’Surely not, ma’am.  There is no first claim.  A man’s wife and children have a claim on him for bread.  A man’s parents have a claim on him for obedience while he is a child.  A man’s uncles, aunts, and cousins have no claim on him at all, except for help in necessity, which he can grant and they require.  None—­wife, children, parents, relatives—­none has a claim to bar his judgement and his actions.  Sound the conscience, and sink the family!  With a clear conscience, it is best to leave the family to its own debates.  No man ever did brave work who held counsel with his family.  The family view of a man’s fit conduct is the weak point of the country.  It is no other view than, “Better thy condition for our sakes.”  Ha!  In this way we breed sheep, fatten oxen:  men are dying off.  Resolution taken, consult the family means—­waste your time!  Those who go to it want an excuse for altering their minds.  The family view is everlastingly the shopkeeper’s!  Purse, pence, ease, increase of worldly goods, personal importance—­the pound, the English pound!  Dare do that, and you forfeit your share of Port wine in this world; you won’t be dubbed with a title; you’ll be fingered at!  Lord, Lord! is it the region inside a man, or out, that gives him peace?  Out, they say; for they have lost faith in the existence of an inner.  They haven’t it.  Air-sucker, blood-pump, cooking machinery, and a battery of trained instincts, aptitudes, fill up their vacuum.  I repeat, ma’am, why should young Captain Beauchamp spend an hour consulting his family?  They won’t approve him; he knows it.  They may annoy him; and what is the gain of that?  They can’t move him; on that I let my right hand burn.  So it would be useless on both sides.  He thinks so.  So do I. He is one of the men to serve his country on the best field we can choose for him.  In a ship’s cabin he is thrown away.  Ay, ay, War, and he may go aboard.  But now we must have him ashore.  Too few of such as he!’

‘It is matter of opinion,’ said Rosamund, very tightly compressed; scarcely knowing what she said.

How strange, besides hateful, it was to her to hear her darling spoken of by a stranger who not only pretended to appreciate but to possess him!  A stranger, a man of evil, with monstrous ideas!  A terribly strong inexhaustible man, of a magical power too; or would he otherwise have won such a mastery over Nevil?

Of course she could have shot a rejoinder, to confute him with all the force of her indignation, save that the words were tumbling about in her head like a world in disruption, which made her feel a weakness at the same time that she gloated on her capacity, as though she had an enormous army, quite overwhelming if it could but be got to move in advance.  This very common condition of the silent-stricken, unused in dialectics, heightened Rosamund’s disgust by causing her to suppose that Nevil had been similarly silenced, in his case vanquished, captured, ruined; and he dwindled in her estimation for a moment or two.  She felt that among a sisterhood of gossips she would soon have found her voice, and struck down the demagogue’s audacious sophisms:  not that they affected her in the slightest degree for her own sake.