“If you like.”

“And showed his good taste by turning aside for the more tangible San Blandish?”

“Of course you consider it would have been so,” sighed the lady, ruffling.

“I can only judge by our generation,” said Sir Austin, with a bend of homage.

The lady gathered her mouth.  “Either we are very mighty or you are very weak.”

“Both, madam.”

“But whatever we are, and if we are bad, bad! we love virtue, and truth, and lofty souls, in men:  and, when we meet those qualities in them, we are constant, and would die for them—­die for them.  Ah! you know men but not women.”

“The knights possessing such distinctions must be young, I presume?” said Sir Austin.

“Old, or young!”

“But if old, they are scarce capable of enterprise?”

“They are loved for themselves, not for their deeds.”

“Ah!”

“Yes—­ah!” said the lady.  “Intellect may subdue women—­make slaves of them; and they worship beauty perhaps as much as you do.  But they only love for ever and are mated when they meet a noble nature.”

Sir Austin looked at her wistfully.

“And did you encounter the knight of your dream?”

“Not then.”  She lowered her eyelids.  It was prettily done.

“And how did you bear the disappointment?”

“My dream was in the nursery.  The day my frock was lengthened to a gown I stood at the altar.  I am not the only girl that has been made a woman in a day, and given to an ogre instead of a true knight.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Sir Austin, “women have much to bear.”

Here the couple changed characters.  The lady became gay as the baronet grew earnest.

“You know it is our lot,” she said.  “And we are allowed many amusements.  If we fulfil our duty in producing children, that, like our virtue, is its own reward.  Then, as a widow, I have wonderful privileges.”

“To preserve which, you remain a widow?”

“Certainly,” she responded.  “I have no trouble now in patching and piecing that rag the world calls—­a character.  I can sit at your feet every day unquestioned.  To be sure, others do the same, but they are female eccentrics, and have cast off the rag altogether.”

Sir Austin drew nearer to her.  “You would have made an admirable mother, madam.”

This from Sir Austin was very like positive wooing.

“It is,” he continued, “ten thousand pities that you are not one.”

“Do you think so?” She spoke with humility.

“I would,” he went on, “that heaven had given you a daughter.”

“Would you have thought her worthy of Richard?”

“Our blood, madam, should have been one!”

The lady tapped her toe with her parasol.  “But I am a mother,” she said.  “Richard is my son.  Yes!  Richard is my boy,” she reiterated.

Sir Austin most graciously appended, “Call him ours, madam,” and held his head as if to catch the word from her lips, which, however, she chose to refuse, or defer.  They made the coloured West a common point for their eyes, and then Sir Austin said: