‘And you’ve never seen Venice,’ Beauchamp said to Jenny.

‘Everything is new to me,’ said she, penetrating and gladly joining the conspiracy to have him out of England.

Dr. Shrapnel was not so compliant as the young husband.  Where he could land and botanize, as at Madeira, he let time fly and drum his wings on air, but the cities of priests along the coast of Portugal and Spain roused him to a burning sense of that flight of time and the vacuity it told of in his labours.  Greatly to his astonishment, he found that it was no longer he and Beauchamp against Jenny, but Jenny and Beauchamp against him.

‘What!’ he cried, ’to draw breath day by day, and not to pay for it by striking daily at the rock Iniquity?  Are you for that, Beauchamp?  And in a land where these priests walk with hats curled like the water-lily’s leaf without the flower?  How far will you push indolent unreason to gain the delusion of happiness?  There is no such thing:  but there’s trance.  That talk of happiness is a carrion clamour of the creatures of prey.  Take it—­and you’re helping tear some poor wretch to pieces, whom you might be constructing, saving perchance:  some one? some thousands!  You, Beauchamp, when I met you first, you were for England, England! for a breadth of the palm of my hand comparatively—­the round of a copper penny, no wider!  And from that you jumped at a bound to the round of this earth:  you were for humanity.  Ay, we sailed our planet among the icy spheres, and were at blood-heat for its destiny, you and I!  And now you hover for a wind to catch you.  So it is for a soul rejecting prayer.  This wind and that has it:  the well-springs within are shut down fast!  I pardon my Jenny, my Harry Denham’s girl.  She is a woman, and has a brain like a bell that rings all round to the tongue.  It is her kingdom, of the interdicted untraversed frontiers.  But what cares she, or any woman, that this Age of ours should lie like a carcase against the Sun?  What cares any woman to help to hold up Life to him?  He breeds divinely upon life, filthy upon stagnation.  Sail you away, if you will, in your trance.  I go.  I go home by land alone, and I await you.  Here in this land of moles upright, I do naught but execrate; I am a pulpit of curses.  Counter-anathema, you might call me.’

‘Oh!  I feel the comparison so, for England shining spiritually bright,’ said Jenny, and cut her husband adrift with the exclamation, and saw him float away to Dr. Shrapnel.

‘Spiritually bright!’

‘By comparison, Nevil.’

’There’s neither spiritual nor political brightness in England, but a common resolution to eat of good things and stick to them,’ said the doctor:  ’and we two out of England, there’s barely a voice to cry scare to the feeders.  I’m back!  I’m home!’