very determined Romeo young gentleman indeed--
+quite alarmed about him.  In the bud! I carried her off on the spot, and
+snapped it effectually.  Warned he meant to be desperate, I kept her away
+from my house at Dover four months, place to place; and I did well.  I
+heard on my return, that a youth, answering to the schoolmistress's
+description of him, had been calling several times, the first two months
+and longer.  You have me alluding to these little nonsensical nothings,
+because she seemed born to create violent attachments, even at that early
+day; and Lady Eglett--Lady Charlotte Eglett may hear; for there is no end
+to them, and impute them to her, when really!--can she be made
+responsible for eyes innocent of the mischief they appear destined to do?
+But I am disturbing you in your work."
+
+"You are very good, ma'am," said the ghost of the determined young
+gentleman.
+
+"A slight cold, have you?" Mrs. Pagnell asked solicitously.
+
+"Dear me, no!" he gave answer with a cleared throat.
+
+In charging him with more than he wanted to carry, she supplied him with
+particulars he had wanted to know; and now he asked himself what could be
+the gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity regarding a married Aminta.
+She slew my lord on board a packet-boat; she bears the arrows that slay.
+My lord married her where the first English chaplain was to be found;
+that is not wonderful either.  British Embassy, Madrid!  Weyburn believed
+the ceremony to have been performed there: at the same time, he could
+hear Lady Charlotte's voice repeating with her varied intonation Mrs.
+Pagnell's impressive utterances; and he could imagine how the somewhat
+silly duenna aunt, so penetrable in her transparent artifices, struck
+emphasis on the incredulity of people inclined to judge of the reported
+ceremony by Lord Ormont's behaviour to his captive.
+
+How explain that strange matter?  But can there be a gain in trying to
+sound it?  Weyburn shuffled it away.  Before the fit of passion seized
+him, he could turn his eager mind from anything which had not a
+perceptible point of gain, either for bodily strength or mental
+acquisition, or for money, too, now that the school was growing palpable
+as an infant in arms and agape for the breast.  Thought of gain, and the
+bent to pursue it, is the shield of Athene over young men in the press of
+the seductions.  He had to confess his having lost some bits of himself
+by reason of his meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let it
+continue a space, will show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs, a
+wheezy wind, for any fellow vowed to physical trials of strength and
+skill.  It will show likewise in the brain beating broken wings--
+inability to shoot a thought up out of the body for half a minute.  And,
+good Lord! how quickly the tight-strong fellow crumbles, when once the
+fragmentary disintegration has begun!  Weyburn cried out on a heart that
+bounded off at prodigal gallops, and had to be nipped with reminders of
+the place of good leader he was for taking among the young.  Hang
+superexcellence! but we know those moanings over the troubles of a
+married woman; we know their sources, know their goal, or else we are the
+fiction-puppet or the Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married at
+the British Embassy, Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks'
+acquaintance with her husband, who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly
+in the registrar's book, but does not prove himself much the hero when he
+drives a pen, even for so little as the signing of his name!  He signed
+his name, apparently not more than partly pledging himself to the bond.
+Lord Ormont's autobiographical scraps combined with Lady Charlotte's
+hints and Mrs. Pagnell's communications, to provoke the secretary's
+literary contempt of his behaviour to his wife.  However, the former
+might be mended, and he resumed the task.
+
+It had the restorative effect of touching him to see his old hero in
+action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he
+really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the
+liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position.  Things
+constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively bobbings
+when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with Weyburn,
+until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to sail away
+in the society of the steadiest.
+
+He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the
+circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would
+best be able--probably it was the one way--to keep himself together; and
+his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he
+abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight.  For if one
+is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and enters
+us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has us as a
+foe.  The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an intimate
+knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within.  Safest for him,
+after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant person he
+was, both there and anywhere else.  The Countess of Ormont's manner
+toward him was to be read as a standing index of the course he should
+follow; and he thanked her.  He could not quite so sincerely thank her
+aunt.  His ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to him
+sprang a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account of
+services performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.
+
+Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord,
+removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.
+
+Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every shaft
+of the quiver of the rays at her disposal?  Or was it a shot from a
+powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor
+no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body?
+Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine.  Those
+eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in a
+throbbing Eden.  The man on whom they had looked shivered over the
+thought of it after years of blank division.
+
+Rather than have those eyes to look on him their displacing unintentness,
+the man on whom they had once looked love would have chosen looks of
+wrath, the darts that kill--blest darts of the celestial Huntress, giving
+sweet sudden cessation of pain, in the one everlasting last flash of life
+with thought that the shot was hers.  Oh for the 'ayava behea' of the
+Merciful in splendour!
+
+These were the outcries of the man deciding simultaneously not to
+observe, not to think, not to feel, and husbanding calculations upon
+storage of gain for the future.  Softness held the song below.  It came
+of the fact that his enforced resolution, for the sake of sanity, drove
+his whole reflective mind backward upon his younger days, when an Evening
+and a Morning star in him greeted the bright Goddess Browny or sang
+adieu, and adored beyond all golden beams the underworld whither she had
+sunk, where she was hidden.
+
+Meanwhile, the worthy dame who had dosed him was out in her carriage,
+busy paying visits to distinguished ladies of the great world, with the
+best of excuses for an early call, which was gossip to impart, such as
+the Countess of Ormont had not yet thought of mentioning; and two or
+three of them were rather amusedly interested to hear that Lord Ormont
+had engaged a handsome young secretary, "under the patronage of Lady
+Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by
+both."  Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing
+pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie.  Those
+flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of
+the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for one
+hour, they are open to take animation from their visitors.  Aminta was
+pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt of a note from Mrs. Lawrence
+Finchley, begging to be invited to lunch if she came, as she had a
+purpose in the wish to meet my lord.
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: The remainder of 'Lord Ormont and His Aminta' is taken from an
+older edition which uses single rather than double quotation marks.
+D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY
+
+My lord had one of his wilful likings for Isabella Lawrence Finchley,
+and he consented to the torture of an hour of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell in the
+middle of the day, just to taste the favourite he welcomed at home as he
+championed her abroad.  The reasons were numerous and intimate why she
+pleased him.  He liked the woman, enjoyed the cause for battle that she
+gave.  Weyburn, on coming to the luncheon table, beheld a lady with the
+head of a comely boy, the manner, softened in delicate feminine, of a
+capital comrade.  Her air of candour was her nature in her face; and it
+carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, a supersensual naughtiness,
+a simplicity of repose amid the smoky reputation she created, that led
+one to think the vapour calumnious or the creature privileged.  That
+young boy's look opened him at once; he had not to warm to her,--he flew.
+Ordinarily the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and
+cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are
+cleared away to grant us rights of citizenship. She was like those frank
+lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait
+for dubious inspection of it.
+
+She prevailed with cognizant men and with the frivolous.  Women were
+capable of appreciating her, too: as Aminta did, despite some hinted
+qualifications addressed shyly to her husband.  But these were the very
+matters exciting his particular esteem.  He was of Lady Charlotte's mind,
+in her hot zeal against injustice done to the creatures she despised; and
+yet more than she applauded a woman who took up her idiot husband's
+challenge to defend her good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, and
+beat him down on his knees, and then started for her spell of the merry
+canter over turf: an example to the English of the punishment they get
+for their stupid Puritanic tyranny--sure to be followed by a national
+helter-skelter down-hill headlong.  And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the
+corrupt, he argued; she concealed what it was decent to conceal, without
+pouting hypocritical pretences; she had merely dispensed with idle legal
+formalities, in the prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to divorce the
+man who tried to divorce her, and 'whined to be forgiven when he found he
+couldn't.  Adderwood was ready to marry her to-morrow, if the donkey
+husband would but go and bray his last.  Half a dozen others were heads
+off on the same course to that goal.'
+
+That was her champion's perusal of a lady candidly asserting her right
+to have breeched comrades, and paying for it in the advocacy which
+compromises.  She was taken to be and she was used as a weapon wherewith
+to strike at our Pharisees.  Women pushing out into the world for
+independence, bleed heavy payments all round.
+
+The earl's double-edged defence of her was partly a vindication of
+another husband, who allowed his wife to call her friend; he was
+nevertheless assured of her not being corrupt, both by his personal
+knowledge of the lady, and his perception of her image in the bosom of
+his wife.  She did no harm there, he knew well.  Although he was not a
+man to put his trust in faces, as his young secretary inclined to do,
+Mrs. Lawrence's look of honest boy did count among the pleadings.  And
+somewhat so might a government cruiser observe the intrusion of a white-
+sailed yacht in protected sea-waters, where licenced trawlers are at the
+haul.
+
+Talk over the table coursed as fluently as might be, with Mrs. Pagnell
+for a boulder in the stream.  Uninformed by malice, she led up to Lord
+Adderwood's name, and perhaps more designedly spoke of Mr. Morsfield, on
+whom her profound reading into the female heart of the class above her
+caused her to harp, as 'a real Antinous,' that the ladies might discuss
+him and Lord Ormont wax meditative.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence pitied the patient gentleman, while asking him in her mind
+who was the author of the domestic burden he had to bear.
+
+'It reminds me I have a mission,' she said.  'There's a fencing match
+down at a hall in the West, near the barracks; private and select:
+Soldier and Civilian; I forget who challenged--Civilian, one judges;
+Soldiers are the peaceful party.  They want you to act "umpire," as they
+call it, on the military side, my dear lord; and you will?--I have given
+my word you will bring Lady Ormont.  You will?--and not let me be
+confounded!  Yes, and we shall make a party.  I see consent.  Aminta will
+enjoy the switch of steel.  I love to see fencing.  It rouses all that is
+diabolical in me.'
+
+She sent a skimming look at the opposite.
+
+'And I,' said he, much freshened.
+
+'You fence?'
+
+'Handle the foils.'
+
+'If you must speak modestly!  Are you in practice?'
+
+'I spend in hour in Captain Chiallo's fencing rooms generally every
+evening before dinner.  I heard there the first outlines of the match
+proposed.  You are right; it was the civilian.'
+
+'Mr. Morsfield, as I suspected.'
+
+She smiled to herself, like one saying, Not badly managed, Mr. Morsfield!
+
+'Italian school?' Lord Ormont inquired, with a screw of the eyelids.
+
+'French, my lord.'
+
+'The only school for teaching.'
+
+'The simplest--has the most rational method.  Italians are apt to be
+tricky.  But they were masters once, and now and then they send out a
+fencer the French can't touch.'
+
+'How would you account for it?'
+
+'If I had to account for it, I should say, hotter blood, cool nerve,
+quick brain.'
+
+'Hum.  Where are we, then?'
+
+'We don't shine with the small sword.'
+
+'We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.'
+
+'We've had clever Irishmen.'
+
+'Hot enough blood!  This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with
+him?'
+
+'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found
+wary enough.'
+
+My lord hummed.  'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over
+steel.'
+
+'He can be dangerous.'
+
+The word struck on something, and rang.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips.  Her travelling eye
+met Aminta's and passed it.
+
+'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.
+
+'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!'  Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble
+assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at
+school under shadow of the master.
+
+She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a
+lesson?  They want it.'
+
+His answer was unheard by Aminta.  She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's
+pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the
+strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic
+attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly
+vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the
+vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood.
+Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the
+wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve
+that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly
+on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence
+Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild
+at his games.
+
+My lord hummed again.  'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing.  This
+fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes.  Show me your hand, sir.'
+
+Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants
+exercise.'
+
+'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at
+cricket.'
+
+'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,' Mrs.
+Pagnell remarked.
+
+He nodded to her and rose.
+
+Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so down
+he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing coffee;
+though he refused to finish a meal without his cup.
+
+'I think the palms do betray something,' said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta
+said: 'Everything betrays.'
+
+'No, my dear,' Mrs. Pagnell corrected her; 'the extremities betray, and
+we cannot read the centre.  Is it not so, my lord?'
+
+'It may be as you say, ma'am.'
+
+She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of
+palms, and especially his sphinx lordship's.
+
+Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish
+gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence's to a subdued
+good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on
+the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing-room.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell, 'quite enjoying the company,' as she told her niece, was
+dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's appointment, positive
+for three o'clock; and she had written it in her head 'p.m., four
+o'clock,' and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner's note; and she
+still had designs upon his lordship's palms, things to read and hint
+around her off the lines.  She departed.
+
+Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not
+marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more or
+less necessitating the infliction he groaned under.  He was too lofty to
+be questioned, even by his favourites.  Mrs. Lawrence conjured the ghost
+of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood's idea.
+Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting.  Pride froze a beginning
+stir in the bosom of Aminta.
+
+Her lord could captivate a reluctant woman's bosom when he was genial.
+He melted her and made her call up her bitterest pride to perform its
+recent office.  That might have failed; but it had support in a second
+letter received from the man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and by Mr.
+Weyburn 'dangerous'; and the thought of who it was that had precipitated
+her to 'play little games' for the sole sake of rousing him through
+jealousy to a sense of righteous duty, armed her desperately against him.
+She could exult in having read the second letter right through on receipt
+of it, and in remembering certain phrases; and notably in a reflection
+shot across her bewildered brain by one of the dangerous man's queer mad
+sentences: 'Be as iron as you like, I will strike you to heat'; and her
+thought: Is there assurance of safety in a perpetual defence?--all while
+she smiled on her genial lord, and signified agreement, with a smiting of
+wonderment at her heart, when he alluded to a panic shout of the country
+for defence, and said: 'Much crying of that kind weakens the power to
+defend when the real attack comes.'  Was it true?
+
+'But say what you propose?' she asked.
+
+Lord Ormont proposed vigilance and drill; a small degree of self-
+sacrifice on the part of the population, and a look-out head in the War
+Department.  He proposed to have a nation of stout-braced men laughing at
+the foreign bully or bandit, instead of being a pack of whimpering women;
+whom he likened to the randomly protestant geese of our country roadside,
+heads out a yard in a gabble of defence while they go backing.
+
+So thereupon Aminta's notion of a resemblance in the mutual thought
+subsided; she relapsed on the cushioning sentiment that she was a woman.
+And--only a woman! he might exclaim, if it pleased him; though he would
+never be able to say she was one of the whimpering.  She, too, had the
+choice to indulge in scorn of the superior man stone blind to proceedings
+intimately affecting him--if he cared!  One might doubt it.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence listened to him with a mind more disengaged, and a flitting
+disapproval of Aminta's unsympathetic ear, or reluctance to stimulate the
+devout attention a bruised warrior should have in his tent.  She did not
+press on him the post of umpire.  He consented--at her request, he said--
+to visit the show; but refused any official position that would, it was
+clearly enough implied, bring his name in any capacity whatever before
+the country which had unpardonably maltreated him.
+
+Feminine wits will be set working, when a point has been gained; and as
+Mrs. Lawrence could now say she had persuaded Lord Ormont to gratify her
+specially, she warmed to fancy she read him, and that she might have
+managed the wounded and angry giant.  Her minor intelligence, caracoling
+unhampered by harassing emotions, rebuked Aminta's for not perceiving
+that to win him round to whatever a woman may desire, she must be with
+him, outstrip him even, along the line he chooses for himself; abuse the
+country, rail at the Government, ridicule the title of English Army,
+proscribe the name of India in his hearing.  Little stings of jealousy
+are small insect bites, and do not pique a wounded giant hardly sensible
+of irritation under his huge, and as we assume for our purpose,
+justifiable wrath.  We have to speculate which way does the giant incline
+to go?  and turn him according to the indication.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence was driven by her critic mood to think Aminta relied--
+erroneously, after woman's old fashion--on the might of superb dark eyes
+after having been captured.  It seemed to her worse than a beautiful
+woman's vanity, a childishness.  But her boy's head held boy's brains;
+and Lord Ormont's praise of the splendid creature's nerve when she had to
+smell powder in Spain, and at bull-fights, and once at a wrecking of
+their carriage down a gully on the road over the Alpujarras, sent her
+away subdued, envious, happy to have kissed the cheek of the woman who
+could inspire it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR
+
+The winning of Lord Ormont's consent to look on at the little bout of
+arms was counted an achievement; for even in his own rarefied upper
+circle, where the fervid sentiments are not allowed to be seen plunging,
+he had his troop of enthusiasts; and they were anxious that he should
+make an appearance in public, to take what consolation a misunderstood
+and injured man could get from evidence of the grateful esteem
+entertained for him by a party of his countrymen, who might reasonably
+expect at the same time to set eyes, at rather close quarters, on the
+wonderful dark beauty, supposed a Spaniard, occasionally beheld riding
+beside him.  If it is possible to connect a woman with the devoutest of
+their anticipations, the sons of leisure up there will do it.  But, in
+truth, an English world was having cause to ransack the dust-heaps for
+neglected men of mettle.  Our intermittent ague, known as dread of
+invasion, was over the land.  Twice down the columns of panic newspaper
+correspondence Lord Ormont saw his name cited, with the effect on him
+that such signs of national repentance approaching lodged a crabbed
+sourness in his consulting-room, whether of head or breast.
+
+He was assailed by a gusty appeal from Lady Charlotte, bidding him seize
+the moment to proclaim his views while the secretary had a private
+missive from her, wherein, between insistency and supplication, she
+directed him to bring the subject before my lord every day, and be sure
+to write out a fair copy of the epistle previous to the transmission of
+it.  'Capua' was mentioned; she brought in 'a siren,' too.  Her brother
+was to be the soldier again--fling off silken bonds.  The world might
+prate of his morality; now was the hour for showing his patriotism,
+casting aside his just anger, and backing his chief's opinion.  'A good
+chance to get their names together.'  To her brother she declared that
+the columns of the leading journal were open to him--'in large type'; he
+was to take her word for it; he had only to 'dictate away,' quite at his
+ease, just as he talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe's
+business to his aide.  'Lose no time,' she concluded; 'the country wants
+your ideas; let us have your plan.'
+
+The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the
+Memoirs.  Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish
+stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a
+complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and
+a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.
+
+'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord
+Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet.  'Take a pen.  Shut up that
+box.  We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs.
+Invasion can't be done, they say!  I tell the doddered asses Napoleon
+would have been over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter.
+Villeneuve had a fit of paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson--
+that 's as it happened.  And they swear at prestige, won't believe in it,
+because it's not fat bacon.  I tell them, after Napoleon's first battles,
+prestige did half his work for him.  It saved him at Essling from a
+plunge into the Danube; it saved him at Moskowa;  it would have marched
+him half over England at his first jump on our shingle beach.  But that
+squelch of fat citizens should be told--to the devil with them! will they
+ever learn? short of a second William!--there were eight-and-forty hours
+when the liberty of this country hung wavering in the balance with those
+Boulogne boats.  Now look at Ulm and Austerlitz.  Essling, Wagram; put
+the victors in those little affairs to front our awkward squads.  The
+French could boast a regimental system, and chiefs who held them as the
+whist-player his hand of cards.  Had we a better general than the
+Archduke Charles? or cavalry and artillery equal to the Hungarian?
+or drilled infantry numbering within eighty thousand of the Boulogne-
+Wimereux camps?  We had nothing but the raw material of courage--pluck,
+and no science.  Ask any boxing man what he thinks of the chances.
+The French might have sacrificed a fleet to land fifty thousand.
+Our fleet was our one chance.  Any foreign General at the head of fifty
+thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut an 'entrechat' for
+joy of the chance.  We should have fought and bled and been marched over
+--a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble!  and Nelson riding the Channel,
+undisputed lord of the waters.  Heigh! by the Lord, this country would
+have been like a man free to rub his skin with his hand and a mortal
+disease in his blood.  Are you ready?  How anticipate a hostile march on
+the capital, is our business.'
+
+Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to
+dictate the practical measures for defence--detesting the cat's-cry
+'defence,' he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we
+should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn the
+mass into troops.  With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen soon
+get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as bat; and
+the sooner they give up the idea of shamming sturdy on a stiff hind leg,
+the better for their chances.  Only, it's a beastly thing to see that for
+their favourite attitude;--like some dog of a fellow weak in the fists,
+weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and prays his gods
+you won't.  All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and he beats his
+wife and kicks his curs at home.  Is there any one to help him now, he
+vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a felon.  Ha!
+
+Bull the bumpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the
+foeman's landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen;
+teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to
+let fly.  Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences,
+hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn.  Kent, Sussex, Surrey, all
+the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of the
+Hampshire heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior's brain.
+He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references to
+gazetteer or atlas.  A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to choose
+our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and place to
+give battle.  If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor to
+ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and
+volunteer horsemen are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry
+prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy mass,
+and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an acknowledged
+defeat.
+
+'That's English! yes, that's English! when they're at it,' my lord sang
+out.
+
+'To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,' cried Weyburn; his
+former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a reminiscence of
+the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper's.
+
+'They fall well.  Yes, the English fall like men,' said my lord,
+pardoning and embracing the cuffed nation.  'Bodies knocked over, hearts
+upright.  That's example; we breed Ironsides out of a sight like that.
+If it weren't for a cursed feeble Government scraping 'conges' to the
+taxpayer--well, so many of our good fellows would not have to fall.  That
+I say; for this thing is going to happen some day, mind you, sir!  And I
+don't want to have puncheons and hogsheads of our English blood poured
+out merely to water the soil of a conquered country because English
+Governments are a craven lot, not daring risk of office by offending the
+taxpayer.  But, on!'
+
+Weyburn sent Lady Charlotte glowing words of the composition in progress.
+
+They worked through a day, and a second day--talked of nothing else in
+the intervals.  Explanatory answers were vouchsafed to Aminta's modest
+inquiries at Finch, as she pictured scenes of smoke, dust and blood from
+the overpowering plain masculine lines they drew, terrible in bluntness.
+The third morning Lord Ormont had map and book to verify distances and
+attempt a scale of heights, take names of estates, farms, parishes,
+commons, patches of woodland.  Weyburn wrote his fair copy on folio
+paper, seven-and-thirty pages.  He read it aloud to the author on the
+afternoon of the fourth day, with the satisfaction in his voice that he
+felt.  My lord listened and nodded.  The plan for the defence of
+England's heart was a good plan.
+
+He signed to have the manuscript handed to him.  A fortified London
+secure of the Thames for abundant supplies, well able to breathe within
+earthworks extending along the southern hills, was clearly shown to stand
+the loss of two big battles on the Sussex weald or more East to North-
+east, if fortune willed it.
+
+He rose from his chair, paced some steps, with bent head, came back
+thoughtfully, lifted the manuscript sheets for another examination.
+Then he stooped to the fire, spreading the edges unevenly, so that they
+caught flame.  Weyburn spied at him.  It was to all appearance the doing
+of a man who had intended it and brought it to the predetermined
+conclusion.
+
+'About time for you to be off for your turn at Chiallo's,' our country's
+defender remarked, after tossing the last half-burnt lump under the grate
+and shovelling at it.
+
+'I will go, my lord,' said Weyburn--and he was glad to go.
+
+He went, calculated his term of service under Lord Ormont.  He was young,
+not a philosopher.  Waste of anything was abhorrent to a nature pointed
+at store of daily gain, if it were only the gain in a new or a freshened
+idea; and time lost, work lost, good counsel to the nation lost,
+represented horrid vacuity to him, and called up the counter
+demonstration of a dance down the halls of madness, for proof that we
+should, at least, have jolly motion of limbs there before Perdition
+struck the great gong.  Ay, and we should be twirling with a fair form on
+the arm: woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but
+together.  Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title
+of madness.  Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist
+burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a
+curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses
+rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old
+schoolboy words--take a licking!
+
+These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by
+Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of
+which they were the sign.  He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did
+no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of
+worship; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.
+
+The person criticized was manifest.  Who was the woman he twirled with?
+She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the sex, or all the sex: the
+sex to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the chosen
+one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift of our
+whole self for her.
+
+She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or
+seemed to murmur--for there was no sound--a complaint of Lord Ormont.
+And she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid
+military hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had no
+understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal life
+with him on earth.
+
+She was put aside rather petulantly, and she took her seat out of the
+whirl with submission.  Thinking she certainly was not Browny, whom he
+would have known among a million, he tried to quit the hall, and he
+twirled afresh, necessarily not alone; it is the unpardonable offence
+both to the Graces and the Great Mother for man to valse alone.  She
+twirled on his arm, uninvited; accepted, as in the course of nature;
+hugged, under dictate of the nature of the man steeled against her by the
+counting of gain, and going now at desperation's pace, by very means of
+those defensive locked steam-valves meant to preserve him from this
+madness,--for the words of the red-lipped mate, where there were no
+words, went through him like a music when the bow is over the viol,
+sweeping imagination, and they said her life was wasting.
+
+Was not she a priceless manuscript cast to the flames?  Her lord had been
+at some trouble to win her.  Or his great fame and his shadowed fortunes
+had won her.  He took her for his own, and he would not call her his own.
+He comported himself with absolute, with kindly deference to the lady
+whose more than vital spark he let the gossips puff at and blur.  He
+praised her courage, visibly admired her person, admitted her in private
+to be his equal, degraded her in public.  Could anything account for the
+behaviour of so manly and noble a gentleman?--Rhetoric made the attempt,
+and Weyburn gave up the windy business.
+
+Discovering that his fair partner of the wasting life was--he struggled
+to quench the revelation--Aminta, he stopped the dance.  If there was no
+gain in whirling fancifully with one of the sex, a spin of a minute with
+her was downright bankruptcy.
+
+He was young, full of blood; his heart led him away from the door Lord
+Ormont had exposed; at which a little patient unemotional watchfulness
+might have intimated to him something besides the simple source of the
+old hero's complex chapter of conduct.  As it was, Weyburn did see the
+rancour of a raw wound in operation.  But he moralized and disapproved;
+telling himself, truly enough, that so it would not have been with him;
+instead of sounding at my lord's character, and his condition of the
+unjustly neglected great soldier, for the purpose of asking how that raw
+wound would affect an injured veteran, who compressed, almost repressed,
+the roar of Achilles, though his military bright name was to him his
+Briseis.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A SHORT PASSAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO
+
+Politest of men in the domestic circle and everywhere among women, Lord
+Ormont was annoyed to find himself often gruffish behind the tie of his
+cravat.  Indeed, the temper of our eminently serene will feel the strain
+of a doldrum-dulness that is goaded to activity by a nettle.  The
+forbearance he carried farther than most could do was tempted to kick,
+under pressure of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell.  Without much blaming Aminta, on
+whose behalf he submitted to it, and whose resolution to fix in England
+had brought it to this crisis, he magnanimously proposed to the Fair
+Enemy he forced her to be, and liked to picture her as being, a month in
+Paris.
+
+Aminta declined it for herself; after six or more years of travelling,
+she wished to settle, and know her country, she said: a repetition
+remark, wide of the point, and indicatory to the game of Pull she was
+again playing beneath her smooth visage, unaware that she had the wariest
+of partners at the game.
+
+'But go you--do, I beg,' she entreated.  'It will give you new
+impressions; and I cannot bear to tie you down here.'
+
+'How you can consent to be tied down here, is the wonder to me!' said he.
+'When we travelled through the year, just visited England and were off
+again, we were driving on our own road.  Vienna in April and May--what do
+you say?  You like the reviews there, and the dances, concerts, Zigeuner
+bands, military Bohemian bands.  Or Egypt to-morrow, if you like--though
+you can't be permitted to swim in the Nile, as you wanted.  Come, Xarifa,
+speak it.  I go to exile without you.  Say you come.'
+
+She smiled firmly.  The name of her honeymoon days was not a cajolery to
+her.
+
+His name had been that of the Christian Romancero Knight Durandarte, and
+she gave it to him, to be on the proper level with him, while she still
+declined.
+
+'Well, but just a month in Paris!  There's nothing doing here.  And we
+both like the French theatre.'
+
+'London will soon be filling.'
+
+'Well, but--' He stopped; for the filling of London did really concern
+her, in the game of Pull she was covertly playing with him.  'You seem to
+have caught the fever of this London; .  .  .  no bands .  .  .  no
+reviews .  .  .  Low comedy acting.'  He muttered his objections to
+London.
+
+'The society of people speaking one's own tongue, add that,' she ventured
+to say.
+
+'You know you are ten times more Spanish than English.  Moorish, if you
+like.'
+
+'The slave of the gallant Christian Knight, converted, baptized, and
+blissful.  Oh, I know.  But now we are settled in England, I have a wish
+to study English society.'
+
+'Disappointing, I assure you;--dinners heavy, dancing boorish, intrigue a
+blind-man's-buff.  We've been over it all before !'
+
+'We have.'
+
+'Admired, I dare say.  You won't be understood.'
+
+'I like my countrymen.'
+
+'The women have good looks--of the ungarnished kind.  The men are louts.'
+
+'They are brave.'
+
+'You're to see their fencing.  You'll own a little goes a long way.'
+
+'I think it will amuse me.'
+
+'So I thought when I gave the nod to Isabella your friend.'
+
+'You like her?'
+
+'You, too.'
+
+'One fancies she would make an encouraging second in a duel.'
+
+'I will remember .  .  .  when I call you out.'
+
+'Oh, my dear lord, you have dozens to choose from leave me my one if we
+are to enter the lists.'
+
+'We are, it seems; unless you consent to take the run to Paris.  You are
+to say Tom or Rowsley.'
+
+'The former, I can never feel at home in saying;  Rowsley is Lady
+Charlotte's name for you.'
+
+The name of Lady Charlotte was an invitation to the conflict between
+them.  He passed it, and said 'Durandarte runs a mile on the mouth, and
+the Coriolanus of their newspapers helps a stage-player to make lantern
+jaws.  Neither of them comes well from the lips of my girl.  After seven
+years she should have hit on a nickname, of none of the Christian suit.
+I am not "at home" either with "my lord."  However, you send me off to
+Paris alone; and you'll be alone and dull here in this London.
+Incomprehensible to me why!'
+
+'We are both wondering?' said Aminta.
+
+'You 're handsomer than when I met you first--by heaven you are!'
+
+She flushed her dark brown-red late-sunset.  'Brunes are exceptional in
+England.'
+
+'Thousands admiring you, of course!  I know, my love, I have a jewel.'
+
+She asked him: 'What are jewels for?' and he replied, 'To excite
+cupidity.'
+
+'When they 're shut in a box?'
+
+'Ware burglars!  But this one is not shut up.  She shuts herself up.  And
+up go her shoulders!  Decide to be out of it, and come to Paris for some
+life for a month.  No?  It's positive?  When do you expect your little
+school friend?'
+
+'After Easter.  Aunt will be away.'
+
+'Your little friend likes the country.  I'll go to my house agents.  If
+there 's a country house open on the upper Thames, you can have swimming,
+boating, botanizing .  .  .'
+
+He saw her throat swallow.  But as he was offering agreeable things he
+chose to not understand how he was to be compassionate.
+
+'Steignton?' she said, and did her cause no good by saying it feebly.
+
+His look of a bygone awake-in-sleep old look, drearily known to her, was
+like a strip of sunlight on a fortress wall.  It signified, Is the poor
+soul pushing me back to that again?
+
+She compelled herself to say: 'Your tenant there?'
+
+'Matter of business .  .  .  me and my tenant,' he remarked.  'The man
+pays punctually.'
+
+'The lease has expired.'
+
+'Not quite.  You are misinformed.'
+
+'At Easter.'
+
+'Ah! Question of renewing.'
+
+'You were fond of the place.'
+
+'I was fond of the place?  Thank Blazes, I'm not what I was!' He paced
+about.  'There's not a corner of the place that doesn't screw an eye at
+me, because I had a dream there. La gloire!'
+
+The rest he muttered.  'These English!' was heard.  Aminta said: 'Am I
+never to see Steignton?'
+
+Lord Ormont invoked the Powers.  He could not really give answer to this
+female talk of the eternities.
+
+'Beaten I can never be,' he said, with instinctive indulgence to the
+greater creature.  'But down there at Steignton, I should be haunted by a
+young donkey swearing himself the fellow I grew up out of.  No doubt of
+that.  I don't like him the better for it.  Steignton grimaces at a
+cavalry officer fool enough at his own risks and penalties to help save
+India for the English.  Maunderers!  You can't tell--they don't know
+themselves--what they mean.  Except that they 're ready to take anything
+you hand 'em, and then pipe to your swinging.  I served them well--and at
+my age, in full activity, they condemn me to sit and gape!'
+
+He stopped his pacing and gazed on the glass of the window.
+
+'Would you wish me not to be present at this fencing?' said Aminta.
+
+'Dear me! by all means, go, my love,' he replied.
+
+Any step his Fair Enemy won in the secret game Pull between them, she was
+undisputedly to keep.
+
+She suggested: 'It might lead to unpleasantness.'
+
+'Of what sort?'
+
+'You ask?'
+
+He emphasized: 'Have you forgotten?  Something happened after that last
+ball at Challis's Rooms.  Their women as well as their men must be
+careful not to cross me.'
+
+Aminta had confused notions of her being planted in hostile territory,
+and torn and knitted, trumpeted to the world as mended, but not
+honourably mended in a way to stop corridor scandal.  The ball at
+Challis's Rooms had been one of her steps won: it had necessitated a
+requirement for the lion in her lord to exhibit himself, and she had
+gained nothing with Society by the step, owing to her poor performance
+of the lion's mate.  She had, in other words, shunned the countenance of
+some scattered people pityingly ready to support her against the deadly
+passive party known to be Lady Charlotte's.
+
+She let her lord go; thinking that once more had she striven and gained
+nothing: which was true of all their direct engagements.  And she had
+failed because of her being only a woman!  Mr. Morsfield was foolishly
+wrong in declaring that she, as a woman, had reserves of strength.  He
+was perhaps of Lady Charlotte's mind with regard to the existence of a
+Countess of Ormont, or he would know her to be incredibly cowardly.
+Cowardly under the boast of pride, too; well, then, say, if you like, a
+woman!
+
+Yet this mere shallow woman would not hesitate to meet the terrible Lady
+Charlotte at any instant, on any terms: and what are we to think of a
+soldier, hero, lion, dreading to tell her to her face that the persecuted
+woman is his wife!
+
+'Am I a woman they can be ashamed of?' she asked, and did not seek the
+answer at her mirror.  She was in her bedroom, and she put out a hand to
+her jewel-box, fingered it, found it locked, and abandoned her idle
+project.  A gentleman was 'dangerous.'  She had not found him so.  He had
+the reputation, perhaps, because he was earnest.  Not so very many men
+are earnest.  She called to recollection how ludicrously practical he was
+in the thick of his passion.  His third letter (addressed to the Countess
+of Ormont--whom he manifestly did not or would not take to be the
+veritable Countess--and there was much to plead for his error), or was it
+his fourth?--the letters were a tropical hail-storm: third or fourth, he
+broke off a streaked thunderpeal, to capitulate his worldly possessions,
+give the names and degrees of kinship of his relatives, the exact amount
+of the rent-roll of his Yorkshire estates, of his funded property.
+
+Silly man!  but not contemptible.  He proposed everything in honour, from
+his view of it.
+
+Whether in his third, fourth, or fifth letter.  .  .  .  How many had
+come?  She drew the key from her purse, and opened a drawer.  The key of
+the jewel-box was applied to the lock.
+
+Mr. Morsfield had sent her six flaming letters.  He not only took no
+precautions, he boasted that he hailed the consequences of discovery.
+Six!
+
+She lifted a pen: it had to be done.
+
+He was briefly informed that he disturbed her peace.  She begged he would
+abstain from any further writing to her.
+
+The severity was in the brevity.  The contrast of her style and his
+appeared harsh.  But it belonged to the position.
+
+Having with one dash of the pen scribbled her three lines, she slipped
+the letter into her pocket.  That was done, and it had to be done; it
+ought to have been done before.  How simple it was when one contemplated
+it as actually done!  Aminta made the motion of a hand along the paper,
+just a flourish.  Soon after, her head dropped back on the chair, and her
+eyes shut, she took in breath through parted lips.  The brief lines of
+writing had cut away a lump of her vitality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE
+
+Dusty wayfarers along a white high-road who know of a bubbling little
+spring across a stile, on the woodland borders of deep grass, are hailed
+to sit aside it awhile: and Aminta's feverishness was cooled by now and
+then a quiet conversation with the secretary ambitious to become a
+school-master.  Lady Charlotte liked him, so did her lord; Mrs. Lawrence
+had chatted with him freshly, as it was refreshing to recollect; nobody
+thought him a stunted growth.
+
+In Aminta's realized recollections, amid the existing troubles of her
+mind, the charge against him grew paler, and she could no longer quite
+think that the young hero transformed into a Mr. Cuper had deceived her,
+though he had done it--much as if she had assisted at the planting and
+watched aforetime the promise of a noble tree, to find it, after an
+interval of years, pollarded--a short trunk shooting out a shock of
+small, slim, stiff branches; dwarfed and disgraced; serviceable perhaps;
+not ludicrous or ugly, certainly, taking it for a pollard.  And he was a
+cool well-spring to talk with.  He, supposed once to be a passionate
+nature, scorned passion as a madness; he smiled in his merciful
+executioner's way at the high society, of which her aim was to pass for
+one among the butterflies or dragonflies; he had lost his patriotism; he
+labelled our English classes the skimmers, the gorgers, the grubbers, and
+stigmatized them with a friendly air; and uttered words of tolerance only
+for farmers and surgeons and schoolmasters.  But that was quite
+incidental in the humorous run of his talk, diverting to hear while it
+lasted.  He had, of course, a right to his ideas.
+
+No longer concerned in contesting them, she drank at the water of this
+plain earth-well, and hoped she preferred it to fiery draughts, though it
+was flattish, or, say, flavourless.  In the other there was excess of
+flavour--or, no, spice it had to be called.  The young schoolmaster's
+world seemed a sunless place, the world of traders bargaining for gain,
+without a glimmer of the rich generosity to venture life, give it, dare
+all for native land--or for the one beloved.  Love pressed its claim on
+heroical generosity, and instantly it suffused her, as an earth under
+flush of sky.  The one beloved!  She had not known love; she was in her
+five-and-twentieth year, and love was not only unknown to her, it was
+shut away from her by the lock of a key that opened on no estimable
+worldly advantage in exchange, but opened on a dreary, clouded round,
+such as she had used to fancy it must be to the beautiful creamy circus-
+horse of the tossing mane and flowing tail and superb step.  She was
+admired; she was just as much doomed to a round of paces, denied the
+glorious fling afield, her nature's food.  Hitherto she would have been
+shamefaced as a boy in forming the word 'love': now, believing it denied
+to her for good and all--for ever and ever--her bosom held and uttered
+the word.  She saw the word, the nothing but the word that it was, and
+she envisaged it, for the purpose of saying adieu to it--good-bye even to
+the poor empty word.
+
+This condition was attributable to a gentleman's wild rageing with the
+word, into which he had not infused the mystic spirit.  He poured hot
+wine and spiced.  If not the spirit of love, it was really the passion of
+the man.  Her tremors now and again in the reading of his later letters
+humiliated her, in the knowledge that they came of no response to him,
+but from the temporary base acquiescence; which is, with women, a
+terrible perception of the gulf of their unsatisfied nature.
+
+The secretary, cheerful at his work, was found for just the opening of a
+door.  Sometimes she hesitated--to disturb him, she said to herself,--and
+went up-stairs or out visiting.  He protested that he could work on and
+talk too.  She was able to amuse her lord with some of his ideas.  He had
+a stock of them, all his own.
+
+Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to
+the humanity they visit to help uplift, it from the state of beast.  In
+the England of that, period original or unknown ideas were a smoking
+brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air,
+jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and the
+cherished, the ivy-clad and celestially haloed.  They carried the
+dishevelled Maenad's torch.  A step with them, and we were on the
+Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution.  For a publication of simple
+ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not
+pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded: the
+horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them up,
+wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an
+execrable brimstone stench.
+
+Lord Ormont broke through his shouts or grunts at Aminta's report of the
+secretary's ideas on various topics, particularly the proposal that the
+lords of the land should head the land in a revolutionary effort to make
+law of his crazy, top-heavy notions, with a self-satisfied ejaculation:
+'He has not favoured me with any of these puffballs of his.'
+
+The deduction was, that the author sagaciously considered them adapted
+for the ear of a woman; they were womanish--i.e. flighty, gossamer.  To
+the host of males, all ideas are female until they are made facts.
+
+This idea, proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas,
+or reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship with
+the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them in history by
+certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and publishers, Lord
+Ormont thought amazingly comical.  English nobles heading the weavers,
+cobblers, and barbers of England!  He laughed, but he said, 'Charlotte
+would listen to that.'
+
+The dread, high-sitting Lady Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking,
+a woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to
+strike a particular set of bells hanging in her cranium.  She patronized
+blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of the
+people, not with a notion of maintaining our English aristocracy eminent
+in history.
+
+Lady Charlotte, however, would be the foremost to swoop down on the
+secretary's ideas about the education of women.
+
+On that subject, Aminta said she did not know what to think.
+
+Now, if a man states the matter he thinks, and a woman does but listen,
+whether inclining to agree or not, a perceptible stamp is left on soft
+wax.  Lord Ormont told her so, with cavalier kindness.
+
+She confessed 'she did not know what to think,' when the secretary
+proposed the education and collocation of boys and girls in one group,
+never separated, declaring it the only way for them to learn to know and
+to respect one another.  They were to learn together, play together, have
+matches together, as a scheme for stopping the mischief between them.
+
+'But, my dear girl, don't you see, the devilry was intended by Nature.
+Life would be the coldest of dishes without it.' And as for mixing the
+breeched and petticoated in those young days--'I can't enter into it,'
+my lord considerately said.  'All I can tell you is, I know boys.'
+
+Aminta persisted in looking thoughtful.  'Things are bad, as they are
+now,' she said.
+
+'Always were--always will be.  They were intended to be, if we are to
+call them bad.  Botched mendings will only make them worse.'
+
+'Which side suffers?'
+
+'Both; and both like it.  One side must be beaten at any game.  It's off
+and on, pretty equal--except in the sets where one side wears thick
+boots.  Is this fellow for starting a mixed sexes school?  Funny
+mothers!'
+
+'I suppose--' Aminta said, and checked the supposition.  'The mothers
+would not leave their girls unless they were confident .  .  . ?'
+
+'There's to be a female head of the female department?  He reckons on
+finding a woman as big a fool as himself?  A fair bit of reckoning
+enough.  He's clever at the pen. He doesn't bother me with his ideas; now
+and then I 've caught a sound of his bee buzzing.'
+
+The secretary was left undisturbed at his labours for several days.
+
+He would have been gladdened by a brighter look of her eyes at her next
+coming.  They were introspective and beamless.  She had an odd leaning
+to the talk upon Cuper's boys.  He was puzzled by what he might have
+classed, in any other woman, as a want of delicacy, when she recurred to
+incidents which were red patches of the school time, and had clearly lost
+their glow for her.
+
+A letter once written by him, in his early days at Cuper's, addressed to
+J. Masner, containing a provocation to fight with any weapons, and
+signed, 'Your Antagonist,' had been read out to the whole school, under
+strong denunciation of the immorality, the unchristian-like conduct of
+the writer, by Mr. Cuper; creating a sensation that had travelled to Miss
+Vincent's establishment, where some of the naughtiest of the girls had
+taken part with the audacious challenger, dreadful though the
+contemplation of a possible duel so close to them was.  And then the
+girls heard that the anonymous 'Your Antagonist,' on being cited to
+proclaim himself in public assembly of school-mates and masters, had
+jumped on his legs and into the name of--one who was previously thought
+by Miss Vincent's good girls incapable of the 'appalling wickedness,' as
+Mr. Cuper called it, of signing 'Your Antagonist' to a Christian school-
+fellow, having the design to provoke a breach of the law of the land and
+shed Christian blood.  Mr. Cuper delivered an impressive sermon from his
+desk to the standing up boarders and day-scholars alike, vilifying the
+infidel Greek word 'antagonist.'
+
+'Do you remember the offender's name?' the Countess of Ormont said; and
+Weyburn said--
+
+'Oh yes, I 've not forgotten the incident.'
+
+Her eyes, wherein the dead time hung just above the underlids, lingered,
+as with the wish for him to name the name.
+
+She said: 'I am curious to hear how you would treat a case of that sort.
+Would you preach to the boys?
+
+'Ten words at most.  The right assumption is that both fellows were to
+blame.  I fancy the proper way would be to appeal to the naughty girls
+for their opinion as to how the dispute should be decided.'
+
+'You impose too much on them.  And you are not speaking seriously.'
+
+'Pardon me, I am.  I should throw myself into the mind of a naughty girl
+--supposing none of these at hand--and I should let it be known that my
+eyes were shut to proceedings, always provided the weapons were not such
+as would cause a shock of alarm in female bosoms.'
+
+'You would at your school allow it to be fought out?'
+
+'Judging by the characters of the boys.  If they had heads to understand,
+I would try them at their heads.  Otherwise they are the better, they
+come round quicker to good blood, at their age--I speak of English boys
+--for a little hostile exercise of their fists.  Well, for one thing, it
+teaches them the value of sparring.'
+
+'I must imagine I am not one of the naughty sisterhood,--for I cannot
+think I should ever give consent to fighting of any description, unless
+for the very best of reasons,' said the countess.
+
+His eyes were at the trick of the quarter-minute's poising.  Her lids
+fluttered.  'Oh, I don't mean to say I was one of the good,' she added.
+
+At the same time her enlivened memory made her conscious of a warning,
+that she might, as any woman might, so talk on of past days as to take,
+rather more than was required of the antidote she had come for.
+
+The antidote was excellent; cooling, fortifying; 'quite a chalybeate,'
+her aunt would say, and she was thankful.  Her heart rose on a quiet wave
+of the thanks, and pitched down to a depth of uncounted fathoms.  Aminta
+was unable to tell herself why.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had been announced.  On her way to the drawing
+room Aminta's brain fell upon a series of dots, that wound along a track
+to the point where she accused herself of a repented coquettry--cause of
+the burning letters she was doomed to receive and could not stop without
+rousing her lion.  She dotted backwards; there was no sign that she had
+been guilty of any weakness other than the almost--at least, in design--
+innocent first move, which had failed to touch Lord Ormont in the
+smallest degree.  Never failure more absolute!
+
+She was about to inquire of her bosom's oracle whether she greatly cared
+now.  For an answer, her brain went dotting along from Mr. Cuper's
+school, and a boy named Abner there, and a boy named Matey Weyburn, who
+protected the little Jew-boy, up to Mr. Abner in London, who recommended
+him in due season to various acquaintances; among them to Lady Charlotte
+Eglett.  Hence the introduction to Lord Ormont.  How little extraordinary
+circumstances are, if only we trace them to the source!
+
+But if only it had appeared marvellous, the throbbing woman might have
+seized on it, as a thing fateful, an intervention distinctly designed to
+waken the best in her, which was, after all, the strongest.  Yea, she
+could hope and pray and believe it was the strongest.
+
+She was listening to Isabella Lawrence Finchley, wishing she might have
+followed to some end the above line of her meditations.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence was changed, much warmer, pressing to be more than merely
+friendly.  Aminta twice gave her cheek for kisses.  The secretary had
+spoken of Mrs. Lawrence as having the look of a handsome boy; and
+Aminta's view of her now underwent a change likewise.  Compunction,
+together with a sisterly taste for the boyish fair one flying her sail
+independently, and gallantly braving the winds, induced her to kiss in
+return.
+
+'You do like me a morsel?' said Mrs. Lawrence.  'I fell in love with you
+the last time I was here.  I came to see Mr. Secretary--it's avowed; and
+I have been thinking of you ever since, of no one else.  Oh yes, for a
+man; but you caught me.  I've been hearing of him from Captain May.  They
+fence at those rooms.  And it 's funny, Mr. Morsfield practises there,
+you know; and there was a time when the lovely innocent Amy, Queen of
+Blondes, held the seat of the Queen of Brunes.  Ah, my dear, the
+infidelity of men doesn't count.  They are affected by the changeing
+moons.  As long as the captain is civil to him, we may be sure beautiful
+Amy has not complained.  Her husband is the pistol she carries in her
+pocket, and she has fired him twice, with effect.  Through love of you I
+have learnt the different opinion the world of the good has of her and of
+me; I thought we ran under a common brand.  There are gradations.  I went
+to throw myself at the feet of my great-aunt; good old great-aunt Lady de
+Culme, who is a power in the land.  I let her suppose I came for myself,
+and she reproached me with Lord Adder.  I confessed to him and ten
+others.  She is a dear, she's ticklish, and at eighty-four she laughed!
+She looked into my eyes and saw a field with never a man in it--just the
+shadow of a man.  She admitted the ten cancelled the one, and exactly
+named to me, by comparison with the erring Amy, the sinner I am and must
+be, if I 'm to live.  So, dear, the end of it is,' and Mrs. Lawrence put
+her fingers to a silken amber bow at Aminta's throat, and squared it and
+flattened it with dainty precision, speaking on under dropped eyelids,
+intent upon her work, 'Lady de Culme will be happy to welcome you
+whenever it shall suit the Countess of Ormont to accompany her
+disreputable friend.  But what can I do, dear?'  She raised her lids and
+looked beseechingly.  'I was born with this taste for the ways and games
+and style of men.  I hope I don't get on badly with women; but if I 'm
+not allowed to indulge my natural taste, I kick the stable-boards and
+bite the manger.'
+
+Aminta threw her arms round her, and they laughed their mutual peal.
+
+Caressing her still, Aminta said: 'I don't know whether I embrace a boy.'
+
+'That idea comes from a man!' said Mrs. Lawrence.  It was admitted.  The
+secretary was discussed.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence remarked: 'Yes, I like talking with him; he's bright.  You
+drove him out of me the day I saw him.  Doesn't he give you the idea of a
+man who insists on capturing you and lets it be seen he doesn't care two
+snaps of a finger?'
+
+Aminta petitioned on his behalf indifferently: 'He 's well bred.'
+
+She was inattentive to Mrs. Lawrence's answer.  The allusion of the Queen
+of Blondes had stung her in the unacknowledged regions where women
+discard themselves and are most sensitive.
+
+'Decide on coming soon to Lady de Culme,' said Mrs. Lawrence.  'Now that
+her arms are open to you, she would like to have you in them.  She is
+old--.  You won't be rigorous? no standing on small punctilios?
+
+She would call, but she does not--h'm, it is M. le Comte that she does
+not choose to--h'm.  But her arms are open to the countess.  It ought to
+be a grand step.  You may be assured that Lady Charlotte Eglett would
+not be taken into them.  My great-aunt has a great-aunt's memory.  The
+Ormonts are the only explanation--if it 's an apology--she can offer for
+the behaviour of the husband of the Countess of Ormont.  You know I like
+him.  I can't help liking a man who likes me.  Is that the way with a
+boy, Mr. Secretary?  I must have another talk with the gentleman, my
+dear.  You are Aminta to me.'
+
+'Always Aminta to you,' was the reply, tenderly given.
+
+'But as for comprehending him, I'm as far off that as Lady de Culme, who
+hasn't the liking for him I have.'
+
+'The earl?' said Aminta, showing by her look that she was in the same
+position.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence shrugged: 'I believe men and women marry in order that they
+should never be able to understand one another.  The riddle's best read
+at a moderate distance.  It 's what they call the golden mean; too close,
+too far, we're strangers.  I begin to understand that husband of mine,
+now we're on bowing terms.  Now, I must meet the earl to-morrow.  You
+will arrange?  His hand wants forcing.  Upon my word, I don't believe it
+'s more.'
+
+Mrs. Lawrence contrasted him in her mind with the husband she knew, and
+was invigorated by the thought that a placable impenetrable giant may
+often be more pliable in a woman's hands than an irascible dwarf--until,
+perchance, the latter has been soundly cuffed, and then he is docile to
+trot like a squire, as near your heels as he can get.  She rejoiced to
+be working for the woman she had fallen in love with.
+
+Aminta promised herself to show the friend a livelier affection at their
+next meeting.
+
+A seventh letter, signed 'Adolphus,' came by post, was read and locked up
+in her jewel-box.  They were all nigh destruction for a wavering minute
+or so.  They were placed where they lay because the first of them had
+been laid there, the box being a strong one, under a patent key, and
+discovery would mean the terrible.  They had not been destroyed because
+they had, or seemed to her to have, the language of passion.  She could
+read them unmoved, and appease a wicked craving she owned to having, and
+reproached herself with having, for that language.
+
+Was she not colour in the sight of men?  Here was one, a mouthpiece of
+numbers, who vowed that homage was her due, and devotion, the pouring
+forth of the soul to her.  What was the reproach if she read the stuff
+unmoved?
+
+But peruse and reperuse it, and ask impressions to tell our deepest
+instinct of truthfulness whether language of this character can have been
+written to two women by one hand!  Men are cunning.  Can they catch a
+tone?  Not that tone!
+
+She, too, Mrs. Amy May, was colour in the sight of men.  Yet it seemed
+that he could not have written so to the Queen of Blondes.  And she, by
+repute, was as dangerous to slight as he to attract.  Her indifference
+exonerated him.  Besides, a Queen of Blondes would not draw the hearts
+out of men in England, as in Italy and in Spain.  Aminta had got thus far
+when she found 'Queen of Brunes' expunged by a mist: she imagined
+hearing the secretary's laugh.  She thought he was right to laugh at her.
+She retorted simply: 'These are feelings that are poetry.'
+
+A man may know nothing about them, and be an excellent schoolmaster.
+
+Suggestions touching the prudence of taking Mrs. Lawrence into her
+confidence, as regarded these troublesome letters of the man with the
+dart in his breast, were shuffled aside for various reasons: her modesty
+shrank; and a sense of honour toward the man forbade it.  She would have
+found it easier to do if she had conspired against her heart in doing it.
+And yet, cold-bloodedly to expose him and pluck the clothing from a
+passion--dear to think of only when it is profoundly secret--struck her
+as an extreme baseness, of which not even the woman who perused and
+reperused his letters could be guilty.
+
+Her head rang with some of the lines, and she accused her head of the
+crime of childishness, seeing that her heart was not an accomplice.  At
+the same time, her heart cried out violently against the business of a
+visit to Lady de Culme, and all the steps it involved.  Justly she
+accused her heart of treason.  Heart and head were severed.  This, as she
+partly apprehended, is the state of the woman who is already on the slope
+of her nature's mine-shaft, dreading the rush downwards, powerless to
+break away from the light.
+
+Letters perused and reperused, coming from a man never fervently noticed
+in person, conjure features one would wish to put beside the actual,
+to make sure that the fiery lines he writes are not practising a
+beguilement.  Aminta had lost grasp of the semblance of the impassioned
+man.  She just remembered enough of his eyes to think there might be
+healing in a sight of him.
+
+Latterly she had refused to be exhibited to a tattling world as the great
+nobleman's conquest:--The 'Beautiful Lady Doubtful' of a report that had
+scorched her cars.  Theatres, rides, pleasure-drives, even such houses as
+she saw standing open to her had been shunned.  Now she asked the earl to
+ride in the park.
+
+He complied, and sent to the stables immediately, just noted another of
+her veerings.  The whimsy creatures we are matched to contrast with,
+shift as the very winds or feather-grasses in the wind.  Possibly a fine
+day did it.  Possibly, too, her not being requested to do it.
+
+He was proud of her bearing on horseback.  She rode well and looked well.
+A finer weapon wherewith to strike at a churlish world was never given
+into the hands of man.  These English may see in her, if they like, that
+they and their laws and customs are defied.  It does her no hurt, and it
+hits them a ringing buffet.
+
+Among the cavaliers they passed was Mr. Morsfield.  He rode by slowly.
+The earl stiffened his back in returning the salute.  Both that and the
+gentleman were observed by Aminta.
+
+'He sees to having good blood under him,' said the earl.  'I admired his
+mount,' she replied.
+
+Interpreted by the fire of his writing, his features expressed character:
+insomuch that a woman could say of another woman, that she admired him
+and might reasonably do so.  His gaze at her in the presence of her lord
+was audacious.
+
+He had the defect of his virtue of courage.  Yet a man indisputably
+possessing courage cannot but have an interesting face--though one may
+continue saying, Pity that the eyes are not a little wider apart!  He
+dresses tastefully; the best English style.  A portrait by a master hand
+might hand him down to generations as an ancestor to be proud of.  But
+with passion and with courage, and a bent for snatching at the lion's
+own, does he not look foredoomed to an early close?  Her imagination
+called up a portrait of Elizabeth's Earl of Essex to set beside him; and
+without thinking that the two were fraternally alike, she sent him riding
+away with the face of the Earl of Essex and the shadow of the unhappy
+nobleman's grievous fortunes over his head.
+
+But it is inexcuseable to let the mind be occupied recurrently by a man
+who has not moved the feelings, wicked though it be to have the feelings
+moved by him.  Aminta rebuked her silly wits, and proceeded to speculate
+from an altitude, seeing the man's projects in a singularly definite
+minuteness, as if the crisis he invoked, the perils he braved, the mute
+participation he implored of her for the short space until their fate
+should be decided, were a story sharply cut on metal.  Several times she
+surprised herself in an interesting pursuit of the story; abominably
+cold, abominably interested.  She fell upon a review of small duties of
+the day, to get relief; and among them a device for spiriting away her
+aunt from the table where Mrs. Lawrence wished to meet Lord Ormont.  It
+sprang up to her call like an imp of the burning pit.  She saw it
+ingenious and of natural aspect.  I must be a born intriguer! she said in
+her breast.  That was hateful; but it seemed worse when she thought of a
+woman commanding the faculty and consenting to be duped and foiled.  That
+might be termed despicable; but what if she had not any longer the wish
+to gain her way with her lord?
+
+Those letters are acting like a kind of poison in me! her heart cried:
+and it was only her head that dwelt on the antidote.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense
+And not be beaten by an acknowledged defeat
+Botched mendings will only make them worse
+Convincing themselves that they impersonate sagacity
+I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe them
+Lawyers hold the keys of the great world
+Naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time
+Not daring risk of office by offending the taxpayer
+This female talk of the eternities
+To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end
+To males, all ideas are female until they are made facts
+We cannot, men or woman, control the heart in sleep at night
+Who cries, Come on, and prays his gods you won't
+
+
+[The End]
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 4478 ***
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..ca641cd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #4478 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4478)
diff --git a/old/4478.txt b/old/4478.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3551119
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4478.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2392 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2
+by George Meredith
+#84 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: Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2
+
+Author: George Meredith
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: September, 2003 [Etext #4478]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 25, 2002]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named 4478.txt or 4478.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 Pat Castevans  <patcat@ctnet.net>
+and 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.]
+
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+VI.       IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR
+VII.      EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES
+VIII.     MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY
+IX.       A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR
+X.        A SHORT PASSAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO
+XI.       THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR
+
+Up in Aminta's amber dressing-room; Mrs. Nargett Pagnell alluded sadly to
+the long month of separation, and begged her niece to let her have in
+plain words an exact statement of the present situation; adding, "Items
+will do."  Thereupon she slipped into prattle and held the field.
+
+She was the known, worthy, good, intolerable woman whom the burgess turns
+out for his world in regiments, that do and look and all but step alike;
+and they mean well, and have conventional worships and material
+aspirations, and very peculiar occult refinements, with a blind head and
+a haphazard gleam of acuteness, impressive to acquaintances, convincing
+themselves that they impersonate sagacity.  She had said this, done that;
+and it was, by proof, Providence consenting, the right thing.  A niece,
+written down in her girlhood, because of her eyes and her striking air
+and excellent deportment, as mate for a nobleman, marries, him before she
+is out of her teens.  "I said, She shall be a countess."  A countess she
+is.  Providence does not comply with our predictions in order to stultify
+us.  Admitting the position of affairs for the moment as extraordinary,
+we are bound by what has happened to expect they will be conformable in
+the end.  Temporarily warped, we should say of them.
+
+She could point to the reason: it was Lord Ormont's blunt
+misunderstanding of her character.  The burgess's daughter was refining
+to an appreciation of the exquisite so rapidly that she could criticize
+patricians.  My lord had never forgiven her for correcting him in his
+pronunciation of her name by marriage.  Singular indeed; but men, even
+great men, men of title, are so, some of them, whom you could least
+suspect of their being so.  He would speak the "g" in Nargett, and he,
+declined--after a remonstrance he declined--to pass Pagnell under the
+cedilla.  Lord Ormont spoke the name like a man hating it, or an English
+rustic: "Nargett Pagnell," instead, of the soft and elegant "Naryett
+Pagnell," the only true way of speaking it; and she had always taken that
+pronunciation of her name for a test of people's breeding.  The
+expression of his lordship's countenance under correction was memorable.
+Naturally, in those honeymoony days, the young Countess of Ormont sided
+with her husband the earl; she declared that her aunt had never dreamed
+of the cedilla before the expedition to Spain.  When, for example, Alfred
+Nargett Pagnell had a laughing remark, which Aminta in her childhood must
+have heard: "We rhyme with spaniel!"
+
+That was the secret of Lord Ormont's prepossession against Aminta's aunt;
+and who can tell? perhaps of much of his behaviour to the beautiful young
+wife he at least admired, sincerely admired, though he caused her to hang
+her head--cast a cloud on the head so dear to him!
+
+Otherwise there was no interpreting his lordship.  To think of herself as
+personally disliked by a nobleman stupefied Mrs. Pagnell, from her just
+expectation of reciprocal dealings in high society; for she confessed
+herself a fly to a title.  Where is the shame, if titles are created to
+attract?  Elsewhere than in that upper circle, we may anticipate hard
+bargains; the widow of a solicitor had not to learn it.  But when a
+distinguished member and ornament of the chosen seats above blew cold
+upon their gesticulatory devotee, and was besides ungrateful; she was
+more than commonly assured of his being, as she called him, "a sphinx."
+His behaviour to his legally wedded wife confirmed the charge.
+
+She checked her flow to resume the question.  "So, then, where are we
+now?  He allows you liberally for pin-money in addition to your own small
+independent income.  Satisfaction with that would warrant him to suppose
+his whole duty done by you."
+
+"We are where we were, aunty; the month has made no change," said Aminta
+in languor.
+
+"And you as patient as ever?"
+
+"I am supposed to have everything a woman can require."
+
+"Can he possibly think it?  And I have to warn you, child, that lawyers
+are not so absolving as the world is with some of the ladies Lord Ormont
+allows you to call your friends.  I have been hearing--it is not mere
+airy tales one hears from lawyers about cases in Courts of Law.  Tighten
+your lips as you like; I say nothing to condemn or reflect on Mrs.
+Lawrence Finchley.  I have had my eyes a little opened, that is all.  Oh,
+I know my niece Aminta, when it's a friend to stand by; but our position
+--thanks to your inscrutable lord and master--demands of us the utmost
+scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl and scandal flying about, and
+those lawyers picking up and putting together.  I have had a difficulty
+to persuade them!... and my own niece! whom I saw married at the British
+Embassy in Madrid, as I take good care to tell everybody; for it was my
+doing; I am the responsible person! and by an English Protestant
+clergyman, to all appearance able to walk erect in and out of any of
+these excellent new Life Assurance offices they are starting for the
+benefit of widows and orphans, and deceased within six days of the
+ceremony--if ceremony one may call the hasty affair in those foreign
+places.  My dear, the instant I heard it I had a presentiment, 'All has
+gone well up to now.'  I remember murmuring the words.  Then your letter,
+received in that smelly Barcelona: Lord Ormont was carrying you off to
+Granada--a dream of my infancy!  It may not have been his manoeuvre, but
+it was the beginning of his manoeuvres."
+
+Aminta shuddered.  "And tra-la-la, and castanets, and my Cid! my Cid! and
+the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di me, Alhama; and Boabdil el
+Chico and el Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida!"  She flung out the rattle,
+yawning, with her arms up and her head back, in the posture of a woman
+wounded.  One of her aunt's chance shots had traversed her breast,
+flashing at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness on
+sword-edges of shade,--and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping mask,
+romance in its anatomy, cold English mist.  Ah, what a background is the
+present when we have the past to the fore!  That filmy past is diaphanous
+on heaving ribs.
+
+She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip.  "Don't speak of manaoeuvres,
+dear aunt.  And we'll leave Granada to the poets.  I'm tired.  Talk of
+our own people, on your side and my father's, and as much as you please
+of the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me.  Do they go on marrying?"
+
+"Why, my child, how could they go on without it?"
+
+Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids.  "Oh, me!" she sighed, feeling
+the tear come with a sting from checked laughter.  "But there are
+marriages, aunty, that don't go on, though Protestant clergymen
+officiated.  Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell."
+
+"You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?"
+
+"Lady Charlotte Eglett?  No syllable.  Or wait--my lord's secretary was
+with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose."
+
+"There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make a man
+like Lord Ormont afraid of her.  And no doubt she is of our old
+aristocracy.  And they tell me she is coarse in her conversation--like a
+man.  Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation.  Years back,
+I am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an
+example.  Lawyers hear next to everything.  I am told she lifted her
+horsewhip on a gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him
+down.  You will say, the sister of your husband.  No; not to make my
+niece a countess, would I, if I had known the kind of family!  Then one
+asks, Is she half as much afraid of him?  In that case, no wonder they
+have given up meeting.  Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties.  Well,
+Lady Eglett, and Aminta, Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as
+they call it, let her only have her dues.  My dear, I would--if I ever
+did--swear the woman is jealous."
+
+"Of me, aunty!"
+
+"I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if
+somebody had his twitch of jealousy.  Wives may be too meek.  Cases and
+cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought to
+his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most
+innocent of wives.  A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are
+poisons that cure.  It might come into the courts; and the nearer the
+proofs the happier he in withdrawing from his charge and effecting a
+reconciliation.  Short of guilt, of course.  Men are so strange.  Imagine
+now, if a handsome young woman were known to be admired rather more than
+enough by a good-looking gentleman near about her own age.  Oh, I've no
+patience with, the man for causing us to think and scheme!  Only there
+are men who won't be set right unless we do. My husband used to say,
+change is such a capital thing in life's jogtrot; that men find it
+refreshing if we now and then, reverse the order of our pillion-riding
+for them.  A spiritless woman in a wife is what they bear least of all.
+Anything rather.  Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's
+house as usual?"
+
+Aminta's cheeks unrolled their deep damask rose at the abrupt intrusion
+of the name.  "I meet him there."
+
+"Lord Adderwood, Sir John Randeller; and the rest?"
+
+"Two or three times a week."
+
+"And the lady, wife of the captain, really a Lady Fair--Mrs....  month of
+May: so I have to get at it."
+
+"She may be seen there."
+
+"Really a contrast, when you two are together!  As to reputation, there
+is an exchange of colours.  Those lawyers hold the keys of the great
+world, and a naughty world it is, I fear--with exceptions, who are the
+salt, but don't taste so much.  I can't help enjoying the people at Mrs.
+Lawrence Finchley's.  I like to feel I can amuse them, as they do me.
+One puzzles for what they say--in somebody's absence, I mean.  They must
+take Lord Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to
+think they may despise him, or suppose him indifferent.  Oh, that upper
+class!  It's a garden, and we can't help pushing to enter it; and fair
+flowers, indeed, but serpents too, like the tropics.  It tries us more
+than anything else in the world--well, just as good eating tries the
+constitution.  He ought to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the
+protection of his name, instead of--not that he denies: I have brought
+him to that point; he cannot deny it with me.  But not to present her--to
+shun the Court; not to introduce her to his family, to appear ashamed of
+her!  My darling Aminta, a month of absence for reflection on your
+legally-wedded husband's conduct increases my astonishment.  For usually
+men old enough to be the grandfathers of their wives--"
+
+"Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray!" Aminta cried, and her body writhed.  "No
+more to-night.  You mean well, I am sure.  Let us wait.  I shall sleep,
+perhaps, if I go to bed early.  I dare say I am spiritless--not worth
+more than I get.  I gave him the lead altogether; he keeps it.  In
+everything else he is kind; I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe
+them.  Kiss me and say good night."
+
+Aminta made it imperative by rising.  Her aunt stood up, kissed, and
+exclaimed, "I tell you you are a queenly creature, not to be treated as
+any puny trollop of a handmaid.  And although he is a great nobleman, he
+is not to presume to behave any longer, my dear, as if your family had no
+claim on his consideration.  My husband, Alfred Pagnell, would have laid
+that before him pretty quick.  You are the child of the Farrells and the
+Solers, both old families; on your father's side you are linked with the
+oldest nobility in Europe.  It flushes one to think of it!  Your
+grandmother, marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the legitimate
+daughter of a Grandee of Spain; as I have told Lord Ormont often, and I
+defy him to equal that for a romantic marriage in the annals of his
+house, or boast of bluer blood.  Again, the Solers--"
+
+"We take the Solers for granted, aunty, good night."
+
+"Commoners, if you like; but established since the Conquest.  That is,
+we trace the pedigree.  And to be treated, even by a great nobleman, as
+if we were stuff picked up out of the ditch!  I declare, there are times
+when I sit and think and boil.  Is it chivalrous, is it generous--is it,
+I say, decent--is it what Alfred would have called a fair fulfilment of a
+pact, for your wedded husband--?  You may close my mouth!  But he
+pretends to be chivalrous and generous, and he has won a queen any
+wealthy gentleman in England--I know of one, if not two--would be proud
+to have beside him in equal state; and what is he to her?  He is an
+extinguisher.  Or is it the very meanest miserliness, that he may keep
+you all to himself?  There we are again!  I say he is an unreadable
+sphinx."
+
+Aminta had rung the bell for her maid.  Mrs. Pagnell could be counted on
+for drawing in her tongue when the domestics were near.
+
+A languor past delivery in sighs was on the young woman's breast.  She
+could have heard without a regret that the heart was to cease beating.
+Had it been downright misery she would have looked about her with less of
+her exanimate glassiness.  The unhappy have a form of life: until they
+are worn out, they feel keenly.  She felt nothing.  The blow to her pride
+of station and womanhood struck on numbed sensations.  She could complain
+that the blow was not heavier.
+
+A letter lying in her jewel-box called her to read it, for the chance of
+some slight stir.  The contents were known.  The signature of Adolphus
+Morsfield had a new meaning for her eyes, and dashed her at her husband
+in a spasm of revolt and wrath against the man exposing her to these
+letters, which a motion of her hand could turn to blood, and abstention
+from any sign maintained in a Satanic whisper, saying, "Here lies one way
+of solving the riddle."  It was her husband who drove her to look that
+way.
+
+The look was transient, and the wrath: she could not burn.  A small
+portion of contempt lodged in her mind to shadow husbands precipitating
+women on their armoury for a taste of vengeance.  Women can always be
+revenged--so speedily, so completely: they have but to dip.  Husbands
+driving wives to taste their power execrate the creature for her fall
+deep downward.  They are forgetful of causes.
+
+Does it matter?  Aminta's languor asked.  The letter had not won a reply.
+Thought of the briefest of replies was a mountain of effort, and she
+moaned at her nervelessness in body and mind.  To reply, to reproach the
+man, to be flame--an image of herself under the form she desired--gave
+her a momentary false energy, wherein the daring of the man, whose life
+was at a loss for the writing of this letter, hung lighted.  She had
+therewith a sharp vision of his features, repellent in correctness, Greek
+in lines, with close eyes, hollow temples, pressed lips--a face
+indicating the man who can fling himself on a die.  She had heard tales
+of women and the man.  Some had loved him, report said.  Here were words
+to say that he loved her.  They might, poor man, be true.  Otherwise she
+had never been loved.
+
+Memory had of late been paying visits to a droopy plant in the golden
+summer drought on a gorgeous mid-sea island, and had taken her on board
+to refresh her with voyages, always bearing down full sail on a couple of
+blissful schools, abodes of bloom and briny vigour, sweet merriment,
+innocent longings, dreams the shyest, dreams the mightiest.  At night
+before sleep, at morn before rising, often during day, and when vexed or
+when dispirited, she had issued her command for the voyage.  Sheer
+refreshment followed, as is ever the case if our vessel carries no
+freight of hopes.  There could be no hopes.  It was forgotten that they
+had ever been seriously alive.  But it carried an admiration.  Now, an
+admiration may endure, and this one had been justified all round.  The
+figure heroical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed Aminta's past.  The
+past of a bitterly  humiliated Aminta was a garden in the coming kiss of
+sunset, with that godlike figure of young manhood to hallow it.  There he
+stayed, perpetually assuring her of his triumphs to come.
+
+She could have no further voyages.  Ridicule convulsed her home of
+refuge.  For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was
+one thing; but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for
+the thirst of glory, accused his nature.  He so certainly involved her in
+the burlesque of the transformation that she had to quench memory.
+
+She was, therefore, having smothered a good part of herself, accountably
+languid--a condition alternating with fire in Aminta; and as Mr.
+Morsfield's letter supplied the absent element, her needy instinct pushed
+her to read his letter through.  She had not yet done that with
+attention.
+
+Whether a woman loves a man or not, he is her lover if he dare tell her
+he loves her, and is heard with attention.  Aware that the sentences were
+poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step
+proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the
+madness.  Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to
+read?  or rather, to brood upon what she read.  The brooding ensued, was
+the thirst of her malady.  The best antidote she could hit on was the
+writer's face.  Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage--gifts she
+respected in him, found wanting in herself.  Read by Lord Ormont, this
+letter would mean a deadly thing.
+
+Aminta did her lord the justice to feel sure of him, that with her name
+bearing the superscription, it might be left on her table, and world not
+have him to peruse it.  If he manoeuvred, it was never basely.  Despite
+resentment, her deepest heart denied his being indifferent either to her
+honour or his own in relation to it.  He would vindicate both at a
+stroke, for a sign.  Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly.  She
+charged on him the guilt of the small preludes, archeries, anglings,
+veilings, evasions, all done with the eyelids and the mute of the lips,
+or a skirmisher word or a fan's flourish, and which, intended to pique
+the husband rather than incite the lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Finchley
+to murmur at her ear, in close assembly, without a distinct designation
+of Mr. Morsfield, "Dangerous man to play little games with!"  It had
+brought upon her this letter of declaration, proposal, entreaty.
+
+This letter was the man's life in her hands, and safe, of course.  But
+surely it was a proof that the man loved her?
+
+Aminta was in her five-and-twentieth year; when the woman who is
+uncertain of the having been loved, and she reputed beautiful, desirable,
+is impelled by a sombre necessity to muse on a declaration, and nibble at
+an idea of a test.  If "a dangerous man to play little games with," he
+could scarcely be dangerous to a woman having no love for him at all.  It
+meant merely that he would soon fall to writing letters like this, and he
+could not expect an answer to it.  But her heart really thanked him, and
+wished the poor gentleman to take its dumb response as his reward, for
+being the one sole one who had loved her.
+
+Aminta dwelt on "the one sole one."  Lord Ormont's treatment had detached
+her from any belief in love on his part; and the schoolboy, now ambitions
+to become a schoolmaster, was behind the screen unlikely to be lifted
+again by a woman valuing her pride of youth, though he had--behold our
+deceptions!--the sympathetic face entirely absent from that of Mr.
+Adolphus Morsfield, whom the world would count quite as handsome--nay, it
+boasted him.  He enjoyed the reputation of a killer of ladies.  Women
+have odd tastes, Aminta thought, and examined the gentleman's
+handwriting.  It pleased her better.  She studied it till the
+conventional phrases took a fiery hue, and came at her with an invasive
+rush.
+
+The letter was cast back into the box, locked up; there an end to it, or
+no interdiction of sleep.
+
+Sleep was a triumph.  Aminta's healthy frame rode her over petty
+agitations of a blood uninflamed, as lightly as she swam the troubled
+sea-waters her body gloried to cleave.  She woke in the morning peaceful
+and mildly reflective, like one who walks across green meadows.  Only by
+degrees, by glimpses, was she drawn to remember the trotting, cantering,
+galloping, leaping of an active heart during night.  We cannot, men or
+woman, control the heart in sleep at night.  There had been wild
+leapings.  Night will lead an unsatisfied heart of a woman, by way of
+sleep, to scale black mountains, jump jagged chasms.  Sleep is a horse
+that laughs at precipices and abysses.  We bid women, moreover, be all
+heart.  They are to cultivate their hearts, pay much heed to their
+hearts.  The vast realm of feeling is open to these appointed keepers of
+the sanctuary household, who may be withering virgins, may be childless
+matrons, may be unhusbanded wives.  Wandering in the vast realm which
+they are exhorted to call their own, for the additional attractiveness it
+gives them, an unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat audaciously cross
+the borderland a single step into the public road of the vast realm of
+thinking.  Once there, and but a single step on the road, she is a rebel
+against man's law for her sex.  Nor is it urgent on her that she should
+think defiantly in order to feel herself the rebel.  She may think
+submissively; with a heart (the enlarged, the scientifically plumped, the
+pasture of epicurean man), with her coveted heart in revolt, and from the
+mere act of thinking at all.
+
+Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the near-to-
+happiness ratings over-night.  She thinned her lips, and her cheeks
+glowed.  An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her.  The choice
+now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think.  She took the
+latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women
+educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held
+a candle in a windy darkness.  She saw no Justice there.  The sensational
+immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required for
+the true sublime.  And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any
+realm!  Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they
+feel when it is refused them.  When they know they feel, they have begun
+to reflect.  The void of Justice is  a godless region.  Women, to whom
+the solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes
+of their storm, ask themselves whether they are God's creatures or man's.
+The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their
+human masters.  Young women, animated by the passions their feeling
+bosoms of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish
+an abstract justice from a concrete.  They are of the tribe too long
+hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract.  So it is with them, that
+their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of
+boys.  He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter--the
+Biblical Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to
+confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance.  By such a
+maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth.  If
+women can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they
+belong to God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they will
+set the one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other, urging
+them unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and his laws
+altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who shines in
+thought.  It is a manner whereby the desperately harried among these
+creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an agreeable,
+almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.
+
+There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
+sensible to the pulses of his audience.  Justice compels at times.  In
+truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
+comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
+unexplained.  Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
+traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft brown
+of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
+overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
+as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
+heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.
+
+Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him.  Her
+will could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her to
+pique the mailed veteran.  Every poor innocent little bit of an art had
+been exhausted.  Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually slave.
+A luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly
+enfranchised set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord
+Adderwood; Sir John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May,
+notorious wife of a fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and other
+ladies, other gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not yet
+paired: gossip raged.  Aminta was of a disposition too generously cordial
+to let her be the rigorous critic of people with whom she was in touch.
+But her mind knew relief when she recollected that her humble little
+school-mate, Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in old days,
+was coming up to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a week.
+However much a slave and an unloved woman, she could be a constant and
+protecting friend.  Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little Selina.
+She thought of his remarks about the modest-minded girl after first
+seeing her.  From that she struck upon a notion of reserves of humaneness
+being in him, if she might find the path to them: and thence, fortified
+by the repose her picture of little Selina's merit had bestowed, she
+sprang to the idea of valiancy, that she would woo him to listen to her,
+without inflicting a scene.  He had been a listening lover, seeming
+lover, once, later than the Granada sunsets.  The letter in her jewel-box
+urged Aminta to clear her conscience by some means, for leaving it
+unburnt.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES
+
+The rules in Lord Ormont's household assisted to shelter him for some
+hours of the day from the lady who was like a blast of sirocco under his
+roof.  He had his breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it at Olmer;
+a dislike of a common table in the morning was a family trait with both.
+At ten o'clock the secretary arrived, and they were shut up together.
+At the luncheon table Aminta usually presided.  If my lord dined at home,
+he had by that time established an equanimity rendering, his constant
+civility to Mrs. Pagnell less arduous.  The presence of a woman of
+tongue, perpetually on the spring to gratify him and win him, was among
+the burdens he bore for his Aminta.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the secretary was in favour.  My lord
+and this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes of conversation, upon which the
+wary aunt of her niece did not gaze like the wintry sun with the distant
+smile her niece displayed over discussions concerning military
+biographies, Hannibal's use of his elephants and his Numidian horse, the
+Little St. Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, English and
+Genoese bowmen, Napoleon's tactics, his command to the troopers to "give
+point,"  and English officers' neglect of sword exercise, and the "devil
+of a day" Old England is to have on a day to come.  My lord connected our
+day of trial with India.  Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious
+interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might
+know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying
+exalted minds.  Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated
+gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.
+
+The secretary behaved with a pretty civility.  Aminta shook herself to
+think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put
+interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal's example and train
+elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of
+our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from
+their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised of
+being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense of
+the excellent motive which impelled them.  Even to the Countess of
+Ormont, she could have replied, "We might have given them a higher idea
+of us"--if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field
+beside her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta.  She hinted as much
+subsequently, and Aminta's consciousness of the troth was touched.  The
+young schoolmaster's company sat on her spirits, deadened her vocabulary.
+Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the two gentlemen
+loudly laughing.  It seemed subserviency on the fallen young hero's part.
+His tastes were low.  He frequented the haunts of boxing men; her lord
+informed her of his having made, or of his making, matches to run or swim
+or walk certain distances against competitors or within a given time.
+He had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom he raced out of town
+on Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to form.
+
+But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where was a
+blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's cap on the head whose golden
+helm was fired by Pallas?
+
+Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger
+on his meanness of nature.
+
+Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if
+she consents to an exchange of letters--shameful indeed, but not such a
+feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an
+object of admiration degraded.  Bad she may be; and she may be deceived,
+vilely treated, in either case.  And what is a woman's pride but the
+staff and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts?  He who wounds it cannot
+be forgiven--never!--he has killed the best of her.  Aminta found herself
+sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a girl's
+worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an
+infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman's possible reckless
+fit of giddiness.  And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct
+it.  Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent
+about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the
+discovered meanness of the girl's idol.  Her wicked memory was caused
+by his having plunged her low.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu of
+the countess, who seemed to find it a task to sit at the luncheon table
+with him, when Lady Ormont was absent.  "Just peeped in," she said as she
+entered the library, "to see if all was comfortable;" and gossip ensued,
+not devoid of object.  She extracted an astonishingly smooth description
+of Lady Charlotte.  Weyburn was brightness in speaking of the much-
+misunderstood lady.  "She's one of the living women of the world."
+
+"You are sure you don't mean one of the worldly women?" Mrs. Pagnell
+rejoiced.
+
+"She has to be known to be liked," he owned.
+
+"And you were, one hears, among the favoured?"
+
+"I can scarcely pretend to that, ma'am."
+
+"You were recommended."
+
+"Lady Charlotte is devoted to her brother."
+
+Mrs. Pagnell's bosom heaved.  "How strange Lord Ormont is!  One would
+suppose, with his indignation at the country for its treatment of him,
+admirers would be welcome.  Oh dear, no! that is not the way.  On board
+the packet, on our voyage to Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring
+mercy of Neptune, as they say, I heard of Lord Ormont among the
+passengers.  I could hardly credit my ears.  For I had been hearing of
+him from my niece ever since her return from a select establishment for
+the education of young ladies, not much more than a morning's drive out
+of London, though Dover was my residence.  She had got a hero!  It was
+Lord Ormont!  Lord Ormont! all day: and when the behaviour of the country
+to him became notorious, Aminta--my niece the countess--she could hardly
+contain herself.  A secret:--I promised her--it's not known to Lord
+Ormont himself:--a printed letter in a metropolitan paper, copied into
+the provincial papers, upholding him for one of the greatest of our
+patriot soldiers and the saviour of India, was the work of her hands.
+You would, I am sure, think it really well written.  Meeting him on deck
+--the outline of the coast of Portugal for an introductory subject, our
+Peninsular battles and so forth--I spoke of her enthusiasm.  The effect
+was, to cut off all communication between us.  I had only to appear, Lord
+Ormont vanished.  I said to myself, this is a character.  However, the
+very mention of him to my niece, as one of the passengers on board--
+medicine, miraculous!  She was up in half an hour, out pacing the deck
+before evening, hardly leaning on my arm, and the colour positively
+beginning to show on her cheeks again.  He fled, of coarse.  I had
+prepared her for his eccentricities.  Next morning she was out by
+herself.  In the afternoon Lord Ormont strode up to us his--military
+step--and most courteously requested the honour of an introduction.  I
+had broken the ice at last; from that moment he was cordiality itself,
+until--I will not say, until he had called her his own--a few little
+misunderstandings!--not with his countess.  You see, a resident aunt is
+translated mother-in-law by husbands; though I spare them pretty
+frequently; I go to friends, they travel. Here in London she must have a
+duenna.  The marriage at Madrid, at the Embassy:--well, perhaps it was a
+step for us, for commoners, though we rank with the independent.  Has her
+own little pin-money--an inheritance.  Perhaps Lady Eglett gives the
+world her version.  She may say, there was aiming at station.  I reply,
+never was there a more whole-hearted love-match!  Absolutely the girl's
+heart has been his from the period of her school-days.  Oh! a little
+affair--she was persecuted by a boy at a neighbouring school.  Her
+mistress wrote me word--a very determined Romeo young gentleman indeed--
+quite alarmed about him.  In the bud! I carried her off on the spot, and
+snapped it effectually.  Warned he meant to be desperate, I kept her away
+from my house at Dover four months, place to place; and I did well.  I
+heard on my return, that a youth, answering to the schoolmistress's
+description of him, had been calling several times, the first two months
+and longer.  You have me alluding to these little nonsensical nothings,
+because she seemed born to create violent attachments, even at that early
+day; and Lady Eglett--Lady Charlotte Eglett may hear; for there is no end
+to them, and impute them to her, when really!--can she be made
+responsible for eyes innocent of the mischief they appear destined to do?
+But I am disturbing you in your work."
+
+"You are very good, ma'am," said the ghost of the determined young
+gentleman.
+
+"A slight cold, have you?" Mrs. Pagnell asked solicitously.
+
+"Dear me, no!" he gave answer with a cleared throat.
+
+In charging him with more than he wanted to carry, she supplied him with
+particulars he had wanted to know; and now he asked himself what could be
+the gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity regarding a married Aminta.
+She slew my lord on board a packet-boat; she bears the arrows that slay.
+My lord married her where the first English chaplain was to be found;
+that is not wonderful either.  British Embassy, Madrid!  Weyburn believed
+the ceremony to have been performed there: at the same time, he could
+hear Lady Charlotte's voice repeating with her varied intonation Mrs.
+Pagnell's impressive utterances; and he could imagine how the somewhat
+silly duenna aunt, so penetrable in her transparent artifices, struck
+emphasis on the incredulity of people inclined to judge of the reported
+ceremony by Lord Ormont's behaviour to his captive.
+
+How explain that strange matter?  But can there be a gain in trying to
+sound it?  Weyburn shuffled it away.  Before the fit of passion seized
+him, he could turn his eager mind from anything which had not a
+perceptible point of gain, either for bodily strength or mental
+acquisition, or for money, too, now that the school was growing palpable
+as an infant in arms and agape for the breast.  Thought of gain, and the
+bent to pursue it, is the shield of Athene over young men in the press of
+the seductions.  He had to confess his having lost some bits of himself
+by reason of his meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let it
+continue a space, will show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs, a
+wheezy wind, for any fellow vowed to physical trials of strength and
+skill.  It will show likewise in the brain beating broken wings--
+inability to shoot a thought up out of the body for half a minute.  And,
+good Lord! how quickly the tight-strong fellow crumbles, when once the
+fragmentary disintegration has begun!  Weyburn cried out on a heart that
+bounded off at prodigal gallops, and had to be nipped with reminders of
+the place of good leader he was for taking among the young.  Hang
+superexcellence! but we know those moanings over the troubles of a
+married woman; we know their sources, know their goal, or else we are the
+fiction-puppet or the Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married at
+the British Embassy, Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks'
+acquaintance with her husband, who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly
+in the registrar's book, but does not prove himself much the hero when he
+drives a pen, even for so little as the signing of his name!  He signed
+his name, apparently not more than partly pledging himself to the bond.
+Lord Ormont's autobiographical scraps combined with Lady Charlotte's
+hints and Mrs. Pagnell's communications, to provoke the secretary's
+literary contempt of his behaviour to his wife.  However, the former
+might be mended, and he resumed the task.
+
+It had the restorative effect of touching him to see his old hero in
+action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he
+really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the
+liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position.  Things
+constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively bobbings
+when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with Weyburn,
+until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to sail away
+in the society of the steadiest.
+
+He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the
+circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would
+best be able--probably it was the one way--to keep himself together; and
+his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he
+abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight.  For if one
+is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and enters
+us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has us as a
+foe.  The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an intimate
+knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within.  Safest for him,
+after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant person he
+was, both there and anywhere else.  The Countess of Ormont's manner
+toward him was to be read as a standing index of the course he should
+follow; and he thanked her.  He could not quite so sincerely thank her
+aunt.  His ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to him
+sprang a doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account of
+services performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.
+
+Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord,
+removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.
+
+Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every shaft
+of the quiver of the rays at her disposal?  Or was it a shot from a
+powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor
+no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body?
+Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine.  Those
+eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in a
+throbbing Eden.  The man on whom they had looked shivered over the
+thought of it after years of blank division.
+
+Rather than have those eyes to look on him their displacing unintentness,
+the man on whom they had once looked love would have chosen looks of
+wrath, the darts that kill--blest darts of the celestial Huntress, giving
+sweet sudden cessation of pain, in the one everlasting last flash of life
+with thought that the shot was hers.  Oh for the 'ayava behea' of the
+Merciful in splendour!
+
+These were the outcries of the man deciding simultaneously not to
+observe, not to think, not to feel, and husbanding calculations upon
+storage of gain for the future.  Softness held the song below.  It came
+of the fact that his enforced resolution, for the sake of sanity, drove
+his whole reflective mind backward upon his younger days, when an Evening
+and a Morning star in him greeted the bright Goddess Browny or sang
+adieu, and adored beyond all golden beams the underworld whither she had
+sunk, where she was hidden.
+
+Meanwhile, the worthy dame who had dosed him was out in her carriage,
+busy paying visits to distinguished ladies of the great world, with the
+best of excuses for an early call, which was gossip to impart, such as
+the Countess of Ormont had not yet thought of mentioning; and two or
+three of them were rather amusedly interested to hear that Lord Ormont
+had engaged a handsome young secretary, "under the patronage of Lady
+Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by
+both."  Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing
+pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie.  Those
+flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of
+the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for one
+hour, they are open to take animation from their visitors.  Aminta was
+pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt of a note from Mrs. Lawrence
+Finchley, begging to be invited to lunch if she came, as she had a
+purpose in the wish to meet my lord.
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: The remainder of 'Lord Ormont and His Aminta' is taken from an
+older edition which uses single rather than double quotation marks.
+D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY
+
+My lord had one of his wilful likings for Isabella Lawrence Finchley,
+and he consented to the torture of an hour of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell in the
+middle of the day, just to taste the favourite he welcomed at home as he
+championed her abroad.  The reasons were numerous and intimate why she
+pleased him.  He liked the woman, enjoyed the cause for battle that she
+gave.  Weyburn, on coming to the luncheon table, beheld a lady with the
+head of a comely boy, the manner, softened in delicate feminine, of a
+capital comrade.  Her air of candour was her nature in her face; and it
+carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, a supersensual naughtiness,
+a simplicity of repose amid the smoky reputation she created, that led
+one to think the vapour calumnious or the creature privileged.  That
+young boy's look opened him at once; he had not to warm to her,--he flew.
+Ordinarily the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and
+cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are
+cleared away to grant us rights of citizenship. She was like those frank
+lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait
+for dubious inspection of it.
+
+She prevailed with cognizant men and with the frivolous.  Women were
+capable of appreciating her, too: as Aminta did, despite some hinted
+qualifications addressed shyly to her husband.  But these were the very
+matters exciting his particular esteem.  He was of Lady Charlotte's mind,
+in her hot zeal against injustice done to the creatures she despised; and
+yet more than she applauded a woman who took up her idiot husband's
+challenge to defend her good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, and
+beat him down on his knees, and then started for her spell of the merry
+canter over turf: an example to the English of the punishment they get
+for their stupid Puritanic tyranny--sure to be followed by a national
+helter-skelter down-hill headlong.  And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the
+corrupt, he argued; she concealed what it was decent to conceal, without
+pouting hypocritical pretences; she had merely dispensed with idle legal
+formalities, in the prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to divorce the
+man who tried to divorce her, and 'whined to be forgiven when he found he
+couldn't.  Adderwood was ready to marry her to-morrow, if the donkey
+husband would but go and bray his last.  Half a dozen others were heads
+off on the same course to that goal.'
+
+That was her champion's perusal of a lady candidly asserting her right
+to have breeched comrades, and paying for it in the advocacy which
+compromises.  She was taken to be and she was used as a weapon wherewith
+to strike at our Pharisees.  Women pushing out into the world for
+independence, bleed heavy payments all round.
+
+The earl's double-edged defence of her was partly a vindication of
+another husband, who allowed his wife to call her friend; he was
+nevertheless assured of her not being corrupt, both by his personal
+knowledge of the lady, and his perception of her image in the bosom of
+his wife.  She did no harm there, he knew well.  Although he was not a
+man to put his trust in faces, as his young secretary inclined to do,
+Mrs. Lawrence's look of honest boy did count among the pleadings.  And
+somewhat so might a government cruiser observe the intrusion of a white-
+sailed yacht in protected sea-waters, where licenced trawlers are at the
+haul.
+
+Talk over the table coursed as fluently as might be, with Mrs. Pagnell
+for a boulder in the stream.  Uninformed by malice, she led up to Lord
+Adderwood's name, and perhaps more designedly spoke of Mr. Morsfield, on
+whom her profound reading into the female heart of the class above her
+caused her to harp, as 'a real Antinous,' that the ladies might discuss
+him and Lord Ormont wax meditative.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence pitied the patient gentleman, while asking him in her mind
+who was the author of the domestic burden he had to bear.
+
+'It reminds me I have a mission,' she said.  'There's a fencing match
+down at a hall in the West, near the barracks; private and select:
+Soldier and Civilian; I forget who challenged--Civilian, one judges;
+Soldiers are the peaceful party.  They want you to act "umpire," as they
+call it, on the military side, my dear lord; and you will?--I have given
+my word you will bring Lady Ormont.  You will?--and not let me be
+confounded!  Yes, and we shall make a party.  I see consent.  Aminta will
+enjoy the switch of steel.  I love to see fencing.  It rouses all that is
+diabolical in me.'
+
+She sent a skimming look at the opposite.
+
+'And I,' said he, much freshened.
+
+'You fence?'
+
+'Handle the foils.'
+
+'If you must speak modestly!  Are you in practice?'
+
+'I spend in hour in Captain Chiallo's fencing rooms generally every
+evening before dinner.  I heard there the first outlines of the match
+proposed.  You are right; it was the civilian.'
+
+'Mr. Morsfield, as I suspected.'
+
+She smiled to herself, like one saying, Not badly managed, Mr. Morsfield!
+
+'Italian school?' Lord Ormont inquired, with a screw of the eyelids.
+
+'French, my lord.'
+
+'The only school for teaching.'
+
+'The simplest--has the most rational method.  Italians are apt to be
+tricky.  But they were masters once, and now and then they send out a
+fencer the French can't touch.'
+
+'How would you account for it?'
+
+'If I had to account for it, I should say, hotter blood, cool nerve,
+quick brain.'
+
+'Hum.  Where are we, then?'
+
+'We don't shine with the small sword.'
+
+'We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.'
+
+'We've had clever Irishmen.'
+
+'Hot enough blood!  This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with
+him?'
+
+'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found
+wary enough.'
+
+My lord hummed.  'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over
+steel.'
+
+'He can be dangerous.'
+
+The word struck on something, and rang.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips.  Her travelling eye
+met Aminta's and passed it.
+
+'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.
+
+'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!'  Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble
+assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at
+school under shadow of the master.
+
+She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a
+lesson?  They want it.'
+
+His answer was unheard by Aminta.  She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's
+pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the
+strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic
+attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly
+vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the
+vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood.
+Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the
+wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve
+that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly
+on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence
+Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild
+at his games.
+
+My lord hummed again.  'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing.  This
+fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes.  Show me your hand, sir.'
+
+Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants
+exercise.'
+
+'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at
+cricket.'
+
+'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,' Mrs.
+Pagnell remarked.
+
+He nodded to her and rose.
+
+Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so down
+he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing coffee;
+though he refused to finish a meal without his cup.
+
+'I think the palms do betray something,' said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta
+said: 'Everything betrays.'
+
+'No, my dear,' Mrs. Pagnell corrected her; 'the extremities betray, and
+we cannot read the centre.  Is it not so, my lord?'
+
+'It may be as you say, ma'am.'
+
+She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of
+palms, and especially his sphinx lordship's.
+
+Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish
+gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence's to a subdued
+good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on
+the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing-room.
+
+Mrs. Pagnell, 'quite enjoying the company,' as she told her niece, was
+dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's appointment, positive
+for three o'clock; and she had written it in her head 'p.m., four
+o'clock,' and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner's note; and she
+still had designs upon his lordship's palms, things to read and hint
+around her off the lines.  She departed.
+
+Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not
+marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more or
+less necessitating the infliction he groaned under.  He was too lofty to
+be questioned, even by his favourites.  Mrs. Lawrence conjured the ghost
+of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood's idea.
+Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting.  Pride froze a beginning
+stir in the bosom of Aminta.
+
+Her lord could captivate a reluctant woman's bosom when he was genial.
+He melted her and made her call up her bitterest pride to perform its
+recent office.  That might have failed; but it had support in a second
+letter received from the man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and by Mr.
+Weyburn 'dangerous'; and the thought of who it was that had precipitated
+her to 'play little games' for the sole sake of rousing him through
+jealousy to a sense of righteous duty, armed her desperately against him.
+She could exult in having read the second letter right through on receipt
+of it, and in remembering certain phrases; and notably in a reflection
+shot across her bewildered brain by one of the dangerous man's queer mad
+sentences: 'Be as iron as you like, I will strike you to heat'; and her
+thought: Is there assurance of safety in a perpetual defence?--all while
+she smiled on her genial lord, and signified agreement, with a smiting of
+wonderment at her heart, when he alluded to a panic shout of the country
+for defence, and said: 'Much crying of that kind weakens the power to
+defend when the real attack comes.'  Was it true?
+
+'But say what you propose?' she asked.
+
+Lord Ormont proposed vigilance and drill; a small degree of self-
+sacrifice on the part of the population, and a look-out head in the War
+Department.  He proposed to have a nation of stout-braced men laughing at
+the foreign bully or bandit, instead of being a pack of whimpering women;
+whom he likened to the randomly protestant geese of our country roadside,
+heads out a yard in a gabble of defence while they go backing.
+
+So thereupon Aminta's notion of a resemblance in the mutual thought
+subsided; she relapsed on the cushioning sentiment that she was a woman.
+And--only a woman! he might exclaim, if it pleased him; though he would
+never be able to say she was one of the whimpering.  She, too, had the
+choice to indulge in scorn of the superior man stone blind to proceedings
+intimately affecting him--if he cared!  One might doubt it.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence listened to him with a mind more disengaged, and a flitting
+disapproval of Aminta's unsympathetic ear, or reluctance to stimulate the
+devout attention a bruised warrior should have in his tent.  She did not
+press on him the post of umpire.  He consented--at her request, he said--
+to visit the show; but refused any official position that would, it was
+clearly enough implied, bring his name in any capacity whatever before
+the country which had unpardonably maltreated him.
+
+Feminine wits will be set working, when a point has been gained; and as
+Mrs. Lawrence could now say she had persuaded Lord Ormont to gratify her
+specially, she warmed to fancy she read him, and that she might have
+managed the wounded and angry giant.  Her minor intelligence, caracoling
+unhampered by harassing emotions, rebuked Aminta's for not perceiving
+that to win him round to whatever a woman may desire, she must be with
+him, outstrip him even, along the line he chooses for himself; abuse the
+country, rail at the Government, ridicule the title of English Army,
+proscribe the name of India in his hearing.  Little stings of jealousy
+are small insect bites, and do not pique a wounded giant hardly sensible
+of irritation under his huge, and as we assume for our purpose,
+justifiable wrath.  We have to speculate which way does the giant incline
+to go?  and turn him according to the indication.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence was driven by her critic mood to think Aminta relied--
+erroneously, after woman's old fashion--on the might of superb dark eyes
+after having been captured.  It seemed to her worse than a beautiful
+woman's vanity, a childishness.  But her boy's head held boy's brains;
+and Lord Ormont's praise of the splendid creature's nerve when she had to
+smell powder in Spain, and at bull-fights, and once at a wrecking of
+their carriage down a gully on the road over the Alpujarras, sent her
+away subdued, envious, happy to have kissed the cheek of the woman who
+could inspire it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR
+
+The winning of Lord Ormont's consent to look on at the little bout of
+arms was counted an achievement; for even in his own rarefied upper
+circle, where the fervid sentiments are not allowed to be seen plunging,
+he had his troop of enthusiasts; and they were anxious that he should
+make an appearance in public, to take what consolation a misunderstood
+and injured man could get from evidence of the grateful esteem
+entertained for him by a party of his countrymen, who might reasonably
+expect at the same time to set eyes, at rather close quarters, on the
+wonderful dark beauty, supposed a Spaniard, occasionally beheld riding
+beside him.  If it is possible to connect a woman with the devoutest of
+their anticipations, the sons of leisure up there will do it.  But, in
+truth, an English world was having cause to ransack the dust-heaps for
+neglected men of mettle.  Our intermittent ague, known as dread of
+invasion, was over the land.  Twice down the columns of panic newspaper
+correspondence Lord Ormont saw his name cited, with the effect on him
+that such signs of national repentance approaching lodged a crabbed
+sourness in his consulting-room, whether of head or breast.
+
+He was assailed by a gusty appeal from Lady Charlotte, bidding him seize
+the moment to proclaim his views while the secretary had a private
+missive from her, wherein, between insistency and supplication, she
+directed him to bring the subject before my lord every day, and be sure
+to write out a fair copy of the epistle previous to the transmission of
+it.  'Capua' was mentioned; she brought in 'a siren,' too.  Her brother
+was to be the soldier again--fling off silken bonds.  The world might
+prate of his morality; now was the hour for showing his patriotism,
+casting aside his just anger, and backing his chief's opinion.  'A good
+chance to get their names together.'  To her brother she declared that
+the columns of the leading journal were open to him--'in large type'; he
+was to take her word for it; he had only to 'dictate away,' quite at his
+ease, just as he talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe's
+business to his aide.  'Lose no time,' she concluded; 'the country wants
+your ideas; let us have your plan.'
+
+The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the
+Memoirs.  Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish
+stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a
+complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and
+a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.
+
+'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord
+Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet.  'Take a pen.  Shut up that
+box.  We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs.
+Invasion can't be done, they say!  I tell the doddered asses Napoleon
+would have been over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter.
+Villeneuve had a fit of paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson--
+that 's as it happened.  And they swear at prestige, won't believe in it,
+because it's not fat bacon.  I tell them, after Napoleon's first battles,
+prestige did half his work for him.  It saved him at Essling from a
+plunge into the Danube; it saved him at Moskowa;  it would have marched
+him half over England at his first jump on our shingle beach.  But that
+squelch of fat citizens should be told--to the devil with them! will they
+ever learn? short of a second William!--there were eight-and-forty hours
+when the liberty of this country hung wavering in the balance with those
+Boulogne boats.  Now look at Ulm and Austerlitz.  Essling, Wagram; put
+the victors in those little affairs to front our awkward squads.  The
+French could boast a regimental system, and chiefs who held them as the
+whist-player his hand of cards.  Had we a better general than the
+Archduke Charles? or cavalry and artillery equal to the Hungarian?
+or drilled infantry numbering within eighty thousand of the Boulogne-
+Wimereux camps?  We had nothing but the raw material of courage--pluck,
+and no science.  Ask any boxing man what he thinks of the chances.
+The French might have sacrificed a fleet to land fifty thousand.
+Our fleet was our one chance.  Any foreign General at the head of fifty
+thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut an 'entrechat' for
+joy of the chance.  We should have fought and bled and been marched over
+--a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble!  and Nelson riding the Channel,
+undisputed lord of the waters.  Heigh! by the Lord, this country would
+have been like a man free to rub his skin with his hand and a mortal
+disease in his blood.  Are you ready?  How anticipate a hostile march on
+the capital, is our business.'
+
+Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to
+dictate the practical measures for defence--detesting the cat's-cry
+'defence,' he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we
+should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn the
+mass into troops.  With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen soon
+get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as bat; and
+the sooner they give up the idea of shamming sturdy on a stiff hind leg,
+the better for their chances.  Only, it's a beastly thing to see that for
+their favourite attitude;--like some dog of a fellow weak in the fists,
+weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and prays his gods
+you won't.  All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and he beats his
+wife and kicks his curs at home.  Is there any one to help him now, he
+vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a felon.  Ha!
+
+Bull the bumpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the
+foeman's landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen;
+teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to
+let fly.  Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences,
+hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn.  Kent, Sussex, Surrey, all
+the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of the
+Hampshire heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior's brain.
+He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references to
+gazetteer or atlas.  A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to choose
+our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and place to
+give battle.  If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor to
+ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and
+volunteer horsemen are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry
+prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy mass,
+and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an acknowledged
+defeat.
+
+'That's English! yes, that's English! when they're at it,' my lord sang
+out.
+
+'To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,' cried Weyburn; his
+former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a reminiscence of
+the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper's.
+
+'They fall well.  Yes, the English fall like men,' said my lord,
+pardoning and embracing the cuffed nation.  'Bodies knocked over, hearts
+upright.  That's example; we breed Ironsides out of a sight like that.
+If it weren't for a cursed feeble Government scraping 'conges' to the
+taxpayer--well, so many of our good fellows would not have to fall.  That
+I say; for this thing is going to happen some day, mind you, sir!  And I
+don't want to have puncheons and hogsheads of our English blood poured
+out merely to water the soil of a conquered country because English
+Governments are a craven lot, not daring risk of office by offending the
+taxpayer.  But, on!'
+
+Weyburn sent Lady Charlotte glowing words of the composition in progress.
+
+They worked through a day, and a second day--talked of nothing else in
+the intervals.  Explanatory answers were vouchsafed to Aminta's modest
+inquiries at Finch, as she pictured scenes of smoke, dust and blood from
+the overpowering plain masculine lines they drew, terrible in bluntness.
+The third morning Lord Ormont had map and book to verify distances and
+attempt a scale of heights, take names of estates, farms, parishes,
+commons, patches of woodland.  Weyburn wrote his fair copy on folio
+paper, seven-and-thirty pages.  He read it aloud to the author on the
+afternoon of the fourth day, with the satisfaction in his voice that he
+felt.  My lord listened and nodded.  The plan for the defence of
+England's heart was a good plan.
+
+He signed to have the manuscript handed to him.  A fortified London
+secure of the Thames for abundant supplies, well able to breathe within
+earthworks extending along the southern hills, was clearly shown to stand
+the loss of two big battles on the Sussex weald or more East to North-
+east, if fortune willed it.
+
+He rose from his chair, paced some steps, with bent head, came back
+thoughtfully, lifted the manuscript sheets for another examination.
+Then he stooped to the fire, spreading the edges unevenly, so that they
+caught flame.  Weyburn spied at him.  It was to all appearance the doing
+of a man who had intended it and brought it to the predetermined
+conclusion.
+
+'About time for you to be off for your turn at Chiallo's,' our country's
+defender remarked, after tossing the last half-burnt lump under the grate
+and shovelling at it.
+
+'I will go, my lord,' said Weyburn--and he was glad to go.
+
+He went, calculated his term of service under Lord Ormont.  He was young,
+not a philosopher.  Waste of anything was abhorrent to a nature pointed
+at store of daily gain, if it were only the gain in a new or a freshened
+idea; and time lost, work lost, good counsel to the nation lost,
+represented horrid vacuity to him, and called up the counter
+demonstration of a dance down the halls of madness, for proof that we
+should, at least, have jolly motion of limbs there before Perdition
+struck the great gong.  Ay, and we should be twirling with a fair form on
+the arm: woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but
+together.  Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title
+of madness.  Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist
+burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a
+curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses
+rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old
+schoolboy words--take a licking!
+
+These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by
+Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of
+which they were the sign.  He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did
+no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of
+worship; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.
+
+The person criticized was manifest.  Who was the woman he twirled with?
+She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the sex, or all the sex: the
+sex to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the chosen
+one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift of our
+whole self for her.
+
+She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or
+seemed to murmur--for there was no sound--a complaint of Lord Ormont.
+And she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid
+military hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had no
+understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal life
+with him on earth.
+
+She was put aside rather petulantly, and she took her seat out of the
+whirl with submission.  Thinking she certainly was not Browny, whom he
+would have known among a million, he tried to quit the hall, and he
+twirled afresh, necessarily not alone; it is the unpardonable offence
+both to the Graces and the Great Mother for man to valse alone.  She
+twirled on his arm, uninvited; accepted, as in the course of nature;
+hugged, under dictate of the nature of the man steeled against her by the
+counting of gain, and going now at desperation's pace, by very means of
+those defensive locked steam-valves meant to preserve him from this
+madness,--for the words of the red-lipped mate, where there were no
+words, went through him like a music when the bow is over the viol,
+sweeping imagination, and they said her life was wasting.
+
+Was not she a priceless manuscript cast to the flames?  Her lord had been
+at some trouble to win her.  Or his great fame and his shadowed fortunes
+had won her.  He took her for his own, and he would not call her his own.
+He comported himself with absolute, with kindly deference to the lady
+whose more than vital spark he let the gossips puff at and blur.  He
+praised her courage, visibly admired her person, admitted her in private
+to be his equal, degraded her in public.  Could anything account for the
+behaviour of so manly and noble a gentleman?--Rhetoric made the attempt,
+and Weyburn gave up the windy business.
+
+Discovering that his fair partner of the wasting life was--he struggled
+to quench the revelation--Aminta, he stopped the dance.  If there was no
+gain in whirling fancifully with one of the sex, a spin of a minute with
+her was downright bankruptcy.
+
+He was young, full of blood; his heart led him away from the door Lord
+Ormont had exposed; at which a little patient unemotional watchfulness
+might have intimated to him something besides the simple source of the
+old hero's complex chapter of conduct.  As it was, Weyburn did see the
+rancour of a raw wound in operation.  But he moralized and disapproved;
+telling himself, truly enough, that so it would not have been with him;
+instead of sounding at my lord's character, and his condition of the
+unjustly neglected great soldier, for the purpose of asking how that raw
+wound would affect an injured veteran, who compressed, almost repressed,
+the roar of Achilles, though his military bright name was to him his
+Briseis.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+A SHORT PASSAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO
+
+Politest of men in the domestic circle and everywhere among women, Lord
+Ormont was annoyed to find himself often gruffish behind the tie of his
+cravat.  Indeed, the temper of our eminently serene will feel the strain
+of a doldrum-dulness that is goaded to activity by a nettle.  The
+forbearance he carried farther than most could do was tempted to kick,
+under pressure of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell.  Without much blaming Aminta, on
+whose behalf he submitted to it, and whose resolution to fix in England
+had brought it to this crisis, he magnanimously proposed to the Fair
+Enemy he forced her to be, and liked to picture her as being, a month in
+Paris.
+
+Aminta declined it for herself; after six or more years of travelling,
+she wished to settle, and know her country, she said: a repetition
+remark, wide of the point, and indicatory to the game of Pull she was
+again playing beneath her smooth visage, unaware that she had the wariest
+of partners at the game.
+
+'But go you--do, I beg,' she entreated.  'It will give you new
+impressions; and I cannot bear to tie you down here.'
+
+'How you can consent to be tied down here, is the wonder to me!' said he.
+'When we travelled through the year, just visited England and were off
+again, we were driving on our own road.  Vienna in April and May--what do
+you say?  You like the reviews there, and the dances, concerts, Zigeuner
+bands, military Bohemian bands.  Or Egypt to-morrow, if you like--though
+you can't be permitted to swim in the Nile, as you wanted.  Come, Xarifa,
+speak it.  I go to exile without you.  Say you come.'
+
+She smiled firmly.  The name of her honeymoon days was not a cajolery to
+her.
+
+His name had been that of the Christian Romancero Knight Durandarte, and
+she gave it to him, to be on the proper level with him, while she still
+declined.
+
+'Well, but just a month in Paris!  There's nothing doing here.  And we
+both like the French theatre.'
+
+'London will soon be filling.'
+
+'Well, but--' He stopped; for the filling of London did really concern
+her, in the game of Pull she was covertly playing with him.  'You seem to
+have caught the fever of this London; .  .  .  no bands .  .  .  no
+reviews .  .  .  Low comedy acting.'  He muttered his objections to
+London.
+
+'The society of people speaking one's own tongue, add that,' she ventured
+to say.
+
+'You know you are ten times more Spanish than English.  Moorish, if you
+like.'
+
+'The slave of the gallant Christian Knight, converted, baptized, and
+blissful.  Oh, I know.  But now we are settled in England, I have a wish
+to study English society.'
+
+'Disappointing, I assure you;--dinners heavy, dancing boorish, intrigue a
+blind-man's-buff.  We've been over it all before !'
+
+'We have.'
+
+'Admired, I dare say.  You won't be understood.'
+
+'I like my countrymen.'
+
+'The women have good looks--of the ungarnished kind.  The men are louts.'
+
+'They are brave.'
+
+'You're to see their fencing.  You'll own a little goes a long way.'
+
+'I think it will amuse me.'
+
+'So I thought when I gave the nod to Isabella your friend.'
+
+'You like her?'
+
+'You, too.'
+
+'One fancies she would make an encouraging second in a duel.'
+
+'I will remember .  .  .  when I call you out.'
+
+'Oh, my dear lord, you have dozens to choose from leave me my one if we
+are to enter the lists.'
+
+'We are, it seems; unless you consent to take the run to Paris.  You are
+to say Tom or Rowsley.'
+
+'The former, I can never feel at home in saying;  Rowsley is Lady
+Charlotte's name for you.'
+
+The name of Lady Charlotte was an invitation to the conflict between
+them.  He passed it, and said 'Durandarte runs a mile on the mouth, and
+the Coriolanus of their newspapers helps a stage-player to make lantern
+jaws.  Neither of them comes well from the lips of my girl.  After seven
+years she should have hit on a nickname, of none of the Christian suit.
+I am not "at home" either with "my lord."  However, you send me off to
+Paris alone; and you'll be alone and dull here in this London.
+Incomprehensible to me why!'
+
+'We are both wondering?' said Aminta.
+
+'You 're handsomer than when I met you first--by heaven you are!'
+
+She flushed her dark brown-red late-sunset.  'Brunes are exceptional in
+England.'
+
+'Thousands admiring you, of course!  I know, my love, I have a jewel.'
+
+She asked him: 'What are jewels for?' and he replied, 'To excite
+cupidity.'
+
+'When they 're shut in a box?'
+
+'Ware burglars!  But this one is not shut up.  She shuts herself up.  And
+up go her shoulders!  Decide to be out of it, and come to Paris for some
+life for a month.  No?  It's positive?  When do you expect your little
+school friend?'
+
+'After Easter.  Aunt will be away.'
+
+'Your little friend likes the country.  I'll go to my house agents.  If
+there 's a country house open on the upper Thames, you can have swimming,
+boating, botanizing .  .  .'
+
+He saw her throat swallow.  But as he was offering agreeable things he
+chose to not understand how he was to be compassionate.
+
+'Steignton?' she said, and did her cause no good by saying it feebly.
+
+His look of a bygone awake-in-sleep old look, drearily known to her, was
+like a strip of sunlight on a fortress wall.  It signified, Is the poor
+soul pushing me back to that again?
+
+She compelled herself to say: 'Your tenant there?'
+
+'Matter of business .  .  .  me and my tenant,' he remarked.  'The man
+pays punctually.'
+
+'The lease has expired.'
+
+'Not quite.  You are misinformed.'
+
+'At Easter.'
+
+'Ah! Question of renewing.'
+
+'You were fond of the place.'
+
+'I was fond of the place?  Thank Blazes, I'm not what I was!' He paced
+about.  'There's not a corner of the place that doesn't screw an eye at
+me, because I had a dream there. La gloire!'
+
+The rest he muttered.  'These English!' was heard.  Aminta said: 'Am I
+never to see Steignton?'
+
+Lord Ormont invoked the Powers.  He could not really give answer to this
+female talk of the eternities.
+
+'Beaten I can never be,' he said, with instinctive indulgence to the
+greater creature.  'But down there at Steignton, I should be haunted by a
+young donkey swearing himself the fellow I grew up out of.  No doubt of
+that.  I don't like him the better for it.  Steignton grimaces at a
+cavalry officer fool enough at his own risks and penalties to help save
+India for the English.  Maunderers!  You can't tell--they don't know
+themselves--what they mean.  Except that they 're ready to take anything
+you hand 'em, and then pipe to your swinging.  I served them well--and at
+my age, in full activity, they condemn me to sit and gape!'
+
+He stopped his pacing and gazed on the glass of the window.
+
+'Would you wish me not to be present at this fencing?' said Aminta.
+
+'Dear me! by all means, go, my love,' he replied.
+
+Any step his Fair Enemy won in the secret game Pull between them, she was
+undisputedly to keep.
+
+She suggested: 'It might lead to unpleasantness.'
+
+'Of what sort?'
+
+'You ask?'
+
+He emphasized: 'Have you forgotten?  Something happened after that last
+ball at Challis's Rooms.  Their women as well as their men must be
+careful not to cross me.'
+
+Aminta had confused notions of her being planted in hostile territory,
+and torn and knitted, trumpeted to the world as mended, but not
+honourably mended in a way to stop corridor scandal.  The ball at
+Challis's Rooms had been one of her steps won: it had necessitated a
+requirement for the lion in her lord to exhibit himself, and she had
+gained nothing with Society by the step, owing to her poor performance
+of the lion's mate.  She had, in other words, shunned the countenance of
+some scattered people pityingly ready to support her against the deadly
+passive party known to be Lady Charlotte's.
+
+She let her lord go; thinking that once more had she striven and gained
+nothing: which was true of all their direct engagements.  And she had
+failed because of her being only a woman!  Mr. Morsfield was foolishly
+wrong in declaring that she, as a woman, had reserves of strength.  He
+was perhaps of Lady Charlotte's mind with regard to the existence of a
+Countess of Ormont, or he would know her to be incredibly cowardly.
+Cowardly under the boast of pride, too; well, then, say, if you like, a
+woman!
+
+Yet this mere shallow woman would not hesitate to meet the terrible Lady
+Charlotte at any instant, on any terms: and what are we to think of a
+soldier, hero, lion, dreading to tell her to her face that the persecuted
+woman is his wife!
+
+'Am I a woman they can be ashamed of?' she asked, and did not seek the
+answer at her mirror.  She was in her bedroom, and she put out a hand to
+her jewel-box, fingered it, found it locked, and abandoned her idle
+project.  A gentleman was 'dangerous.'  She had not found him so.  He had
+the reputation, perhaps, because he was earnest.  Not so very many men
+are earnest.  She called to recollection how ludicrously practical he was
+in the thick of his passion.  His third letter (addressed to the Countess
+of Ormont--whom he manifestly did not or would not take to be the
+veritable Countess--and there was much to plead for his error), or was it
+his fourth?--the letters were a tropical hail-storm: third or fourth, he
+broke off a streaked thunderpeal, to capitulate his worldly possessions,
+give the names and degrees of kinship of his relatives, the exact amount
+of the rent-roll of his Yorkshire estates, of his funded property.
+
+Silly man!  but not contemptible.  He proposed everything in honour, from
+his view of it.
+
+Whether in his third, fourth, or fifth letter.  .  .  .  How many had
+come?  She drew the key from her purse, and opened a drawer.  The key of
+the jewel-box was applied to the lock.
+
+Mr. Morsfield had sent her six flaming letters.  He not only took no
+precautions, he boasted that he hailed the consequences of discovery.
+Six!
+
+She lifted a pen: it had to be done.
+
+He was briefly informed that he disturbed her peace.  She begged he would
+abstain from any further writing to her.
+
+The severity was in the brevity.  The contrast of her style and his
+appeared harsh.  But it belonged to the position.
+
+Having with one dash of the pen scribbled her three lines, she slipped
+the letter into her pocket.  That was done, and it had to be done; it
+ought to have been done before.  How simple it was when one contemplated
+it as actually done!  Aminta made the motion of a hand along the paper,
+just a flourish.  Soon after, her head dropped back on the chair, and her
+eyes shut, she took in breath through parted lips.  The brief lines of
+writing had cut away a lump of her vitality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE
+
+Dusty wayfarers along a white high-road who know of a bubbling little
+spring across a stile, on the woodland borders of deep grass, are hailed
+to sit aside it awhile: and Aminta's feverishness was cooled by now and
+then a quiet conversation with the secretary ambitious to become a
+school-master.  Lady Charlotte liked him, so did her lord; Mrs. Lawrence
+had chatted with him freshly, as it was refreshing to recollect; nobody
+thought him a stunted growth.
+
+In Aminta's realized recollections, amid the existing troubles of her
+mind, the charge against him grew paler, and she could no longer quite
+think that the young hero transformed into a Mr. Cuper had deceived her,
+though he had done it--much as if she had assisted at the planting and
+watched aforetime the promise of a noble tree, to find it, after an
+interval of years, pollarded--a short trunk shooting out a shock of
+small, slim, stiff branches; dwarfed and disgraced; serviceable perhaps;
+not ludicrous or ugly, certainly, taking it for a pollard.  And he was a
+cool well-spring to talk with.  He, supposed once to be a passionate
+nature, scorned passion as a madness; he smiled in his merciful
+executioner's way at the high society, of which her aim was to pass for
+one among the butterflies or dragonflies; he had lost his patriotism; he
+labelled our English classes the skimmers, the gorgers, the grubbers, and
+stigmatized them with a friendly air; and uttered words of tolerance only
+for farmers and surgeons and schoolmasters.  But that was quite
+incidental in the humorous run of his talk, diverting to hear while it
+lasted.  He had, of course, a right to his ideas.
+
+No longer concerned in contesting them, she drank at the water of this
+plain earth-well, and hoped she preferred it to fiery draughts, though it
+was flattish, or, say, flavourless.  In the other there was excess of
+flavour--or, no, spice it had to be called.  The young schoolmaster's
+world seemed a sunless place, the world of traders bargaining for gain,
+without a glimmer of the rich generosity to venture life, give it, dare
+all for native land--or for the one beloved.  Love pressed its claim on
+heroical generosity, and instantly it suffused her, as an earth under
+flush of sky.  The one beloved!  She had not known love; she was in her
+five-and-twentieth year, and love was not only unknown to her, it was
+shut away from her by the lock of a key that opened on no estimable
+worldly advantage in exchange, but opened on a dreary, clouded round,
+such as she had used to fancy it must be to the beautiful creamy circus-
+horse of the tossing mane and flowing tail and superb step.  She was
+admired; she was just as much doomed to a round of paces, denied the
+glorious fling afield, her nature's food.  Hitherto she would have been
+shamefaced as a boy in forming the word 'love': now, believing it denied
+to her for good and all--for ever and ever--her bosom held and uttered
+the word.  She saw the word, the nothing but the word that it was, and
+she envisaged it, for the purpose of saying adieu to it--good-bye even to
+the poor empty word.
+
+This condition was attributable to a gentleman's wild rageing with the
+word, into which he had not infused the mystic spirit.  He poured hot
+wine and spiced.  If not the spirit of love, it was really the passion of
+the man.  Her tremors now and again in the reading of his later letters
+humiliated her, in the knowledge that they came of no response to him,
+but from the temporary base acquiescence; which is, with women, a
+terrible perception of the gulf of their unsatisfied nature.
+
+The secretary, cheerful at his work, was found for just the opening of a
+door.  Sometimes she hesitated--to disturb him, she said to herself,--and
+went up-stairs or out visiting.  He protested that he could work on and
+talk too.  She was able to amuse her lord with some of his ideas.  He had
+a stock of them, all his own.
+
+Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to
+the humanity they visit to help uplift, it from the state of beast.  In
+the England of that, period original or unknown ideas were a smoking
+brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air,
+jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and the
+cherished, the ivy-clad and celestially haloed.  They carried the
+dishevelled Maenad's torch.  A step with them, and we were on the
+Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution.  For a publication of simple
+ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not
+pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded: the
+horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them up,
+wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an
+execrable brimstone stench.
+
+Lord Ormont broke through his shouts or grunts at Aminta's report of the
+secretary's ideas on various topics, particularly the proposal that the
+lords of the land should head the land in a revolutionary effort to make
+law of his crazy, top-heavy notions, with a self-satisfied ejaculation:
+'He has not favoured me with any of these puffballs of his.'
+
+The deduction was, that the author sagaciously considered them adapted
+for the ear of a woman; they were womanish--i.e. flighty, gossamer.  To
+the host of males, all ideas are female until they are made facts.
+
+This idea, proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas,
+or reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship with
+the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them in history by
+certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and publishers, Lord
+Ormont thought amazingly comical.  English nobles heading the weavers,
+cobblers, and barbers of England!  He laughed, but he said, 'Charlotte
+would listen to that.'
+
+The dread, high-sitting Lady Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking,
+a woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to
+strike a particular set of bells hanging in her cranium.  She patronized
+blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of the
+people, not with a notion of maintaining our English aristocracy eminent
+in history.
+
+Lady Charlotte, however, would be the foremost to swoop down on the
+secretary's ideas about the education of women.
+
+On that subject, Aminta said she did not know what to think.
+
+Now, if a man states the matter he thinks, and a woman does but listen,
+whether inclining to agree or not, a perceptible stamp is left on soft
+wax.  Lord Ormont told her so, with cavalier kindness.
+
+She confessed 'she did not know what to think,' when the secretary
+proposed the education and collocation of boys and girls in one group,
+never separated, declaring it the only way for them to learn to know and
+to respect one another.  They were to learn together, play together, have
+matches together, as a scheme for stopping the mischief between them.
+
+'But, my dear girl, don't you see, the devilry was intended by Nature.
+Life would be the coldest of dishes without it.' And as for mixing the
+breeched and petticoated in those young days--'I can't enter into it,'
+my lord considerately said.  'All I can tell you is, I know boys.'
+
+Aminta persisted in looking thoughtful.  'Things are bad, as they are
+now,' she said.
+
+'Always were--always will be.  They were intended to be, if we are to
+call them bad.  Botched mendings will only make them worse.'
+
+'Which side suffers?'
+
+'Both; and both like it.  One side must be beaten at any game.  It's off
+and on, pretty equal--except in the sets where one side wears thick
+boots.  Is this fellow for starting a mixed sexes school?  Funny
+mothers!'
+
+'I suppose--' Aminta said, and checked the supposition.  'The mothers
+would not leave their girls unless they were confident .  .  . ?'
+
+'There's to be a female head of the female department?  He reckons on
+finding a woman as big a fool as himself?  A fair bit of reckoning
+enough.  He's clever at the pen. He doesn't bother me with his ideas; now
+and then I 've caught a sound of his bee buzzing.'
+
+The secretary was left undisturbed at his labours for several days.
+
+He would have been gladdened by a brighter look of her eyes at her next
+coming.  They were introspective and beamless.  She had an odd leaning
+to the talk upon Cuper's boys.  He was puzzled by what he might have
+classed, in any other woman, as a want of delicacy, when she recurred to
+incidents which were red patches of the school time, and had clearly lost
+their glow for her.
+
+A letter once written by him, in his early days at Cuper's, addressed to
+J. Masner, containing a provocation to fight with any weapons, and
+signed, 'Your Antagonist,' had been read out to the whole school, under
+strong denunciation of the immorality, the unchristian-like conduct of
+the writer, by Mr. Cuper; creating a sensation that had travelled to Miss
+Vincent's establishment, where some of the naughtiest of the girls had
+taken part with the audacious challenger, dreadful though the
+contemplation of a possible duel so close to them was.  And then the
+girls heard that the anonymous 'Your Antagonist,' on being cited to
+proclaim himself in public assembly of school-mates and masters, had
+jumped on his legs and into the name of--one who was previously thought
+by Miss Vincent's good girls incapable of the 'appalling wickedness,' as
+Mr. Cuper called it, of signing 'Your Antagonist' to a Christian school-
+fellow, having the design to provoke a breach of the law of the land and
+shed Christian blood.  Mr. Cuper delivered an impressive sermon from his
+desk to the standing up boarders and day-scholars alike, vilifying the
+infidel Greek word 'antagonist.'
+
+'Do you remember the offender's name?' the Countess of Ormont said; and
+Weyburn said--
+
+'Oh yes, I 've not forgotten the incident.'
+
+Her eyes, wherein the dead time hung just above the underlids, lingered,
+as with the wish for him to name the name.
+
+She said: 'I am curious to hear how you would treat a case of that sort.
+Would you preach to the boys?
+
+'Ten words at most.  The right assumption is that both fellows were to
+blame.  I fancy the proper way would be to appeal to the naughty girls
+for their opinion as to how the dispute should be decided.'
+
+'You impose too much on them.  And you are not speaking seriously.'
+
+'Pardon me, I am.  I should throw myself into the mind of a naughty girl
+--supposing none of these at hand--and I should let it be known that my
+eyes were shut to proceedings, always provided the weapons were not such
+as would cause a shock of alarm in female bosoms.'
+
+'You would at your school allow it to be fought out?'
+
+'Judging by the characters of the boys.  If they had heads to understand,
+I would try them at their heads.  Otherwise they are the better, they
+come round quicker to good blood, at their age--I speak of English boys
+--for a little hostile exercise of their fists.  Well, for one thing, it
+teaches them the value of sparring.'
+
+'I must imagine I am not one of the naughty sisterhood,--for I cannot
+think I should ever give consent to fighting of any description, unless
+for the very best of reasons,' said the countess.
+
+His eyes were at the trick of the quarter-minute's poising.  Her lids
+fluttered.  'Oh, I don't mean to say I was one of the good,' she added.
+
+At the same time her enlivened memory made her conscious of a warning,
+that she might, as any woman might, so talk on of past days as to take,
+rather more than was required of the antidote she had come for.
+
+The antidote was excellent; cooling, fortifying; 'quite a chalybeate,'
+her aunt would say, and she was thankful.  Her heart rose on a quiet wave
+of the thanks, and pitched down to a depth of uncounted fathoms.  Aminta
+was unable to tell herself why.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had been announced.  On her way to the drawing
+room Aminta's brain fell upon a series of dots, that wound along a track
+to the point where she accused herself of a repented coquettry--cause of
+the burning letters she was doomed to receive and could not stop without
+rousing her lion.  She dotted backwards; there was no sign that she had
+been guilty of any weakness other than the almost--at least, in design--
+innocent first move, which had failed to touch Lord Ormont in the
+smallest degree.  Never failure more absolute!
+
+She was about to inquire of her bosom's oracle whether she greatly cared
+now.  For an answer, her brain went dotting along from Mr. Cuper's
+school, and a boy named Abner there, and a boy named Matey Weyburn, who
+protected the little Jew-boy, up to Mr. Abner in London, who recommended
+him in due season to various acquaintances; among them to Lady Charlotte
+Eglett.  Hence the introduction to Lord Ormont.  How little extraordinary
+circumstances are, if only we trace them to the source!
+
+But if only it had appeared marvellous, the throbbing woman might have
+seized on it, as a thing fateful, an intervention distinctly designed to
+waken the best in her, which was, after all, the strongest.  Yea, she
+could hope and pray and believe it was the strongest.
+
+She was listening to Isabella Lawrence Finchley, wishing she might have
+followed to some end the above line of her meditations.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence was changed, much warmer, pressing to be more than merely
+friendly.  Aminta twice gave her cheek for kisses.  The secretary had
+spoken of Mrs. Lawrence as having the look of a handsome boy; and
+Aminta's view of her now underwent a change likewise.  Compunction,
+together with a sisterly taste for the boyish fair one flying her sail
+independently, and gallantly braving the winds, induced her to kiss in
+return.
+
+'You do like me a morsel?' said Mrs. Lawrence.  'I fell in love with you
+the last time I was here.  I came to see Mr. Secretary--it's avowed; and
+I have been thinking of you ever since, of no one else.  Oh yes, for a
+man; but you caught me.  I've been hearing of him from Captain May.  They
+fence at those rooms.  And it 's funny, Mr. Morsfield practises there,
+you know; and there was a time when the lovely innocent Amy, Queen of
+Blondes, held the seat of the Queen of Brunes.  Ah, my dear, the
+infidelity of men doesn't count.  They are affected by the changeing
+moons.  As long as the captain is civil to him, we may be sure beautiful
+Amy has not complained.  Her husband is the pistol she carries in her
+pocket, and she has fired him twice, with effect.  Through love of you I
+have learnt the different opinion the world of the good has of her and of
+me; I thought we ran under a common brand.  There are gradations.  I went
+to throw myself at the feet of my great-aunt; good old great-aunt Lady de
+Culme, who is a power in the land.  I let her suppose I came for myself,
+and she reproached me with Lord Adder.  I confessed to him and ten
+others.  She is a dear, she's ticklish, and at eighty-four she laughed!
+She looked into my eyes and saw a field with never a man in it--just the
+shadow of a man.  She admitted the ten cancelled the one, and exactly
+named to me, by comparison with the erring Amy, the sinner I am and must
+be, if I 'm to live.  So, dear, the end of it is,' and Mrs. Lawrence put
+her fingers to a silken amber bow at Aminta's throat, and squared it and
+flattened it with dainty precision, speaking on under dropped eyelids,
+intent upon her work, 'Lady de Culme will be happy to welcome you
+whenever it shall suit the Countess of Ormont to accompany her
+disreputable friend.  But what can I do, dear?'  She raised her lids and
+looked beseechingly.  'I was born with this taste for the ways and games
+and style of men.  I hope I don't get on badly with women; but if I 'm
+not allowed to indulge my natural taste, I kick the stable-boards and
+bite the manger.'
+
+Aminta threw her arms round her, and they laughed their mutual peal.
+
+Caressing her still, Aminta said: 'I don't know whether I embrace a boy.'
+
+'That idea comes from a man!' said Mrs. Lawrence.  It was admitted.  The
+secretary was discussed.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence remarked: 'Yes, I like talking with him; he's bright.  You
+drove him out of me the day I saw him.  Doesn't he give you the idea of a
+man who insists on capturing you and lets it be seen he doesn't care two
+snaps of a finger?'
+
+Aminta petitioned on his behalf indifferently: 'He 's well bred.'
+
+She was inattentive to Mrs. Lawrence's answer.  The allusion of the Queen
+of Blondes had stung her in the unacknowledged regions where women
+discard themselves and are most sensitive.
+
+'Decide on coming soon to Lady de Culme,' said Mrs. Lawrence.  'Now that
+her arms are open to you, she would like to have you in them.  She is
+old--.  You won't be rigorous? no standing on small punctilios?
+
+She would call, but she does not--h'm, it is M. le Comte that she does
+not choose to--h'm.  But her arms are open to the countess.  It ought to
+be a grand step.  You may be assured that Lady Charlotte Eglett would
+not be taken into them.  My great-aunt has a great-aunt's memory.  The
+Ormonts are the only explanation--if it 's an apology--she can offer for
+the behaviour of the husband of the Countess of Ormont.  You know I like
+him.  I can't help liking a man who likes me.  Is that the way with a
+boy, Mr. Secretary?  I must have another talk with the gentleman, my
+dear.  You are Aminta to me.'
+
+'Always Aminta to you,' was the reply, tenderly given.
+
+'But as for comprehending him, I'm as far off that as Lady de Culme, who
+hasn't the liking for him I have.'
+
+'The earl?' said Aminta, showing by her look that she was in the same
+position.
+
+Mrs. Lawrence shrugged: 'I believe men and women marry in order that they
+should never be able to understand one another.  The riddle's best read
+at a moderate distance.  It 's what they call the golden mean; too close,
+too far, we're strangers.  I begin to understand that husband of mine,
+now we're on bowing terms.  Now, I must meet the earl to-morrow.  You
+will arrange?  His hand wants forcing.  Upon my word, I don't believe it
+'s more.'
+
+Mrs. Lawrence contrasted him in her mind with the husband she knew, and
+was invigorated by the thought that a placable impenetrable giant may
+often be more pliable in a woman's hands than an irascible dwarf--until,
+perchance, the latter has been soundly cuffed, and then he is docile to
+trot like a squire, as near your heels as he can get.  She rejoiced to
+be working for the woman she had fallen in love with.
+
+Aminta promised herself to show the friend a livelier affection at their
+next meeting.
+
+A seventh letter, signed 'Adolphus,' came by post, was read and locked up
+in her jewel-box.  They were all nigh destruction for a wavering minute
+or so.  They were placed where they lay because the first of them had
+been laid there, the box being a strong one, under a patent key, and
+discovery would mean the terrible.  They had not been destroyed because
+they had, or seemed to her to have, the language of passion.  She could
+read them unmoved, and appease a wicked craving she owned to having, and
+reproached herself with having, for that language.
+
+Was she not colour in the sight of men?  Here was one, a mouthpiece of
+numbers, who vowed that homage was her due, and devotion, the pouring
+forth of the soul to her.  What was the reproach if she read the stuff
+unmoved?
+
+But peruse and reperuse it, and ask impressions to tell our deepest
+instinct of truthfulness whether language of this character can have been
+written to two women by one hand!  Men are cunning.  Can they catch a
+tone?  Not that tone!
+
+She, too, Mrs. Amy May, was colour in the sight of men.  Yet it seemed
+that he could not have written so to the Queen of Blondes.  And she, by
+repute, was as dangerous to slight as he to attract.  Her indifference
+exonerated him.  Besides, a Queen of Blondes would not draw the hearts
+out of men in England, as in Italy and in Spain.  Aminta had got thus far
+when she found 'Queen of Brunes' expunged by a mist: she imagined
+hearing the secretary's laugh.  She thought he was right to laugh at her.
+She retorted simply: 'These are feelings that are poetry.'
+
+A man may know nothing about them, and be an excellent schoolmaster.
+
+Suggestions touching the prudence of taking Mrs. Lawrence into her
+confidence, as regarded these troublesome letters of the man with the
+dart in his breast, were shuffled aside for various reasons: her modesty
+shrank; and a sense of honour toward the man forbade it.  She would have
+found it easier to do if she had conspired against her heart in doing it.
+And yet, cold-bloodedly to expose him and pluck the clothing from a
+passion--dear to think of only when it is profoundly secret--struck her
+as an extreme baseness, of which not even the woman who perused and
+reperused his letters could be guilty.
+
+Her head rang with some of the lines, and she accused her head of the
+crime of childishness, seeing that her heart was not an accomplice.  At
+the same time, her heart cried out violently against the business of a
+visit to Lady de Culme, and all the steps it involved.  Justly she
+accused her heart of treason.  Heart and head were severed.  This, as she
+partly apprehended, is the state of the woman who is already on the slope
+of her nature's mine-shaft, dreading the rush downwards, powerless to
+break away from the light.
+
+Letters perused and reperused, coming from a man never fervently noticed
+in person, conjure features one would wish to put beside the actual,
+to make sure that the fiery lines he writes are not practising a
+beguilement.  Aminta had lost grasp of the semblance of the impassioned
+man.  She just remembered enough of his eyes to think there might be
+healing in a sight of him.
+
+Latterly she had refused to be exhibited to a tattling world as the great
+nobleman's conquest:--The 'Beautiful Lady Doubtful' of a report that had
+scorched her cars.  Theatres, rides, pleasure-drives, even such houses as
+she saw standing open to her had been shunned.  Now she asked the earl to
+ride in the park.
+
+He complied, and sent to the stables immediately, just noted another of
+her veerings.  The whimsy creatures we are matched to contrast with,
+shift as the very winds or feather-grasses in the wind.  Possibly a fine
+day did it.  Possibly, too, her not being requested to do it.
+
+He was proud of her bearing on horseback.  She rode well and looked well.
+A finer weapon wherewith to strike at a churlish world was never given
+into the hands of man.  These English may see in her, if they like, that
+they and their laws and customs are defied.  It does her no hurt, and it
+hits them a ringing buffet.
+
+Among the cavaliers they passed was Mr. Morsfield.  He rode by slowly.
+The earl stiffened his back in returning the salute.  Both that and the
+gentleman were observed by Aminta.
+
+'He sees to having good blood under him,' said the earl.  'I admired his
+mount,' she replied.
+
+Interpreted by the fire of his writing, his features expressed character:
+insomuch that a woman could say of another woman, that she admired him
+and might reasonably do so.  His gaze at her in the presence of her lord
+was audacious.
+
+He had the defect of his virtue of courage.  Yet a man indisputably
+possessing courage cannot but have an interesting face--though one may
+continue saying, Pity that the eyes are not a little wider apart!  He
+dresses tastefully; the best English style.  A portrait by a master hand
+might hand him down to generations as an ancestor to be proud of.  But
+with passion and with courage, and a bent for snatching at the lion's
+own, does he not look foredoomed to an early close?  Her imagination
+called up a portrait of Elizabeth's Earl of Essex to set beside him; and
+without thinking that the two were fraternally alike, she sent him riding
+away with the face of the Earl of Essex and the shadow of the unhappy
+nobleman's grievous fortunes over his head.
+
+But it is inexcuseable to let the mind be occupied recurrently by a man
+who has not moved the feelings, wicked though it be to have the feelings
+moved by him.  Aminta rebuked her silly wits, and proceeded to speculate
+from an altitude, seeing the man's projects in a singularly definite
+minuteness, as if the crisis he invoked, the perils he braved, the mute
+participation he implored of her for the short space until their fate
+should be decided, were a story sharply cut on metal.  Several times she
+surprised herself in an interesting pursuit of the story; abominably
+cold, abominably interested.  She fell upon a review of small duties of
+the day, to get relief; and among them a device for spiriting away her
+aunt from the table where Mrs. Lawrence wished to meet Lord Ormont.  It
+sprang up to her call like an imp of the burning pit.  She saw it
+ingenious and of natural aspect.  I must be a born intriguer! she said in
+her breast.  That was hateful; but it seemed worse when she thought of a
+woman commanding the faculty and consenting to be duped and foiled.  That
+might be termed despicable; but what if she had not any longer the wish
+to gain her way with her lord?
+
+Those letters are acting like a kind of poison in me! her heart cried:
+and it was only her head that dwelt on the antidote.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense
+And not be beaten by an acknowledged defeat
+Botched mendings will only make them worse
+Convincing themselves that they impersonate sagacity
+I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe them
+Lawyers hold the keys of the great world
+Naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time
+Not daring risk of office by offending the taxpayer
+This female talk of the eternities
+To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end
+To males, all ideas are female until they are made facts
+We cannot, men or woman, control the heart in sleep at night
+Who cries, Come on, and prays his gods you won't
+
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+***********************************************************************
+The Project Gutenberg Etext Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2, by Meredith
+*********This file should be named gm84v10.txt or gm84v10.zip**********
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, gm84v11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, gm84v10a.txt
+
+This etext was produced by Pat Castevans  <patcat@ctnet.net>
+and 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 Lord Ormont and his Aminta, v2
+by George Meredith
+
diff --git a/old/4478.zip b/old/4478.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c3a974b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/4478.zip