Beauchamp often tried to conjure words to paint his wife.  On grave subjects she had the manner of speaking of a shy scholar, and between grave and playful, between smiling and serious, her clear head, her nobly poised character, seemed to him to have never had a prototype and to elude the art of picturing it in expression, until he heard Lydiard call her whimsically, ‘Portia disrobing’

Portia half in her doctor’s gown, half out of it.  They met Lydiard and his wife Louise, and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckham, in Venice, where, upon the first day of October, Jenny Beauchamp gave birth to a son.  The thrilling mother did not perceive on this occasion the gloom she cast over the father of the child and Dr. Shrapnel.  The youngster would insist on his right to be sprinkled by the parson, to get a legal name and please his mother.  At all turns in the history of our healthy relations with women we are confronted by the parson!  ‘And, upon my word, I believe,’ Beauchamp said to Lydiard, ’those parsons—­not bad creatures in private life:  there was one in Madeira I took a personal liking to—­but they’re utterly ignorant of what men feel to them—­more ignorant than women!’ Mr. Tuckham and Mrs. Lydiard would not listen to his foolish objections; nor were they ever mentioned to Jenny.  Apparently the commission of the act of marriage was to force Beauchamp from all his positions one by one.

‘The education of that child?’ Mrs. Lydiard said to her husband.

He considered that the mother would prevail.

Cecilia feared she would not.

‘Depend upon it, he’ll make himself miserable if he can,’ said Tuckham.

That gentleman, however, was perpetually coming fuming from arguments with Beauchamp, and his opinion was a controversialist’s.  His common sense was much afflicted.  ’I thought marriage would have stopped all those absurdities,’ he said, glaring angrily, laughing, and then frowning.  ’I ’ve warned him I’ll go out of my way to come across him if he carries on his headlong folly.  A man should accept his country for what it is when he’s born into it.  Don’t tell me he’s a good fellow.  I know he is, but there ’s an ass mounted on the good fellow.  Talks of the parsons!  Why, they’re men of education.’

‘They couldn’t steer a ship in a gale, though.’

‘Oh! he’s a good sailor.  And let him go to sea,’ said Tuckham.  ’His wife’s a prize.  He’s hardly worthy of her.  If she manages him she’ll deserve a monument for doing a public service.’

How fortunate it is for us that here and there we do not succeed in wresting our temporary treasure from the grasp of the Fates!