or other in the Treasury; his grandfather on the mother’s side had been something or other in the Church.  He had come into the paternal estate, two or three thousand a year in Hampshire; but he had let the place advantageously and was generous to four plain sisters who lived at Bournemouth and adored him.  The family was hideous all round, but the very salt of the earth.  He was supposed to be unspeakably clever; he was fond of London, fond of books, of intellectual society and of the idea of a political career.  That such a man should be at the same time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as the phrase in the first volume of Gibbon has it, the variety of his inclinations.  I was soon to learn that he was fonder of her than of all the other things together.  Betty, one of five and with views above her station, was at any rate felt at home to have dished herself by her perversity.  Of course no one had looked at her since and no one would ever look at her again.  It would be eminently desirable that Flora should learn the lesson of Betty’s fate.

I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptom on our young lady’s part of that sort of meditation.  The one moral she saw in anything was that of her incomparable aspect, which Mr. Dawling, smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the doom-dealing gods, had followed from London to Venice and from Venice back to London again.  I afterwards learned that her version of this episode was profusely inexact:  his personal acquaintance with her had been determined by an accident remarkable enough, I admit, in connexion with what had gone before—­a coincidence at all events superficially striking.  At Munich, returning from a tour in the Tyrol with two of his sisters, he had found himself at the table d’hote of his inn opposite to the full presentment of that face of which the mere clumsy copy had made him dream and desire.  He had been tossed by it to a height so vertiginous as to involve a retreat from the board; but the next day he had dropped with a resounding thud at the very feet of his apparition.  On the following, with an equal incoherence, a sacrifice even of his bewildered sisters, whom he left behind, he made an heroic effort to escape by flight from a fate of which he had already felt the cold breath.  That fate, in London, very little later, drove him straight before it—­drove him one Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to the door of the Hammond Synges.  He marched in other words close up to the cannon that was to blow him to pieces.  But three weeks, when he reappeared to me, had elapsed since then, yet (to vary my metaphor) the burden he was to carry for the rest of his days was firmly lashed to his back.  I don’t mean by this that Flora had been persuaded to contract her scope; I mean that he had been treated to the unconditional snub which, as the event was to show, couldn’t have been bettered as a means of securing him.  She hadn’t calculated, but she had said “Never!” and that word had made a bed big enough for his long-legged patience.  He became from this moment to my mind the interesting figure in the piece.