’Indeed, Nevil, really, must not—­may I not ask you this?—­must not every one feel the evil spell of some associations?  And Dante and Dr. Shrapnel!’

‘You don’t know him, Cecilia.’

‘I saw him yesterday.’

‘You thought him too tall?’

‘I thought of his character.’

‘How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful!’

‘I am immensely indebted to my unconscious advocate.’

’You are clad in steel; you flash back; you won’t answer me out of the heart.  I ‘m convinced it is pure wilfulness that makes you oppose me.’

’I fancy you must be convinced because you cannot imagine women to have any share of public spirit, Nevil.’

A grain of truth in that remark set Nevil reflecting.

‘I want them to have it,’ he remarked, and glanced at a Tory placard, probably the puppet’s fresh-printed address to the electors, on one of the wayside fir-trees.  ’Bevisham looks well from here.  We might make a North-western Venice of it, if we liked.’

‘Papa told you it would be money sunk in mud.’

’Did I mention it to him?—­Thoroughly Conservative!—­So he would leave the mud as it is.  They insist on our not venturing anything—­those Tories! exactly as though we had gained the best of human conditions, instead of counting crops of rogues, malefactors, egoists, noxious and lumbersome creatures that deaden the country.  Your town down there is one of the ugliest and dirtiest in the kingdom:  it might be the fairest.’

‘I have often thought that of Bevisham, Nevil.’

He drew a visionary sketch of quays, embankments, bridged islands, public buildings, magical emanations of patriotic architecture, with a practical air, an absence of that enthusiasm which struck her with suspicion when it was not applied to landscape or the Arts; and she accepted it, and warmed, and even allowed herself to appear hesitating when he returned to the similarity of the state of mud-begirt Bevisham and our great sluggish England.

Was he not perhaps to be pitied in his bondage to the Frenchwoman, who could have no ideas in common with him?

The rare circumstance that she and Nevil Beauchamp had found a subject of agreement, partially overcame the sentiment Cecilia entertained for the foreign lady; and having now one idea in common with him, she conceived the possibility that there might be more.  There must be many, for he loved England, and she no less.  She clung, however, to the topic of Bevisham, preferring to dream of the many more, rather than run risks.  Undoubtedly the town was of an ignoble aspect; and it was declining in prosperity; and it was consequently over-populated.  And undoubtedly (so she was induced to coincide for the moment) a Government, acting to any extent like a supervising head, should aid and direct the energies of towns and ports and trades, and not leave everything everywhere to chance:  schools for the people, public morality,