say; for they have lost faith in the existence of an inner.  They haven’t it.  Air-sucker, blood-pump, cooking machinery, and a battery of trained instincts, aptitudes, fill up their vacuum.  I repeat, ma’am, why should young Captain Beauchamp spend an hour consulting his family?  They won’t approve him; he knows it.  They may annoy him; and what is the gain of that?  They can’t move him; on that I let my right hand burn.  So it would be useless on both sides.  He thinks so.  So do I. He is one of the men to serve his country on the best field we can choose for him.  In a ship’s cabin he is thrown away.  Ay, ay, War, and he may go aboard.  But now we must have him ashore.  Too few of such as he!’

‘It is matter of opinion,’ said Rosamund, very tightly compressed; scarcely knowing what she said.

How strange, besides hateful, it was to her to hear her darling spoken of by a stranger who not only pretended to appreciate but to possess him!  A stranger, a man of evil, with monstrous ideas!  A terribly strong inexhaustible man, of a magical power too; or would he otherwise have won such a mastery over Nevil?

Of course she could have shot a rejoinder, to confute him with all the force of her indignation, save that the words were tumbling about in her head like a world in disruption, which made her feel a weakness at the same time that she gloated on her capacity, as though she had an enormous army, quite overwhelming if it could but be got to move in advance.  This very common condition of the silent-stricken, unused in dialectics, heightened Rosamund’s disgust by causing her to suppose that Nevil had been similarly silenced, in his case vanquished, captured, ruined; and he dwindled in her estimation for a moment or two.  She felt that among a sisterhood of gossips she would soon have found her voice, and struck down the demagogue’s audacious sophisms:  not that they affected her in the slightest degree for her own sake.

Shrapnel might think what he liked, and say what he liked, as far as she was concerned, apart from the man she loved.  Rosamund went through these emotions altogether on Nevil’s behalf, and longed for her affirmatizing inspiring sisterhood until the thought of them threw another shade on him.

What champion was she to look to?  To whom but to Mr. Everard Romfrey?

It was with a spasm of delighted reflection that she hit on Mr. Romfrey.  He was like a discovery to her.  With his strength and skill, his robust common sense and rough shrewd wit, his prompt comparisons, his chivalry, his love of combat, his old knightly blood, was not he a match, and an overmatch, for the ramping Radical who had tangled Nevil in his rough snares?  She ran her mind over Mr. Romfrey’s virtues, down even to his towering height and breadth.  Could she but once draw these two giants into collision in Nevil’s presence, she was sure it would save him.  The method of doing it she did not stop to consider:  she enjoyed her triumph in the idea.