Fiction, and especially foreign fiction, he did not care for.  With the utmost desire to be wide and impartial, he sucked in what ministered to the wants of his nature, rejecting unconsciously all that by its unsuitability endangered the flame of his private spirit.  What he read, in fact, served only to strengthen those profounder convictions which arose from his temperament.  With a contempt of the vulgar gewgaws of wealth and rank he combined a humble but intense and growing conviction of his capacity for leadership, of a spiritual superiority to those whom he desired to benefit.  There was no trace, indeed, of the common Pharisee in Miltoun, he was simple and direct; but his eyes, his gestures, the whole man, proclaimed the presence of some secret spring of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers penetrated.  He was not devoid of wit, but he was devoid of that kind of wit which turns its eyes inward, and sees something of the fun that lies in being what you are.  Miltoun saw the world and all the things thereof shaped like spires—­even when they were circles.  He seemed to have no sense that the Universe was equally compounded of those two symbols, whose point of reconciliation had not yet been discovered.

Such was he, then, when the Member for his native division was made a peer.

He had reached the age of thirty without ever having been in love, leading a life of almost savage purity, with one solitary breakdown.  Women were afraid of him.  And he was perhaps a little afraid of woman.  She was in theory too lovely and desirable—­the half-moon in a summer sky; in practice too cloying, or too harsh.  He had an affection for Barbara, his younger sister; but to his mother, his grandmother, or his elder sister Agatha, he had never felt close.  It was indeed amusing to see Lady Valleys with her first-born.  Her fine figure, the blown roses of her face, her grey-blue eyes which had a slight tendency to roll, as though amusement just touched with naughtiness bubbled behind them; were reduced to a queer, satirical decorum in Miltoun’s presence.  Thoughts and sayings verging on the risky were characteristic of her robust physique, of her soul which could afford to express almost all that occurred to it.  Miltoun had never, not even as a child, given her his confidence.  She bore him no resentment, being of that large, generous build in body and mind, rarely—­never in her class—­associated with the capacity for feeling aggrieved or lowered in any estimation, even its own.  He was, and always had been, an odd boy, and there was an end of it!  Nothing had perhaps so disconcerted Lady Valleys as his want of behaviour in regard to women.  She felt it abnormal, just as she recognized the essential if duly veiled normality of her husband and younger son.  It was this feeling which made her realize almost more vividly than she had time for, in the whirl of politics and fashion, the danger of his friendship with this lady to whom she alluded so discreetly as ‘Anonyma.’