Why had she given it to his warmest friend?  For the asking, probably.

This question was the first ripple of the breeze from other emotions beginning to flow fast.

He walked out of London, to be alone, and to think and from the palings of a road on a South-western run of high land, he gazed, at the great city—­a place conquerable yet, with the proper appliances for subjugating it:  the starting of his daily newspaper, the dawn, say, as a commencement.  It began to seem a possible enterprise.  It soon seemed a proximate one.  If Cecilia!  He left the exclamation a blank, but not an empty dash in the brain; rather like the shroud of night on a vast and gloriously imagined land.

Nay, the prospect was partly visible, as the unknown country becomes by degrees to the traveller’s optics on the dark hill-tops.  It is much, of course, to be domestically well-mated:  but to be fortified and armed by one’s wife with a weapon to fight the world, is rare good fortune; a rapturous and an infinite satisfaction.  He could now support of his own resources a weekly paper.  A paper published weekly, however, is a poor thing, out of the tide, behind the date, mainly a literary periodical, no foremost combatant in politics, no champion in the arena; hardly better than a commentator on the events of the six past days; an echo, not a voice.  It sits on a Saturday bench and pretends to sum up.  Who listens?  The verdict knocks dust out of a cushion.  It has no steady continuous pressure of influence.  It is the organ of sleepers.  Of all the bigger instruments of money, it is the feeblest, Beauchamp thought.  His constant faith in the good effects of utterance naturally inclined him to value six occasions per week above one; and in the fight he was for waging, it was necessary that he should enter the ring and hit blow for blow sans intermission.  A statement that he could call false must be challenged hot the next morning.  The covert Toryism, the fits of flunkeyism, the cowardice, of the relapsing middle-class, which is now England before mankind, because it fills the sails of the Press, must be exposed.  It supports the Press in its own interests, affecting to speak for the people.  It belies the people.  And this Press, declaring itself independent, can hardly walk for fear of treading on an interest here, an interest there.  It cannot have a conscience.  It is a bad guide, a false guardian; its abject claim to be our national and popular interpreter-even that is hollow and a mockery!  It is powerful only while subservient.  An engine of money, appealing to the sensitiveness of money, it has no connection with the mind of the nation.  And that it is not of, but apart from, the people, may be seen when great crises come.  Can it stop a war?  The people would, and with thunder, had they the medium.  But in strong gales the power of the Press collapses; it wheezes like a pricked pigskin of a piper.  At its best Beauchamp regarded our lordly Press as a curiously diapered curtain and delusive mask, behind which the country struggles vainly to show an honest feature; and as a trumpet that deafened and terrorized the people; a mere engine of leaguers banded to keep a smooth face upon affairs, quite soullessly:  he meanwhile having to be dumb.