Victor cut him short.  ‘I deny that those two are absurd.’

‘And Catkin’s toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon.’

Nataly strongly denied it.  Peridon and Catkin pertained to their genial picture of the dear sweet nest in life; a dale never traversed by the withering breath they dreaded.

Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his way as Colney, fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, with a pitchfork’s exaltation of the sacred attachment of the divergently meritorious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles in the principles of each.  The pair were offending the amatory corner in the generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities, except by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of Miss Graves.  Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge.  She wondered at having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic tribulation-bell.  Fenellan’s graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons—­abominations of emptiness—­to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the one most wretched light is Inebriation’s nose; and of the vegetarian violoncello’s horror at his vision of the long procession of the flocks and herds into his lady’s melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and delighted her antipathy.  She was amused to transports at the station, on hearing Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark:  ’No, I carry no instrument.’  The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not forgotten when it sounded.

Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just under Victor’s ear:  ‘Where are those two?’

‘Bid me select the couple,’ said he.

She rejoined:  ‘Silly man’; and sleepily gave him her hand for good night, and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued junction by saying more than he intended:  ‘If they come to an understanding!’

‘Plain enough on one side.’

‘You think it suitable?’

‘Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.’  ’This is really my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.’

‘Go on.’

‘How?’

‘Number your loves.  It would tax your arithmetic.’

‘I can hate.’

‘Not me?’