’It is the mania with us, my dear Nevil, to marry our girls young to established men.  Your established man carries usually all the signs, visible to the multitude or not, of the stages leading to that eminence.  We cannot, I believe, unless we have the good fortune to boast the paternity of Hercules, disconnect ourselves from the steps we have mounted; not even, the priests inform us, if we are ascending to heaven; we carry them beyond the grave.  However, it seems that our excellent marquis contrives to keep them concealed, and he is ready to face marriage—­the Grandest Inquisitor, next to Death.  Two furious matchmakers—­our country, beautiful France, abounds in them—­met one day; they were a comtesse and a baronne, and they settled the alliance.  The bell was rung, and Renee came out of school.  There is this to be said:  she has no mother; the sooner a girl without a mother has a husband the better.  That we are all agreed upon.  I have no personal objection to the marquis; he has never been in any great scandals.  He is Norman, and has estates in Normandy, Dauphiny, Touraine; he is hospitable, luxurious.  Renee will have a fine hotel in Paris.  But I am eccentric:  I have read in our old Fabliaux of December and May.  Say the marquis is November, say October; he is still some distance removed from the plump Spring month.  And we in our family have wits and passions.  In fine, a bud of a rose in an old gentleman’s button-hole! it is a challenge to the whole world of youth; and if the bud should leap?  Enough of this matter, friend Nevil; but sometimes a friend must allow himself to be bothered.  I have perfect confidence in my sister, you see; I simply protest against her being exposed to . . .  You know men.  I protest, that is, in the privacy of my cigar-case, for I have no chance elsewhere.  The affair is on wheels.  The very respectable matchmakers have kindled the marquis on the one hand, and my father on the other, and Renee passes obediently from the latter to the former.  In India they sacrifice the widows, in France the virgins.’

Roland proceeded to relate his adventure.  Nevil’s inattention piqued him to salt and salt it wonderfully, until the old story of He and She had an exciting savour in its introductory chapter; but his friend was flying through the circles of the Inferno, and the babble of an ephemeral upper world simply affected him by its contrast with the overpowering horrors, repugnances, despairs, pities, rushing at him, surcharging his senses.  Those that live much by the heart in their youth have sharp foretastes of the issues imaged for the soul.  St. Mark’s was in a minute struck black for him.  He neither felt the sunlight nor understood why column and campanile rose, nor why the islands basked, and boats and people moved.  All were as remote little bits of mechanism.