 Prelued to the Egoist A chapter of which the last page only is of any importance. Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilised men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses, nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief my newest grains of evidence for the rooting of incredulity. The comic spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men, vision and ardour constitute his merit. He has not a thought of persuading you to believe in him, follow and you will see. But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels. Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on earth, that might indeed be called the Book of Earth, whose title is the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. So full of it and of such dimensions is this book, in which the generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be profitable to us the book needs a powerful compression. Who says the notable humorist, in allusion to this book, who can studiously travel through sheets of leaves, now capable of a stretch from the lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds of leagues dancing on their toes for coal to explorers tell us, and catching breath by good luck, like dogs at boners about a table, on the edge of the pole. Inordinate, unvaried length, sheer long inquity, staggers the heart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we manage finally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary majestic outsider? We may get him into the book, yet the knowledge we want will not be more present with us than it was when the chapters hung their end over the cliff you can of at Dover, where sits our great Lord and Master, contemplating the seas without, upon the reflex of that within. In other words, as I venture to translate him, humorists are difficult, it is a piece of their humor to puzzle our wits. The inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give us those interminable mile-post piles of matter, extending well night of the very pole, in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible, is mainly accountable for our present brandfulness, and that prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to science the other day for an antidote, which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains, and science introduced us to our all-hoary ancestry, them in the oriental posture, whereupon we set up a primeval chattering to rival the Amazon forest nine nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our disease was hanging on to us again, with the extension of a tale. We had it for and aft. We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we got from science. Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may be left. The chief consideration for us is what particular practice of art in letters is the best for the perusal of the book of our common wisdom, so that with clearer minds and livelier manners we may escape as it were into daylight and song, from a land of foghorns. Shall we read it by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of the infinitesimal, or pointed with examples and types under the broad alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence? Which is the comic spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us that there is a constant tendency in the book to accumulate excess of substance, and such replete-ness, obscuring the glass it holds to mankind, renders us inexact in the recognition of our individual countenances, a perilous thing for civilisation. And these wise men are strong in their opinion that we should encourage the comic spirit, who is, after all, our own offspring, to relieve the book. Comedy, they say, is the true diversion, as it is likewise the key of the great book, the music of the book. They tell us how it condenses whole sections of the book in a sentence, volumes in a character, so that a fair pan of a book outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled may be compassed in one comic sitting. For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the page before us if we would be men. One with an index on the book cries out in a style pardonable to his fervency. The remedy of your frightful affliction is here, through the stilletry of comedy, and not in science, nor yet in speed, whose name is but another for voracity. Why, to be alive, to be quick in the soul, there should be diversity in the companion's robbs of your pulses. Interrogate them. They lump along like the old lob-legs of Dobbin the Horse, or do their business like cudgels of carpet-thwackers expelling dust, or the cottage-clock pendulum teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic, this too in spite of backers, and let them gallop, let them gallop with the God bestriding them, gallop to Hyman, gallop to Hades, they strike the same note. Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the arms of anthitrity. We hear a shout of war for a diversion. Comedy he pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and comprehensively. She it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of dullness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among us. She is the ultimate civiliser, the polisher, a sweet cook. If he says she watches over sentimentalism with a birch rod, she is not opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one foot's length of pretence will have that foot caught in her trap. In comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain and of the stroke of honourable laughter, an aerial released by Prospero's wand from the fetters of the damned witch-sicker-axe. And this laughter of reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the shifty spring deciding for summer. You hear it giving the delicate spirit his liberty. Listen for comparison to an unleavened society, and lo, as of the udderful cow past milking are. Oh, for a titled ecclesiastic to curse to excommunication that unholy thing. So far an enthusiast, perhaps, but he should have a hearing. Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos, and we are not totally deficient of pathos, which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process on board our modern vessel. For it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses, and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest. There is a touch of pathos. The egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over, and squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation. You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth and station. A not flexile figure, do what we may with him. The humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface, and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him. When they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records boldly, where brevity is most complementary, as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision. Malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Where they catch sight of egoism, they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their grip of an English gentleman in whom they have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antique, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of the chase. Simply off they scour, egoist and imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great house for centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands, and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round the tottering pillar of the house when his turn arrives. As if they had, possibly they had, smelt of old date a doomed colossus of egoism in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They dare not be chuckling while egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait. A foretime a grand old egoism built the house. It would appear that ever finer essences of it are demanded to sustain the structure. But especially would it appear that a reversion to the gross original, beneath a mask and in a vein of fineness, is an earthquake at the foundations of the house. Better that it should not have consented to motion and have held stubbornly to all ancestral ways than have bred that anachronic spectre. The sight, however, is one to make our squatting imps encircle, grow restless on their haunches, as they bend eyes instantly, ears at full cock, for the commencement of the comic drama of the suicide. If this line of verse be not yet in our literature, through very love of self, himself he slew. Let it be admitted for his epitaph. CHAPTER I A minor incident showing an hereditary aptitude in the use of the knife. There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible over the infancy of Willoughby, fifth in descent from Simon Pattern, of Pattern Hall, premier of this family, a lawyer, a man of solid acquirements and stout ambition, who well understood the foundation work of a house, and was endowed with the power of saying no to those first agents of destruction, besieging relatives. He said it with the resonant emphasis of death to younger sons, for if the oak is to become a stately tree, we must provide against the crowding of timber. Also the tree beset with parasites prospers not. A great house, in its beginning, lives, we may truly say, by the knife. Soil is easily got, and so are bricks, and a wife and children come of wishing for them, but the vigorous use of the knife is a natural gift, and points to growth. Popper patterns were numerous when the fifth head of the race was the hope of his county. A pattern was in the marines. The country and the chief of this family were simultaneously informed of the existence of one Lieutenant Cross J. Pattern, of the core of the famous Hard Fighters, through an act of heroism of the unpretending cool sort, which kindles British blood, on the part of the modest young officer, in the storming of some eastern river-rained stronghold, somewhere about the coast of China. The officer's youth was assumed on the strength of his rank, perhaps likewise from the tale of his modesty. He had only done his duty. Our Willoughby was then at college, emulous of the generous enthusiasm of his years, and strangely impressed by the report and the printing of his name in the newspapers. He thought over it for several months. When, coming to his title and heritage, he sent Lieutenant Cross J. Pattern a check for some of money amounting to the gallant fellow's pay per annum, at the same time showing his acquaintance with the first, or chemical, principles of generosity, in the remark to friends at home that, Blood is thicker than water. The man is a marine, but he is a pattern. How any pattern should have drifted into the marines is of the order of questions which are senselessly asked of the great dispensary. In the complimentary letter accompanying his check, the Lieutenant was invited to present himself at the ancestral hall, when convenient to him, and he was assured that he had given his relative and friend a taste for a soldier's life. Young Sir Willoughby was fond of talking of his military namesake and distant cousin, Young Pattern, the Marine. It was funny, and not less laughable was the description of his namesake's deed of valor, with the rescued British sailor inebriate, and the hauling off to captivity of the three braves of the black dragon on a yellow ground, and the tying of them together back to back by their pigtails, and driving of them into our lines upon a newly devised, dying-top style of march that inclined the oblique, like the astonished six eyes of the celestial prisoners, for straight they could not go. The humour of gentlemen at home is always highly excited by such cool feats. We are a small island, but you see what we do. The ladies at the hall, Sir Willoughby's mother and his aunts, Eleanor and Isabelle, were more affected than he by the circumstance of their having a pattern in the Marines. But how then? We English have dookal blood in business. We have, genealogists tell us, royal blood in common trades. For all our pride we are queer people, and you may be ordering butchers meat of a tooter, sitting on the cane-bottom chairs of a plantagenet. By and by you may. But cherish your reverence. Sir Willoughby made a kind of shock-head or football-hero of his gallant distant cousin, and wondered occasionally that the fellow had been content to dispatch a letter of effusive thanks without availing himself of the invitation to partake of the hospitality's of pattern. He was one afternoon parading between showers on the stately garden terrace at the hall, in company with his affianced, the beautiful and dashing Constantia d'Orem, followed by knots of ladies and gentlemen vowed to fresh air before dinner, while it was to be had. Chancing with his usual happy fortune, we call these things dealt to us out of the great hidden dispensary, chance, to glance up the avenue of limes, as he was in the act of turning on his heel at the end of the terrace, and it should be added, discoursing with passion's privilege of the passion of love to Miss D'Orem. Sir Willoughby, who was anything but obtuse, experienced a presentiment upon aspiring a thick-set, stumpy man crossing the gravel space from the avenue to the front steps of the hall, decidedly not bearing the stamp of the gentleman on his hat, his coat, his feet, or anything that was his, Willoughby subsequently observed the ladies of his family in the scriptural style of gentlemen who do bear the stamp. His brief sketch of the creature was repulsive. The visitor carried a bag, and his coat-collar was up. His hat was melancholy. He had the appearance of a bankrupt tradesman absconding—no gloves, no umbrella. As to the incident we have to note, it was very slight. The card of Lieutenant Pattern was handed to Sir Willoughby, who laid it on the salver, saying to the footman, not at home. He had been disappointed in the age, grossly deceived in the appearance of the man claiming to be his relative in this unseasonable fashion, and his acute instinct advised him swiftly of the absurdity of introducing to his friends a heavy, unpresentable senior as the celebrated gallant Lieutenant of Marines, and the same as a member of his family. He had talked of the man too much, too enthusiastically, to be able to do so. A young subaltern, even if passively vulgar in figure, can be shuffled through by the aid of the heroical story humorously exaggerated in apology for his aspect. Cutting can be done with a mature and stumpy marine of that rank. Considerateness dismisses him on the spot, without parley. It was performed by a gentleman supremely advanced at a very early age in the art of cutting. Young Sir Willoughby spoke a word of the rejected visitor to Miss Durham in response to her startled look. I shall drop him a check," he said, for she seemed personally wounded, and had a face of crimson. The young lady did not reply. Dating from the humble departure of Lieutenant Cross Jay pattern of the Lime Avenue under a gathering rain-cloud, the ring of imps in attendance on Sir Willoughby maintained their station with strict observation of his movements at all hours, and were comparisons in quest the sympathetic eagerness of the eyes of caged monkeys for the hand about to feed them would supply one. They perceived in him a fresh development and very subtle manifestation of the very old thing from which he had sprung. CHAPTER II The Young Sir Willoughby These little scoundrel imps, who have attained to some respectability as the dogs and pets of the comic spirit, had been curiously attentive three years earlier, long before the public announcement of his engagement to the beautiful Miss Durham, on the day of Sir Willoughby's majority, when Mrs. Mount Stewart Jenkinson said her word of him. Mrs. Mount Stewart was a lady certain to say the remembered, if not the right thing. Women and again was it confirmed on days of high celebration, days of birth or bridal, how sure she was to hit the mark that rang the bell, and away her word went over the county. And had she been an uncharitable woman, she could have ruled the county with an iron rod of caricature, so sharp was her touch. A grain of malice would have sent county faces and characters awry into the currency. She was wealthy and kindly, and resembled our mother nature and her reasonable antipathies to one or two things which none can defend, and her decided preference of persons that shone in the sun. Her words sprang out of her. She looked at you, and forth it came, and it stuck to you, as nothing laboured or literary could have adhered. Her saying of Letitia Dale—here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes—was a portrait of Letitia, and that of Vernon Whitford. He is a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar, painted the sunken brilliancy of the lean, long walker, and scholar at a stroke. Of the young Sir Willoughby her word was brief, and there was the merit of it on a day when he was hearing from sunrise to the setting of the moon salutes in his honour songs of praise, and Ciceronian eulogy. Rich, handsome, courteous, generous, lord of the hall, the feast and the dance, he excited his guests of both sexes to a holiday of flattery, and, says Mrs. Mount Stewart, while grand phrases were mouthing round about him, you see, he has a leg. That you saw, of course, but after she had spoken, you saw much more. Mrs. Mount Stewart said it just as others utter empty nothings, with never a hint of a stress. Her word was taken up, and very soon, from the extreme end of the long drawing-room, the circulation of something of Mrs. Mount Stewart's was distinctly perceptible. Lady Pattern sent a little heebie down, skirting the dancers for an accurate report of it, and even the inappreciative lips of a very young lady transmitting the word could not damp the impression of its weighty truthfulness. It was perfect. Agulation of the young Sir Willoughby's beauty and wit, and aristocratic bearing and mean, and of his moral virtues was common—welcome, if you like, as a form of homage—but common, almost vulgar, beside Mrs. Mount Stewart's quiet little touch of nature. In seeming to say infinitely less than others, as Miss Isabelle Pattern pointed out to Lady Bush, Mrs. Mount Stewart comprised all that the others had said, by showing the needlessness of allusions to the saliently evident. She was the aristocrat reproving the provincial. He is everything you have had the goodness to remark. Ladies and dear Sirs, he talks charmingly, dances divinely, rides with the air of a commander-in-chief, has the most natural grand pose possible without ceasing for a moment to be the young English gentleman he is. Alcibiades, fresh from a Louis IV Perucier, could not surpass him. Whatever you please. I could outdo you in sublime comparisons, were I minded to pelt him. Have you noticed that he has a leg? So might it be amplified. A simple seeming word of this import is the triumph of the spiritual, and where it passes for coin of value, the society has reached a high refinement, Arcadian by the aesthetic root. Observation of Willoughby was not, as Miss Eleanor Pattern pointed out to Lady Cullmer, drawn down to the leg, but directed to estimate him from the leg upward. That, however, is prosaic. Dwell a short space on Mrs. Mount Stewart's word, and wither into what fair region, and with how decorously voluptuous a sensation, do not we fly, who have, through mournful veneration of the martyr Charles, a coy attachment to the court of his merry son, where the leg was ribboned with love-knots and reigned. Oh! it was a naughty court. Yet we have dreamed of it as the period when an English cavalier was grace incarnate, far from the boar now hustling us in another sphere, beautifully mannered, every gesture dulcet. And if the ladies were, we will hope they had been traduced. But if they were, if they were too tender—ah, gentlemen were gentlemen then, worth perishing for—there is this dream in the English country. Then it must be an aspiration after some form of melodious gentlemanliness, which is imagined to have inhabited the island at one time, as among our poets the dream of the period of a circle of chivalry here is encouraged for the pleasure of the imagination. Mrs. Mount Stewart touched a thrilling chord. In spite of men's hateful modern costume, you see he has a leg. That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you, and obscured as you will, best generately, there it is for ladies who have eyes. You see it, or you see he has it. Miss Isabelle and Miss Eleanor disputed the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though a slight difference of meaning may be heard, either will do. Many with a good show of reason throw the accent upon leg, and the ladies knew for a fact that Willoughby's leg was exquisite, he had a cavalier court suit in his wardrobe. Mrs. Mount Stewart signified that the leg was to be seen because it was a burning leg. There it is, and it will shine through. He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham, Dorsett, Suckling. The leg that smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty self-satisfied. That twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness and seductiveness, audacity and discretion, between, You shall worship me, and I am devoted to you. It is your lord, your slave, alternately, and in one. It is a leg of ebb and flow, and high-tide ripples. Such a leg, when it has done with pretending to retire, will walk straight into the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to them. Self-satisfied it must be. Humbleness does not win multitudes of the sex. It must be vain to have a sheen, captivating melodies, to prove to you the unavoidableness of self-satisfaction when you know that you have hit perfection. Listen to them closely. Have an inner pipe of that conceit almost ludicrous when you detect the chirp. And you need not be reminded that he has the leg without the naughtiness. You see eminent in him what we would feign have brought about in a nation that has lost its leg, in gaining possibly cleaner morality. And that is often contested. But there is no doubt of the loss of the leg. Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish Highlanders, and the Cord de Ballet, Dremen, too, have legs, and staring legs shapely enough. But what are they? Not the modulated instrument we mean, simply legs for legwork dumb as the brutes. Our cavaliers is the poetic leg, a portent, a valiance. He has it as Cicero had a tongue. It is a lute to scatter songs to his mistress. A rapier, is she obdurate. Insooth a leg with brains in it, soul. And its shadows are an ambush, its lights a surprise. It blushes, it pales, can whisper, exclaim. It is a peep, in part revelation, just sufferable of the Olympian God, Jove playing carpet-night. For the young Sir Willoughby's family and his thoughtful admirers, it is not too much to say that Mrs. Mount Stewart's little word fetched an epoch of our history to colour the evening of his arrival at man's estate. He was all that Mary Charles's court should have been, subtracting not a sparkle from what it was. Under this light he danced, and you may consider the effect of it on his company. He had received the domestic education of a prince. Little princes abound in a land of heaped riches. Where they have not to yield military service to an imperial master, they are necessarily here and there dainty during youth, sometimes unmanageable, and as they are bound in no personal duty to the state, each is for himself with full present, and what is more luxurious, prospective leisure for the practice of that allegiance. They are sometimes enervated by it. That must be in continental countries. Happily our climate and our brave blood precipitate the greater number upon the hunting field, to do the public service of heading the chase of the fox, with benefit to their constitutions. Hence a manly as well as useful race of little princes, and will be was as manly as any. He cultivated himself. He would not be outdone in popular accomplishments. Had the standard of the public taste been set in philosophy, and the national enthusiasm centred in philosophers, he would at least have worked at books. He did work at science, and had a laboratory. His admirable passion to excel, however, was chiefly directed in his youth upon sport, and so great was the passion in him that it was commonly the presence of rivals which led him to the declaration of love. He knew himself, nevertheless, to be the most constant of men in his attachment to the sex. He had never discouraged Letitia Dale's devotion to him, and even when he followed in the sweeping tide of the beautiful Constantia d'Orum, whom Mrs. Mount Stewart called the racing cutter, he thought of Letitia and looked at her. She was a shy violet. Willoughby's comportment, while the showers of adulation drenched him, might be likened to the composure of Indian gods undergoing worship. But unlike them, he reposed upon no seat of amplitude to preserve him from a betrayal of intoxication. He had to continue tripping, dancing, exactly balancing himself, head to right, head to left, addressing his idolaters in phrases of perfect choiceness. This is only to say that it is easier to be a wooden idol than one in the flesh. Yet Willoughby was equal to his task. The little prince's education teaches him that he is other than you, and by virtue of the instruction he receives, and also something, we know not what, within, he is enabled to maintain his posture, where you would be tottering. Urchins upon whose curly, pate's grave seniors lay their hands with conventional encomium and speculation, look older than they are immediately, and Willoughby looked older than his years, not for want of freshness, but because he felt that he had to stand eminently and correctly poised. Hearing of Mrs. Mount Stewart's word on him, he smiled and said, It is at her service. The speech was communicated to her, and she proposed to attach a dedicatory strip of silk, and then they came together, and there was wit and repartee suitable to the electrical atmosphere of the dancing-room, on the march to a magical hall of supper. Willoughby conducted Mrs. Mount Stewart to the supper-table. Were I, said she, twenty years younger I think I would marry you to cure my infatuation. Then let me tell you in advance, madam, said he, that I will do everything to obtain a new lease of it, except divorce you. They were infinitely wittier, but so much was heard and may be reported. It makes the business of choosing a wife for him superhumanly difficult, Mrs. Mount Stewart observed, after listening to the praises she had set going again when the ladies were weeded of us in Lady Pattern's Indian Room, and could converse unhampered upon their own ethereal themes. Lady will choose a wife for himself, said his mother. Egoist by George Meredith Chapter III Constantia Durham The great question for the county was debated in many households, daughter thronged and daughterless, long subsequent to the memorable day of Willoughby's coming of age. Lady Bush was for Constantia Durham. She laughed at Mrs. Mount Stewart Jenkinson's notion of Letitia Dale. She was a little older than Mrs. Mount Stewart, and had known Willoughby's father, whose marriage into the wealthiest branch of the Whitford family had been strictly sagacious. Pattern's marry money, they are not romantic people, she said. Mrs. Durham had money, and she had health and beauty. Three mighty qualifications for a Pattern bride. Her father, Sir John Durham, was a large landowner in the western division of the county. A pompous gentleman, the picture of her father-in-law for Willoughby. The father of Miss Dale was a battered army surgeon from India, tenant of one of Sir Willoughby's cottages bordering Pattern Park. His girl was portionless and a poetess. Her writing of the song in celebration of the young Baronet's birthday was thought to a clever venture. Bold as only your timid creatures can be bold. She let the cat out of her bag of verse before the multitude. She almost proposed to her hero in her rhymes. She was pretty. Her eyelashes were long and dark, her eyes dark blue, and her soul was ready to shoot like a rocket out of them at a look from Willoughby. And he looked, he certainly looked, though he did not dance with her once that night, and danced repeatedly with Miss Durham. He gave Laetitia to Vernon Whitford for the final dance of the night, and he may have looked at her so much in pity of an elegant girl allied to such a partner. The febus Apollo turned fasting friar had certainly forgotten his musical gifts in motion. He crossed himself and crossed his bewildered lady and crossed everybody in the figure, distorting shouts of cordial laughter from his cousin Willoughby. Be it said that the hour was four in the morning when dancers must laugh at somebody, if only to refresh their feet, and the wit of the hour had ministered to the wildest laughter. Vernon was linked to Theseus in the maze, entirely dependent upon his Ariadne, to a fly released from a jam-pot, to a salvage or green man caught in a web of nymphs and made to go the paces. Willoughby was inexhaustible in the happy similes he poured out to Miss Durham across the lines of Sir Roger de Covelay, and they were not forgotten, they procured him a reputation as a convivial sparkler. Rumour went the round that he intended to give Laetitia to Vernon for good, when he could decide to take Miss Durham to himself. His generosity was famous, but that decision, though the rope was in the form of a knot, seemed reluctant for the conclusive close haul. It preferred the state of slackness, and if he courted Laetitia on behalf of his cousin, his cousinly love must have been greater than his passion one had to suppose. He was generous enough for it, or for marrying the portionless girl himself. There was a story of a brilliant young widow of our aristocracy who had very nearly snared him. Why should he object to marry into our aristocracy? Mrs. Mount Stewart asked him, and he replied that the girls of that class have no money, and he doubted the quality of their blood. He had his eyes awake, his duty to his house was a foremost thought with him, and for such a reason he may have been more anxious to give the slim and not robust Laetitia to Vernon than accede to his personal inclination. The mention of the widow singularly offended him, notwithstanding the high rank of the lady named. A widow, he said, I! He spoke to a widow, an oldish one truly, but his wrought at the suggestion of his union with a widow led him to be for the moment oblivious of the minor shades of good taste. He desired Mrs. Mount Stewart to contradict the story in positive terms. He repeated his desire, he was urgent to have it contradicted, and said again, a widow, straightening his whole figure to the erectness of the letter I. She was a widow unmarried a second time, and it has been known of the steadfast women who retain the name of their first husband, or do not hamper his title with a little new squire at their skirts, that they can partially approve the objections indicated by Sir Willoughby. They are thinking of themselves when they do so, and they will rarely say, I might have married. Rarely within them will they avow that with their permission it might have been. They can catch an idea of the gentleman's view of the widow's cap. But a niceness that could feel sharply wounded by the simple rumour of his alliance with the young relict of an earl was mystifying. Sir Willoughby unbent. His military letter I took a careless glance at itself, lounging idly and proudly at ease in the glass of his mind, decked with a wanton wreath, as he dropped a hint, generously vague, just to show the origin of the rumour, and the excellent basis it had for not being credited. He was chidden. Mrs. Mount Stewart read him a lecture. She was, however, able to contradict the tale of the young Countess. There is no fear of his marrying her, my dears. Meanwhile there was a fear that he would lose his chance of marrying the beautiful Miss Durham. The dilemmas of little princes are often grave. They should be dwelt on now and then, for an example to poor struggling commoners, of the slings and arrows assailing fortune's most favoured men, that we may preach contentment to the wretch who cannot must aware with all to marry a wife, or has done it and trots the streets, pack laden, to maintain the dame and troops of children painfully reared to fill subordinate stations. According to our reading, a moral is always welcome in a moral country, especially when silly envy is to be chastised by it, the restless craving for change rebuked. Young Sir Willoughby then stood in this dilemma. A lady was at either hand of him, the only two that had ever, apart from metropolitan conquests, not to be recited, touched his emotions. Susceptible to beauty, he had never seen so beautiful a girl as Constantia Durham. Equally susceptible to admiration of himself, he considered Letitia Dale a paragon of cleverness. He stood between the Queenly Rose and the Modest Violet. One he bowed to, the other bowed to him. He could not have both, it is the law governing princes and pedestrians alike. But which could he forfeit? His growing acquaintance with the world taught him to put an increasing price on the sentiments of Miss Dale. Still, Constantia's beauty was of a kind to send away beholders, aching. She had the glory of the racing cutter, full sail on a whining breeze, and she did not court to win him, she flew. In his more reflective hour, the attractiveness of that lady which held the mirror to his features was paramount. But he had passionate snatches when the magnetism of the flyer drew him in her wake. Rather to add to the complexity, he loved his liberty. He was princely a free. He had more subjects, more slaves. He ruled arrogantly in the world of women. He was more himself. His metropolitan experiences did not answer to his liking the particular question, do we bind the woman down to us idolatrously by making a wife of her? In the midst of his deliberations a report of the hot pursuit of Miss Durham, casually mentioned to him by Lady Bush, drew an immediate proposal from Sir Willoughby. She accepted him, and they were engaged. She had been nibbled at, or but eaten up, while he hung dubitative. And though that was the cause of his winning her, it offended his niceness. She had not come to him out of cloisteral purity, out of perfect radiancy. Spiritually, likewise, was he a little prince, a despotic prince. He wished for her to have come to him out of an egg-shell, somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but as completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him with her sex's eyes first of all men. She talked frankly of her cousins and friends, young males. She could have replied to his bitter wish, had you asked me on the night of your twenty-first birthday, Willoughby. Since then she had been in the dust of the world, and he conceived his peculiar antipathy, destined to be so fatal to him, from the earlier hours of his engagement. He was quaintly incapable of a jealousy of individuals. A young Captain Oxford had been foremost in the swarm, pursuing Constantia. Willoughby thought as little of Captain Oxford as he did of Vernon Whitford. His enemy was the world, the mass, which confounds us in a lump, which has breathed on her whom we have selected, whom we cannot can never rub quite clear of her contact with the abominated crowd. The pleasure of the world is to bowl down our soldierly letter-eye, to encroach on our identity, soil our niceness. To begin to think is the beginning of disgust of the world. As soon as the engagement was published, all the county said that there had not been a chance for Letitia, and Mrs. Mount Stewart Jenkins and humbly remarked, in an attitude of penitence, I'm not a witch! Lady Bush could claim to be one. She had foretold the event. Letitia was of the same opinion as the county. She had looked up, but not hopefully. She had only looked up to the brightest, and as he was the highest, how could she have hoped? She was the solitary companion of a sick father, whose inveterate prognostic offer that she would live to rule at Patton Hall, tortured the poor girl in proportion as he seemed to derive comfort from it. The noise of the engagement merely silenced him. The clues invalid's cling obstinately to their ideas. He had observed Sir Willoughby in the society of his daughter, when the young baronet revived to a sprightly boyishness immediately. Indeed, as big boy and little girl, they had played together of old. Willoughby had been a handsome, fair boy, the portrait of him at the hall, in a hat leaning on his pony with crossed legs, and long flaxen curls over his shoulders, was the image of her soul's most present angel. And as a man he had, she did not suppose intentionally, subjected her nature to bow to him. So submissive was she that it was fuller happiness for her to think him right in all his actions than to imagine the circumstances different. This may appear to resemble the ecstasy of the devotee of Juggernaut. It is a form of the passion inspired by little princes, and we need not marvel that a conservative sex should assist to keep them in their lofty places. What were there otherwise to look up to? You should have no dazzling beacon lights if they were levelled and treated as clod earth, and it is worthwhile for here and there a woman to be burned, so long as women's general adoration of an ideal young man shall be preserved. Purity is our demand of them. They may justly cry for attraction. They cannot have it brighter than in the universal bearing of the eyes of their sisters upon a little prince, one who has the ostensible virtues in his pay, and can practice them without injuring himself to make himself unsightly, let the races of men be by and by astonished at their gods, if they please, meantime they had better continue to worship. Letitia did continue. She saw Miss Durham at Patton on several occasions. She admired the pair. She had a wish to witness the bridal ceremony. She was looking forward to the day with that mixture of eagerness and withholding, which we have as we draw nigh the disenchanting termination of an enchanting romance, when Sir Willoughby met her on a Sunday morning as she crossed his park solidarily to church. They were within ten days of the appointed ceremony. He should have been away at Miss Durham's end of the county. He had, Letitia knew, ridden over to her the day before. But there he was, and very unwontedly, quite surprisingly, he presented his arm to conduct Letitia to the church door, and talked and laughed in a way that reminded her of a hunting gentleman she had seen once rising to his feet, staggering from an ugly fall across hedge and fence into one of the lanes of her short winter walks. All's well, all sound, never better, only a scratch, the gentleman had said, as he reeled and pressed a bleeding head. Sir Willoughby chatted of his felicity in meeting her. I am really wonderfully lucky," he said, and he said that and other things over and over, incessantly talking, and telling an anecdote of county occurrences, and laughing at it with a mouth that would not widen. He went on talking in the church porch, and murmuring softly some steps up the aisle, passing the pews of Mrs. Mount Stewart Jenkinson and Lady Bush. Of course he was entertaining, but what a strangeness it was to Letitia. His face would have been half under an antique bonnet. It came very close to hers, and the scrutiny he bent on her was most solicitous. After the service he avoided the great ladies by sauntering up to within a yard or two of where she sat. He craved her hand on his arm to lead her forth by the park entrance to the church, all the while bending to her, discoursing rapidly, appearing radiantly interested in her quiet replies, with fits of intentness that stared itself out into dim abstraction. She hazarded the briefest replies, for fear of not having understood him. One question she asked, Miss Durham is well I trust? And he answered, Durham? And said, there is no Miss Durham, to my knowledge. The impression he left her with was that he might yesterday, during his ride, have had an accident and fallen on his head. She would have asked that, if she had not known him for so thorough an Englishman, in his dislike to have it thought that accidents could hurt even when they happened to him. He called the next day to claim her for a walk. He assured her she had promised it, and he appealed to her father, who could not testify to a promise he had not heard, but begged her to leave him to have her walk. So once more she was in the park with Sir Willoughby, listening to his raptures over old days. A word of assent from her sufficed him. I am now myself, was one of the remarks he repeated this day. She dilated on the beauty of the park and the hall to gratify him. He did not speak of Miss Durham, and Letitia became afraid to mention her name. At their parting Willoughby promised Letitia that he would call on the morrow. He did not come, and she could well excuse him after her hearing of the tale. It was a lamentable tale. He had ridden to Sir John Durham's mansion, a distance of thirty miles, to hear on his arrival that Constantia had quitted her father's house two days previously on a visit to an aunt in London, and had just sent word that she was the wife of Captain Oxford, Hazard, and messmate of one of her brothers. A letter from the bride awaited Willoughby at the hall. He had ridden back at night, not caring how he used his horse in order to get swiftly home. So forgetful of himself was he under the terrible blow. That was the night of Saturday. On the day following, being Sunday, he met Letitia in his park, led her to church, led her out of it, and the day after that, previous to his disappearance for some weeks, was walking with her in full view of the carriages along the road. He had indeed, you see, been very fortunately, if not considerably, liberated by Miss Durham. She as a man of honour could not have taken the initiative, but the frenzy of a jealous girl might urge her to such a course, and how little he suffered from it had been shown to the world. Miss Durham, the story went, was his mother's choice for him against his heart's inclinations, which had finally subdued Lady Patton. Consequently there was no longer an obstacle between Sir Willoughby and Miss Dale. It was a pleasant and romantic story, and it put most people in good humour with the county's favourite, as his choice of a portionless girl of no position would not have done, without the shock of astonishment at the conduct of Miss Durham, and the desire to feel that so prevailing a gentleman was not in any degree pityable. Constantia was called that mad thing. Constantia broke forth in novel and abundant merits, and one of the chief points of requisition in relation to Patton, a Lady Willoughby who would entertain well and animate the deadness of the hall, became a certainty when her gentleness and liveliness and exceeding cleverness were considered. She was often a visitor at the hall by Lady Patton's express invitation, and sometimes on these occasions Willoughby was there too, superintending the filling up of his laboratory, though he was not at home to the county. It was not expected that he should be yet. He had taken heartily to the pursuit of science, and spoke of little else. Science, he said, was in our days the sole object worth the devoted pursuit. But the sweeping remark could hardly apply to Letitia, of whom he was the courteous, quiet wooer you behold when a man has broken loose from an unhappy tangle, to return to the Lady of his first and strongest affections. Some months of homely courtship ensued, and then the decent interval prescribed by the situation having elapsed, so Willoughby Patton left his native land on a tour of the globe. CHAPTER IV OF THE EGOIST This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Martin Geeson. The Egoist by George Meredith. CHAPTER IV. Letitia Dale. That was another surprise to the county. Let us not inquire into the feelings of patiently starving women. They must obtain some sustenance of their own, since, as you perceive, they live. Evidently they are not in need of a great amount of nourishment, and we may set them down for creatures with a rush-light of animal fire to warm them. They cannot have much vitality who are so little exclamatory. A corresponding sentiment of patient compassion, akin to scorn, is provoked by persons having the opportunity for pathos and declining to use it. The public bosom was open to Letitia for several weeks, and had she run to it to bewail herself, she would have been cherished in thankfulness for a country drama. There would have been a party against her, cold people, critical of her pretensions to rise from an unrecognised sphere to be mistress of Patten Hall. But there would also have been a party against Sir Willoughby, composed of the two or three revolutionists, tired of the yoke, which are to be found in England when there is a stir. A larger number of born sympathetics, ever ready to yield the tear for the tear, and here and there a Samaritan soul prompt to suck a poor humanity in distress. The opportunity passed undramatised. Letitia presented herself at church with a face mildly devout according to her custom, and she accepted invitations to the hall. She assisted at the reading of Willoughby's letters to his family, and fed on dry husks of him wherein her name was not mentioned. Never one note of the summoning call for pathos did this young lady blow. So very soon the public bosom closed. She had, under the fresh interpretation of affairs, too small a spirit to be Lady Willoughby of Patten. She could not have entertained becomingly. He must have seen that the girl was not the match for him in station, and off he went to conquer the remainder of a troublesome first attachment, no longer extremely disturbing to judge from the tenor of his letters. Simply incomparable letters! Lady Bush and Mrs. Mount Stuart Jenkinson enjoyed a perusal of them. Sir Willoughby appeared as a splendid young representative island lord in these letters to his family, dispatched from the principal cities of the United States of America. He would give them a sketch of our democratic cousins, he said. Such cousins! They might all have been in the marines. He carried his English standard over that continent, and by simply jotting down facts, he left an idea of the results of the measurement to his family and friends at home. He was an adept in the irony of incongruously grouping. The nature of the equality under the stars and stripes was presented in this manner. Equality! Reflections came occasionally. These cousins of ours are highly amusing. I am among the descendants of the roundheads. Now and then an allusion to old domestic differences in perfect good temper. We go on in our way, they theirs, in the apparent belief that republicanism operates remarkable changes in human nature. Vernon tries hard to think it does. The upper ten of our cousins are the afernal of Paris. The rest of them is radical England, as far as I am acquainted with that section of my country. Where we compared, they were absurd. Where we contrasted, they were monstrous. The contrast of Vernon's letters with Willoughbys was just as extreme. You could hardly have taken them for relatives travelling together, or Vernon Whitford for a born and bred Englishman. The same scenes furnished by these two pens might have been sketched in different hemispheres. Vernon had no irony. He had nothing of Willoughbys' epistolary creative power, which causing his family and friends to exclaim, How like him that is! Conjured them across the broad Atlantic to behold and clap hands at his lordliness. They saw him distinctly as with the naked eye, a word, a turn of the pen, or a word unsaid, offered the picture of him in America, Japan, China, Australia, nay, the continent of Europe, holding an English review of his maker's grotesques. Vernon seemed a sheepish fellow, without stature abroad, glad of a compliment, grateful for a dinner, endeavouring, sadly, to digest all he saw and heard. But one was a pattern, the other a Whitford. One had genius, the other potted after him with the title of student. One was the English gentleman wherever he went. The other was a new kind of thing, nondescript, produced in England of late, and not likely to come to much good himself, or do much good to the country. Man's dancing in America was capitely described by Willoughby. A due to our cousins, the latter wrote on his voyage to Japan, I may possibly have had some vogue in their ballrooms, and in showing them an English seat on horseback, I must resign myself if I have not been popular among them. I could not sing their national song, if a conjury of states be a nation, and I must confess I listened with frigid politeness to their singing of it. O great people, no doubt, a due to them. I have had to tear old Vernon away. He had serious thoughts of settling, means to correspond with some of them. On the whole, forgetting two or more trays of insolence on the part of his hosts which he cited, Willoughby escaped pretty comfortably. The president had been consciously or not uncivil, but one knew his origin. Upon these interjections, placable flicks of the lionly tail addressed to Britannia the ruler, who expected him in some mildish way to lash Terga Kauda in retiring, so Willoughby Patton passed from a land of alien manners, and ever after he spoke of America respectfully and pensively with a tail tucked in, as it were. His travels were profitable to himself. The fact is that there are cousins who come to greatness and must be pacified, or they will prove annoying. Heaven forfeit a collision between cousins. Willoughby returned to his England after an absence of three years. On a fair April morning, the last of the months, he drove along his park palings, and by the luck of things Letitia was the first of his friends whom he met. She was crossing from field to field, with a band of school children, gathering wild flowers for the morrow May Day. He sprang to the ground and seized her hand. "'Letitia Dale,' he said, he panted, "'Your name is sweet English music, and you are well?' The anxious question permitted him to read deeply in her eyes. He found the man he sought there, squeezed him passionately, and let her go, saying, "'I could not have prayed for a lovelier home scene to welcome me than you and these children flower-gathering. I don't believe in chance. It was decreed that we should meet. Do not you think so?' Letitia breathed faintly of her gladness. He begged her to distribute a gold coin among the little ones, asked for the names of some of them, and repeated, Mary, Susan, Charlotte, only the Christian names pray, "'Well, my dears, you will bring your garlands to the hall tomorrow morning, and mind early no slugger-beds to-morrow. I suppose I am browned, Letitia.' He smiled in apology for the foreign sun, and murmured with rapture, "'The green of this English country is unsurpassed. It is wonderful. Leave England and be baked, if you would appreciate it. You can't unless you taste exile as I have done, for how many years? How many?' "'Three,' said Letitia. "'Thirty,' said he, "'it seems to me that length. At least I am immensely older.' But looking at you, I could think it less than three. You have not changed. You are absolutely unchanged. I am bound to hope so. I shall see you soon. I have much to talk of, much to tell you. I shall hasten to call on your father. I have specially to speak with him. I—what happiness this is, Letitia! But I must not forget I have a mother, at you, for some hours not for many.' He pressed her hand again. He was gone. She dismissed the children to their homes. Being Primrose's was hard labour now, a dusty business. She could have wished that her planet had not descended to earth. His presence agitated her so. But his enthusiastic patriotism was like a shower that in the spring season of the year sweeps against the hard-binding east, and melts the air, and brings out new colours, makes life flow, and her thoughts recurred in wonderment to the behaviour of Constantia Durham. That was Letitia's manner of taking up her weakness once more. She could almost have reviled the woman who had given this beneficent magician this pathetic exile of the aristocratic sun-burned visage and deeply scrutinising eyes cause for grief. How deeply his eyes could read, the starvelling of patience awoke to the idea of a feast! The sense of hunger came with it, and hope came, and patience fled. She would have rejected hope to keep patience nigh her. But surely it can not always be winter, said her reasoning blood, and we must excuse her as best we can if she was assured by her restored warmth that Willoughby came in the order of the revolving seasons, marking a long winter past. He had specially to speak with her father, he had said, What could that mean? What but? She dared not phrase it, or view it. At their next meeting she was Miss Dale. A week later he was closeted with her father. Mr. Dale, in the evening of that pregnant day, eulogised Sir Willoughby as a landlord. A new lease of the cottage was to be granted him on the old terms, he said. Except that Sir Willoughby had congratulated him in the possession of an excellent daughter, their interview was one of landlord and tenant it appeared, and Letitia said, So we shall not have to leave the cottage, in a tone of satisfaction, while she quietly gave a wrench to the neck of the young hope in her breast. At night her diary received the line, This day I was a fool, tomorrow, tomorrow and many days afterwards there were dashes instead of words. Patience travelled back to her sullenly, as we must have some kind of food, and she had nothing else, she took to that, and found it drier than of yore. It is a composing but a lean dietary. The dead are patient, and we get a certain likeness to them in feeding on it unintermittingly over long. Her hollowed cheeks, with the fallen leaf in them, pleaded against herself to justify her idle, for not looking down on one like her. She saw him when he was at the hall. He did not notice any change. He was exceedingly gentle and courteous. More than once she discovered his eyes dwelling on her, and then he looked hurriedly at his mother, and Letitia had to shut her mind from thinking, lest thinking should be a sin, and hope a guilty spectre. But had his mother objected to her, she could not avoid asking herself. His tour of the globe had been undertaken at his mother's desire. She was an ambitious lady, in failing health, and she wished to have him living with her at pattern, yet seemed to agree that he did wisely to reside in London. One day Sir Willoughby, in the quiet manner which was his humour, informed her that he had become a country gentleman. He had abandoned London. He loathed it as the burial place of the individual man. He intended to sit down on his estates, and have his cousin Vernon Whitford to assist him in managing them, he said, and very amusing was his description of his cousin's shifts to live by literature, and add enough to a beggarly income to get his usual two months of the year in the Alps. Previous to his great tour, Willoughby had spoken of Vernon's judgment with derision, nor was it entirely unknown that Vernon had offended his family pride by some extravagant act. And after their return he acknowledged Vernon's talents, and seemed unable to do without him. The new arrangement gave Letitia a companion for her walks. Pedestrianism was a sour business to Willoughby, whose exclamation of the word indicated a willingness for any amount of exercise on horseback. But she had no horse, and so while he hunted, Letitia and Vernon walked, and the neighbourhood speculated on the circumstances, until the ladies Eleanor and Isabel Patton engaged her more frequently for carriage exercise, and Sir Willoughby was observed riding beside them. A real and sunny pleasure befell Letitia in the establishment of young Cross J Patton under her roof. The son of the lieutenant, now captain of Marines, a boy of twelve with the sprites of twelve boys in him, for whose board and lodgement Vernon provided by arrangement with her father. Vernon was one of your men that have no occupation for their money, no bills to pay for repair of their property, and are insane to spend. He had heard of Captain Patton's large family, and proposed to have his eldest boy at the hall to teach him. But Willoughby declined to house the son of such a father, predicting that the boy's hair would be red, his skin eruptive, and his practice is detestable. So Vernon, having obtained Mr. Dale's consent to accommodate this youth, stalked off to Devon Port, and brought back a rosy-cheeked, round-bodied rogue of a boy, who fell upon meats and puddings and defeated them, with a captivating simplicity in his confession that he had never had enough to eat in his life. He had gone through a training for a plentiful table. At first, after a number of helps, young Cross Jay would sit and sigh heavily in contemplation of the unfinished dish. Subsequently, he told his host and hostess that he had two sisters above his own age, and three brothers and two sisters younger than he. All hungry, said the boy. His pathos was most comical. It was a good month before he could see pudding taken away from table, without a sigh of regret that he could not finish it as deputy for the Devon Port household. The pranks of the little fellow and his revel in a country life, and muddy wildness in it, amused Letitia from morning to night. She, when she had caught him, talked him in the morning, Vernon favoured by the chase in the afternoon. Young Cross Jay would have enlivened any household. He was not only indolent, he was opposed to the acquisition of knowledge through the medium of books, and would say, but I don't want to. Nature was very strong in him. He had, on each return of the hour for instruction, to be plucked out of the earth, rank of the soil, like a root for the exercise of his big round headpiece on those tyrannous puzzles. But the habits of birds, and the place for their eggs, and the management of rabbits, and the tickling of fish, and poaching joys with combative boys of the district, and how to weadle a cook for a luncheon for a whole day in the rain, he soon knew of his great nature. His passion for our naval service was a means of screwing his attention to lessons after he had begun to understand that the desert had to be traversed to attain Midshipman's rank. He boasted ardently of his fighting father, and, chanceing to be near the hall as he was talking to Vernon and Letitia of his father, he propounded a question close to his heart, and he put it in these words following, my father's the one to lead an army. When he paused, I say, Mr. Whitford, Sir Willoughby's kind to me, and gives me crowned pieces, why wouldn't he see my father, and my father came here ten miles in the rain to see him, and had to walk ten miles back and sleep at an inn. The only answer to be given was that Sir Willoughby could not have been at home. Oh! my father saw him, and Sir Willoughby said he was not at home. The boy replied, producing an odd ring in the ear by his repetition of not at home, in the same voice as the apology, plainly innocent of malice. Vernon told Letitia, however, that the boy never asked an explanation of Sir Willoughby. Like the horse of the adage, it was easier to compel young Cross Jay to drink of the waters of instruction than to get him to the brink. His heart was not so antagonistic as his nature, and by degrees, owing to a proper mixture of discipline and cajolery, he imbibed. He was whistling at the cook's windows after a day of wicked truancy, on an April night, and reported adventures over the supper supplied to him. Letitia entered the kitchen with a reproving forefinger. He jumped to kiss her, and went on chattering of a place fifteen miles distant, where he had seen Sir Willoughby riding with a young lady. The impossibility that the boy should have got so far on foot made Letitia doubtful of his veracity, until she heard that a gentleman had taken him up on the road in a gig, and had driven him to a farm to show him strings of bird's eggs, and stuffed birds of every English kind, kingfishers, yaffles, black woodpeckers, goat-sucker owls, more mouth than head, with dusty dark-spotted wings like moths, all very circumstantial. Still, in spite of his tea at the farm, and ride back by rail at the gentleman's expense, the tale seemed fictitious to Letitia, until cross-jay related how that he had stood to salute on the road to the railway, and taken off his cap to Sir Willoughby. And Sir Willoughby had passed him, not noticing him, though the young lady did, and looked back and nodded. The hue of truth was in that picture. Strange eclipse, when the hue of truth comes shadowing over our bright, ideal planet, it will not seem that planets fault, but truths. Reality is the offender, delusion our treasure that we are robbed of, then begins with us the term of willful delusion, and its necessary accompaniment of the disgust of reality, exhausting the heart much more than patient endurance of starvation. Hints were dropping about the neighbourhood, the hedgeways twitted, the treetops cored. Mrs. Mount Stuart Jenkinson was loud on the subject. One is to have a mistress at last, you say. But there was never a doubt of his marrying. He must marry. And so long as he does not marry a foreign woman, we have no cause to complain. He met her at Chariton. Both were struck at the same moment. Her father is, I hear, some sort of learned man. Money, no land. No house, either, I believe. People who spend half their time on the continent. They are now for a year at Upton Park. The very girl to settle down and entertain when she does think of settling. Eighteen perfect manners. You need not ask if a beauty, Sir Willoughby, will have his dues. We must teach her to make amends to him. But don't listen to Lady Bush. He was too young at twenty-three or twenty-four. No young man is ever jilted. He is allowed to escape. A young man married as a fire-eater bound over to keep the peace. If he keeps it, he worries it. At thirty-one or thirty-two he is ripe for his command, because he knows how to bend. And Sir Willoughby is a splendid creature, only wanting a wife to complete him. For a man like that to go on running about would never do. Soberly, no! It would soon be getting ridiculous. He has been no worse than other men, probably better, infinitely more excusable. But now we have him, and it was time we short. I shall see her and study her sharply, you may be sure. Though I fancy, I can rely on his judgment. In confirmation of the swelling buzz, the Reverend Dr. Middleton and his daughter paid a flying visit to the hall, where they were seen only by the members of the Patton family. Young Cross Jay had a short conversation with Miss Middleton, and ran to the cottage full of her. She loved the navy, and had a merry face. She had a smile of very pleasant humour, according to Vernon. The young lady was outlined to Letitia as tall, elegant, lively, and painted as carrying youth like a flag. With her smile of very pleasant humour, she could not but be winning. Vernon spoke more of her father, a scholar of high repute, happily a scholar of an independent fortune. His mature recollection of Miss Middleton grew poetic, or he described her in an image to suit a poetic end. She gives you an idea of the mountain echo. Dr. Middleton has one of the grandest heads in England. What is her Christian name? said Letitia. He thought her Christian name was Clara. Letitia went to bed, and walked through the day, conceiving the mountain echo, the swift wild spirit Clara by name, sent fleeting on a far half-circle by the voice it is roused to subserve, sweeter than beautiful, high above, drawing from beauties as the colours of the sky, and if at the same time elegant and lovable smiling could a man resist her? To inspire the title of mountain echo in any mind, a young lady must be singularly spiritualised. Her father doted on her, Vernon said. Who would not? It seemed an additional cruelty that the grace of a poetical attractiveness should be round her, for this was robbing Letitia of some of her own little fortune, mystical, though that might be. But a man like Sir Willoughby had claims on poetry, possessing as he did every manly grace, and to think that Miss Middleton had won him by virtue of something native to her likewise, though mystically, touched Letitia with a faint sense of relationship to the chosen girl. What is in me he sees on her? It decked her pride to think so, as a wreath on the gravestone. She encouraged her imagination to brood over Clara, and invested her designately with romantic charms, in spite of pain. The ascetic zealot hugs his share of heaven, most bitter, most blessed, in his hair, shirt and scourge, and Letitia's happiness was to glorify Clara. Through that chosen rival, through her comprehension of the spirit of Sir Willoughby's choice of one such as Clara, she was linked to him yet. Her mood of ecstatic fidelity was a dangerous exaltation, one that in a desert will distort the brain, and in the world where the idol dwells will put him, should he come nigh, to its own furnace-test, and get a clear brain out of a burnt heart. She was frequently at the hall, helping to nurse Lady Patton. Sir Willoughby had hitherto treated her as a dear, insignificant friend, to whom it was unnecessary that he should mention the object of his rides to Upton Park. He had, however, in the contemplation of what he was gaining, fallen into anxiety about what he might be losing. She belonged to his brilliant youth. Her devotion was the bride of his youth. He was a man who lived backward, almost as intensely as in the present. And not withstanding Letitia's praise were the zeal in attending on his mother. She suspected some unfaithfulness. Hardly without cause, she had not looked paler of late. Her eyes had not reproached him. The secret of the old days between them had been as little concealed as it was exposed. She might have buried it after the way of woman whose bosoms can be tombs, if we and the world allow them to be—absolutely sepulchreous, where you lie dead ghastly. Even if not dead and horrible to think of, you may be lying cold, somewhere in a corner. Even if embalmed, you may not be much visited. And how is the world to know you are embalmed? You are no better than a rotting wretch to the world that does not have peeps of you in the woman's breast, and see lights burning and an occasional exhibition of the services of worship. There are women—tellers not of her of Ephesus—that have embalmed you, and have quitted the world to keep the tapers alight, and a stranger comes, and they who have your image before them will suddenly blow out the vestal flames, and treat you as dust to fatten the garden of their bosoms for a fresh flower of love. So Willoughby knew it. He had experience of it in the form of the stranger, and he knew the stranger's feelings towards his predecessor and the lady. He waylaid Letitia to talk of himself and his plans. The projecte were run to Italy. Revealable, yes, but in England you live the higher moral life. Italy boasts of sensual beauty. The spiritual is yours. I know Italy well. I have often wished to act as a chicherone to you there. As it is, I suppose I shall be with those who know the land as well as I do, and will not be particularly enthusiastic. If you are what you were. He was guilty of this perplexing twist from one person to another in a sentence more than once. While he talked exclusively of himself, it seemed to her a condescension. In time he talked principally of her, beginning with her admirable care of his mother, and he wished to introduce a Miss Middleton to her. He wanted her opinion of Miss Middleton. He relied on her intuition of character and never known it ear. If I supposed it could ear, Miss Dale, I should not be so certain of myself. I am bound up in my good opinion of you, you see, and you must continue the same or where shall I be? Thus he was led to dwell upon friendship and the charm of the friendship of men and women. Pleitonism, as it was called. I have laughed at it in the world, but not in the depth of my heart. The world's platonic attachments are laughable enough. You have taught me that the ideal of friendship is possible, when we find two who are capable of a disinterested esteem. The rest of life is duty, duty to parents, duty to country. But friendship is the holiday of those who can be friends. Wives are plentiful, friends are rare. I know how rare. Letitia swallowed her thoughts as they sprang up. Why was he torturing her to give himself a holiday? She could bear to lose him, she was used to it, and bear his indifference, but not that he should disfigure himself. It made her poor. It was as if he required an oath of her when he said, Italy, but I shall never see a day in Italy to compare with the day of my return to England, or know a pleasure so exquisite as your welcome of me. Will you be true to that? May I look forward to just another such meeting? He pressed her for an answer. She gave the best she could. He was dissatisfied, and to her hearing it was hardly in the tone of manliness that he entreated her to reassure him. He womanised his language. She had to say, I am afraid I cannot undertake to make it an appointment, Sir Willoughby. Before he recovered his alertness, which he did, for he was anything but obtuse, with the reply, you would keep it if you promised and freeze at your post. So as accidents happen, we must leave it to fate. The will's the thing. You know my detestation of changes, at least I have you for my tenant, and wherever I am I see your light at the end of my park. Neither my father nor I would willingly quit Ivy Cottage, said Letitia. So far, then, he murmured, you will give me a long notice, and it must be with my consent if you think of quitting. I could almost engage to do that, she said. You love the place. Yes, I am the most contented of cottagers. I believe, Miss Dale, it would be well for my happiness where I a cottager. That is the dream of the palace, but to be one and not to wish to be other is quiet sleep in comparison. You paint a cottage in colours that tempt one to run from big houses and households. You would run back to them faster, Sir Willoughby. You may know me, said he, bowing and passing on contentedly. He stopped, but I am not ambitious. Perhaps you are too proud for ambition, Sir Willoughby. You hit me to the life. He passed on regretfully. Sarah Middleton did not study and know him like Letitia Dale. Letitia was left to think it pleased him to play at cat and mouse. She had not hit him to the life, or she would have marvelled in acknowledging how sincere he was. At her next sitting by the bedside of Lady Patton, she received a certain measure of insight that might have helped her to fathom him if only she could have kept her feelings down. The old lady was affectionately confidential in talking of her one subject, her son. And here is another dashing girl, my dear. She has money and health and beauty, and so has he, and it appears a fortune at Union. I hope and pray it may be, but we begin to read the world when our eyes grow dim because we read the plain lines, and I ask myself whether money and health and beauty on both sides have not been the mutual attraction. We tried it before, and that girl, Dunham, was honest whatever we may call her. I should have desired an appreciative, thoughtful partner for him, a woman of mind with another sort of wealth and beauty. She was honest, she ran away in time. There was a worse thing possible than that. And now we have the same chapter, and the same kind of person, who may not be quite as honest, and I shall not see the end of it. Promise me you will always be good to him. My son's friend, his Egeria, he names you. Be what you were to him when that girl broke his heart, and no one, not even his mother, was allowed to see that he suffered anything. Comfort him in his sensitiveness. Willoughby has the most entire faith in you. Where that destroyed, I shudder. You are, he says, and he has often said, his image of the constant woman. Letitia's hearing took in no more. She repeated to herself for days, his image of the constant woman. Now when he was a second time forsaking her, his praise of her constancy wore the painful ludicrousness of the look of a whimper on the face.