The gentle altercation lasted half-an-hour, but they got no farther than this.  Mr. Pericles was either hopeless of protecting himself from such shrewd assailants, or indifferent to their attacks, for all his defensive measures were against the cold.  He was muffled in a superbly mounted bearskin, which came up so closely about his ears that Arabella had to repeat to him all her questions, and as it were force a way for her voice through the hide.  This was provoking, since it not only stemmed the natural flow of conversation, but prevented her imagination from decorating the reminiscence of it subsequently (which was her profound secret pleasure), besides letting in the outer world upon her.  Take it as an axiom, when you utter a sentimentalism, that more than one pair of ears makes a cynical critic.  A sentimentalism requires secresy.  I can enjoy it, and shall treat it respectfully if you will confide it to me alone; but I and my friends must laugh at it outright.

“Does there not seem a soul in the moonlight?” for instance.  Arabella, after a rapturous glance at the rosy orb, put it to Mr. Pericles, in subdued impressive tones.  She had to repeat her phrase; Mr. Pericles then echoing, with provoking monotony of tone, “Sol?”—­whereupon “Soul!” was reiterated, somewhat sharply:  and Mr. Pericles, peering over the collar of the bear, with half an eye, continued the sentence, in the manner of one sent thereby farther from its meaning:  “Ze moonlight?” Despairing and exasperated, Arabella commenced afresh:  “I said, there seems a soul in it”; and Mr. Pericles assented bluntly:  “In ze light!”—­ which sounded so little satisfactory that Arabella explained, “I mean the aspect;” and having said three times distinctly what she meant, in answer to a terrific glare from the unsubmerged whites of the eyes of Mr. Pericles, this was his comment, almost roared forth: 

“Sol! you say so-whole—­in ze moonlight—­Luna?  Hein?  Ze aspect is of Sol!—­Yez.”

And Mr. Pericles sank into his bear again, while Wilfrid Pole, who was swinging his long cavalry legs to rearward, shouted; and Mr. Sumner, a rising young barrister, walking beside Cornelia, smiled a smile of extreme rigidity.  Arabella was punished for claiming rights of birth.  She heard the murmuring course of the dialogue between Cornelia and Mr. Sumner, sufficiently clear to tell her it was not fictitious and was well sustained, while her heart was kept thirsting for the key to it.  In advance were Adela and Edward Buxley, who was only a rich alderman’s only son, but had the virtue of an extraordinary power of drawing caricatures, and was therefore useful in exaggerating the features of disagreeable people, and showing how odious they were:  besides endearing pleasant ones exhibiting how comic they could be.  Gossips averred that before Mr. Pole had been worried by his daughters into giving that mighty sum for Brookfield, Arabella had accepted Edward as her suitor; but for some reason or other he had apparently fallen from his high estate.  To tell the truth, Arabella conceived that he had simply obeyed her wishes, while he knew he was naughtily following his own; and Adela, without introspection at all, was making her virgin effort at the caricaturing of our sex in his person:  an art for which she promised well.