Their meeting was like the features of the day she set her brush to picture:  characteristic of a season rather than cheerless in tone, though it breathed little cheer.  Is there not a pleasure in contemplating that which is characteristic?  Her unfinished sketch recalled him after he had gone:  he lived in it, to startle her again, and bid her heart gallop and her cheeks burn.  The question occurred to her:  May not one love, not craving to be beloved?  Such a love does not sap our pride, but supports it; increases rather than diminishes our noble self-esteem.  To attain such a love the martyrs writhed up to the crown of saints.  For a while Cecilia revelled in the thought that she could love in this most saint-like manner.  How they fled, the sordid ideas of him which accused him of the world’s one passion, and were transferred to her own bosom in reproach that she should have imagined them existing in his!  He talked simply and sweetly of his defeat, of time wasted away from the canvass, of loss of money:  and he had little to spare, he said.  The water-colour drawing interested him.  He said he envied her that power of isolation, and the eye for beauty in every season.  She opened a portfolio of Mr. Tuckham’s water-colour drawings in every clime; scenes of Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and he was to be excused for not caring to look through them.  His remark, that they seemed hard and dogged, was not so unjust, she thought, smiling to think of the critic criticized.  His wonderment that a young man like his Lancastrian cousin should be ’an unmitigated Tory’ was perhaps natural.

Cecilia said, ‘Yet I cannot discern in him a veneration for aristocracy.’  ‘That’s not wanted for modern Toryism,’ said Nevil.  ’One may venerate old families when they show the blood of the founder, and are not dead wood.  I do.  And I believe the blood of the founder, though the man may have been a savage and a robber, had in his day finer elements in it than were common.  But let me say at a meeting that I respect true aristocracy, I hear a growl and a hiss beginning:  why?  Don’t judge them hastily:  because the people have seen the aristocracy opposed to the cause that was weak, and only submitting to it when it commanded them to resist at their peril; clinging to traditions, and not anywhere standing for humanity:  much more a herd than the people themselves.  Ah! well, we won’t talk of it now.  I say that is no aristocracy, if it does not head the people in virtue—­military, political, national:  I mean the qualities required by the times for leadership.  I won’t bother you with my ideas now.  I love to see you paint-brush in hand.’

Her brush trembled on the illumination of a scarlet maple.  ’In this country we were not originally made free and equal by decree, Nevil.’

‘No,’ said he, ‘and I cast no blame on our farthest ancestors.’

It struck her that this might be an outline of a reply to Mr. Austin.