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  ’In this country we were not originally made free and equal by decree, Nevil.’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.

‘So you have been thinking over it?’ he asked.

‘Not to conclusions,’ she said, trying to retain in her mind the evanescent suggestiveness of his previous remark, and vexed to find herself upon nothing but a devious phosphorescent trail there.

Her forehead betrayed the unwonted mental action.  He cried out for pardon.  ’What right have I to bother you?  I see it annoys you.  The truth is, I came for peace.  I think of you when they talk of English homes.’

She felt then that he was comparing her home with another, a foreign home.  After he had gone she felt that there had been a comparison of two persons.  She remembered one of his observations:  ’Few women seem to have courage’; when his look at her was for an instant one of scrutiny or calculation.  Under a look like that we perceive that we are being weighed.  She had no clue to tell her what it signified.

Glorious and solely glorious love, that has risen above emotion, quite independent of craving!  That is to be the bird of upper air, poised on his wings.  It is a home in the sky.  Cecilia took possession of it systematically, not questioning whether it would last; like one who is too enamoured of the habitation to object to be a tenant-at-will.  If it was cold, it was in recompense immeasurably lofty, a star-girdled place; and dwelling in it she could avow to herself the secret which was now working self-deception, and still preserve her pride unwounded.  Her womanly pride, she would have said in vindication of it:  but Cecilia Halkett’s pride went far beyond the merely womanly.