He railed at her to Algernon, and astonished the youth, who thought them in a fair way to make an alliance.  “Milk and capsicums,” he called her, and compared her to bloody mustard-haired Saxon Queens of history, and was childishly spiteful.  And Mrs. Lovell had it all reported to her, as he was-quite aware.

“The woman seeking for an anomaly wants a master.”

With this pompous aphorism, he finished his reading of the fair Enigma.

Words big in the mouth serve their turn when there is no way of satisfying the intelligence.

To be her master, however, one must not begin by writhing as her slave.

The attempt to read an inscrutable woman allows her to dominate us too commandingly.  So the lordly mind takes her in a hard grasp, cracks the shell, and drawing forth the kernel, says, “This was all the puzzle.”

Doubtless it is the fate which women like Mrs. Lovell provoke.  The truth was, that she could read a character when it was under her eyes; but its yesterday and to-morrow were a blank.  She had no imaginative hold on anything.  For which reason she was always requiring tangible signs of virtues that she esteemed.

The thirst for the shows of valour and wit was insane with her; but she asked for nothing that she herself did not give in abundance, and with beauty super-added.  Her propensity to bet sprang of her passion for combat; she was not greedy of money, or reckless in using it; but a difference of opinion arising, her instinct forcibly prompted her to back her own.  If the stake was the risk of a lover’s life, she was ready to put down the stake, and would have marvelled contemptuously at the lover complaining.  “Sheep! sheep!” she thought of those who dared not fight, and had a wavering tendency to affix the epithet to those who simply did not fight.

Withal, Mrs. Lovell was a sensible person; clearheaded and shrewd; logical, too, more than the run of her sex:  I may say, profoundly practical.  So much so, that she systematically reserved the after-years for enlightenment upon two or three doubts of herself, which struck her in the calm of her spirit, from time to time.

“France,” Edward called her, in one of their colloquies.

It was an illuminating title.  She liked the French (though no one was keener for the honour of her own country in opposition to them), she liked their splendid boyishness, their unequalled devotion, their merciless intellects; the oneness of the nation when the sword is bare and pointing to chivalrous enterprise.

She liked their fine varnish of sentiment, which appears so much on the surface that Englishmen suppose it to have nowhere any depth; as if the outer coating must necessarily exhaust the stock, or as if what is at the source of our being can never be made visible.

She had her imagination of them as of a streaming banner in the jaws of storm, with snows among the cloud-rents and lightning in the chasms:—­which image may be accounted for by the fact that when a girl she had in adoration kissed the feet of Napoleon, the giant of the later ghosts of history.