“I do sometimes.  Feet will be walking over ones grave, wherever it lies.  Be sure of this:  Willoughby Patterne is a man of unimpeachable honour.”

“I do not doubt it.”

“He means to be devoted to you.  He has been accustomed to have women hanging around him like votive offerings.”

“I . . .!”

“You cannot:  of course not:  any one could see that at a glance.  You are all the sweeter to me for not being tame.  Marriage cures a multitude of indispositions.”

“Oh!  Mrs. Mountstuart, will you listen to me?”

“Presently.  Don’t threaten me with confidences.  Eloquence is a terrible thing in woman.  I suspect, my dear, that we both know as much as could be spoken.”

“You hardly suspect the truth, I fear.”

“Let me tell you one thing about jealous men—­when they are not blackamoors married to disobedient daughters.  I speak of our civil creature of the drawing-rooms:  and lovers, mind, not husbands:  two distinct species, married or not:—­they’re rarely given to jealousy unless they are flighty themselves.  The jealousy fixes them.  They have only to imagine that we are for some fun likewise and they grow as deferential as my footman, as harmless as the sportsman whose gun has burst.  Ah! my fair Middleton, am I pretending to teach you?  You have read him his lesson, and my table suffered for it last night, but I bear no rancour.”

“You bewilder me, Mrs. Mountstuart.”

“Not if I tell you that you have driven the poor man to try whether it would be possible for him to give you up.”

“I have?”

“Well, and you are successful.”

“I am?”

“Jump, my dear!”

“He will?”

“When men love stale instead of fresh, withered better than blooming, excellence in the abstract rather than the palpable.  With their idle prate of feminine intellect, and a grotto nymph, and a mother of Gracchi!  Why, he must think me dazed with admiration of him to talk to me!  One listens, you know.  And he is one of the men who cast a kind of physical spell on you while he has you by the ear, until you begin to think of it by talking to somebody else.  I suppose there are clever people who do see deep into the breast while dialogue is in progress.  One reads of them.  No, my dear, you have very cleverly managed to show him that it isn’t at all possible:  he can’t.  And the real cause for alarm, in my humble opinion, is lest your amiable foil should have been a trifle, as he would say, deceived, too much in earnest, led too far.  One may reprove him for not being wiser, but men won’t learn without groaning that they are simply weapons taken up to be put down when done with.  Leave it to me to compose him.—­Willoughby can’t give you up.  I’m certain he has tried; his pride has been horridly wounded.  You were shrewd, and he has had his lesson.  If these little rufflings don’t come before marriage they come after; so it’s not time lost; and it’s good to be able to look back on them.  You are very white, my child.”