or utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a wind-in-the-orchard style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth bluster; sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a hand to street-slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints.  This was its effect on the lady.  To her the incomprehensible was the abominable, for she had our country’s high critical feeling; but he, while admitting that he could not quite master it, liked it.  He had dug the book out of a bookseller’s shop in Malta, captivated by its title, and had, since the day of his purchase, gone at it again and again, getting nibbles of golden meaning by instalments, as with a solitary pick in a very dark mine, until the illumination of an idea struck him that there was a great deal more in the book than there was in himself.  This was sufficient to secure the devoted attachment of young Mr. Beauchamp.  Rosamund sighed with apprehension to think of his unlikeness to boys and men among his countrymen in some things.  Why should he hug a book he owned he could not quite comprehend?  He said he liked a bone in his mouth; and it was natural wisdom, though unappreciated by women.  A bone in a boy’s mind for him to gnaw and worry, corrects the vagrancies and promotes the healthy activities, whether there be marrow in it or not.  Supposing it furnishes only dramatic entertainment in that usually vacant tenement, or powder-shell, it will be of service.

Nevil proposed to her that her next present should be the entire list of his beloved Incomprehensible’s published works, and she promised, and was not sorry to keep her promise dangling at the skirts of memory, to drop away in time.  For that fire-and-smoke writer dedicated volumes to the praise of a regicide.  Nice reading for her dear boy!  Some weeks after Nevil was off again, she abused herself for her half-hearted love of him, and would have given him anything—­the last word in favour of the Country versus the royal Martyr, for example, had he insisted on it.  She gathered, bit by bit, that he had dashed at his big blustering cousin Cecil to vindicate her good name.  The direful youths fought in the Steynham stables, overheard by the grooms.  Everard received a fine account of the tussle from these latter, and Rosamund, knowing him to be of the order of gentlemen who, whatsoever their sins, will at all costs protect a woman’s delicacy, and a dependant’s, man or woman, did not fear to have her ears shocked in probing him on the subject.

Everard was led to say that Nevil’s cousins were bedevilled with womanfolk.

From which Rosamund perceived that women had been at work; and if so, it was upon the business of the scandal-monger; and if so, Nevil fought his cousin to protect her good name from a babbler of the family gossip.