Evidently he had resolved to back Mr. Romfrey blindly.  That epistle of Dr. Shrapnel’s merited condign punishment and had met with it, he seemed to rejoice in saying:  and this was his abstract of the same:  ’An old charlatan who tells his dupe to pray every night of his life for the beheading of kings and princes, and scattering of the clergy, and disbanding the army, that he and his rabble may fall upon the wealthy, and show us numbers win; and he’ll undertake to make them moral!’

‘I wish we were not going to Steynham,’ said Cecilia.

‘So do I. Well, no, I don’t,’ the colonel corrected himself, ’no; it ’s an engagement.  I gave my consent so far.  We shall see whether Nevil Beauchamp’s a man of any sense.’

Her heart sank.  This was as much as to let her know that if Nevil broke with his uncle, the treaty of union between the two families, which her father submitted to entertain out of consideration for Mr. Romfrey, would be at an end.

The wind had fallen.  Entering her river, Cecilia gazed back at the smooth broad water, and the band of golden beams flung across it from the evening sun over the forest.  No little cutter was visible.  She could not write to Nevil to bid him come and concert with her in what spirit to encounter his uncle Everard at Steynham.  And guests would be at Mount Laurels next day; Lord Lockrace, Lord Croyston, and the Lespels; she could not drive down to Bevisham on the chance of seeing him.  Nor was it to be acknowledged even to herself that she so greatly desired to see him and advise him.  Why not?  Because she was one of the artificial creatures called women (with the accent) who dare not be spontaneous, and cannot act independently if they would continue to be admirable in the world’s eye, and who for that object must remain fixed on shelves, like other marketable wares, avoiding motion to avoid shattering or tarnishing.  This is their fate, only in degree less inhuman than that of Hellenic and Trojan princesses offered up to the Gods, or pretty slaves to the dealers.  Their artificiality is at once their bane and their source of superior pride.

Seymour Austin might have reason for seeking to emancipate them, she thought, and blushed in thought that she could never be learning anything but from her own immediate sensations.

Of course it was in her power to write to Beauchamp, just as it had been in his to speak to her, but the fire was wanting in her blood and absent from his mood, so they were kept apart.

Her father knew as little as she what was the positive cause of Mr. Romfrey’s chastisement of Dr. Shrapnel.  ‘Cause enough, I don’t doubt,’ he said, and cited the mephitic letter.

Cecilia was not given to suspicions, or she would have had them kindled by a certain wilfulness in his incessant reference to the letter, and exoneration, if not approval, of Mr. Romfrey’s conduct.