The girl was caught away to the thinnest of wisps in a dust-whirl.  Reverting to the father and mother, his idea of a positive injury, that was not without its congratulations, sank him down among his disordered deeper sentiments; which were a diver’s wreck, where an armoured livid subtermarine, a monstrous puff-ball of man, wandered seriously light in heaviness; trembling his hundredweights to keep him from dancing like a bladder-block of elastic lumber; thinking occasionally, amid the mournful spectacle, of the atmospheric pipe of communication with the world above, whereby he was deafened yet sustained.  One tug at it, and he was up on the surface, disengaged from the hideous harness, joyfully no more that burly phantom cleaving green slime, free! and the roaring stopped; the world looked flat, foreign, a place of crusty promise.  His wreck, animated by the dim strange fish below, appeared fairer; it winked lurefully when abandoned.

The internal state of a gentleman who detested intangible metaphor as heartily as the vulgarest of our gobblegobbets hate it, metaphor only can describe; and for the reason, that he had in him just something more than is within the compass of the language of the meat-markets.  He had—­and had it not the less because he fain would not have had—­sufficient stuff to furnish forth a soul’s epic encounter between Nature and Circumstance:  and metaphor, simile, analysis, all the fraternity of old lamps for lighting our abysmal darkness, have to be rubbed, that we may get a glimpse of the fray.

Free, and rejoicing; without the wish to be free; at the same time humbly and sadly acquiescing in the stronger claim of his family to pronounce the decision:  such was the second stage of Dudley’s perturbation after the blow.  A letter of Nesta’s writing was in his pocket:  he knew her address.  He could not reply to her until he had seen her father:  and that interview remained necessarily prospective until he had come to his exact resolve, not omitting his critical approval of the sentences giving it shape, stamp, dignity—­a noble’s crest, as it were.

Nesta wrote briefly.  The apostrophe was, ‘Dear Mr. Sowerby.’  She had engaged to send her address.  Her father had just gone.  The Miss Duvidneys had left the hotel yesterday for the furnished house facing the sea.  According to arrangements, she had a livery-stable hack, and had that morning trotted out to the downs with a riding-master and company, one of whom was ‘an agreeable lady.’

He noticed approvingly her avoidance of an allusion to the ‘Delphica’ of Mr. Durance’s incomprehensible serial story, or whatever it was; which, as he had shown her, annoyed him, for its being neither fact nor fun; and she had insisted on the fun; and he had painfully tried to see it or anything of a meaning; and it seemed to him now, that he had been humiliated by the obedience to her lead:  she had offended by her harping upon Delphica.  However, here it was unmentioned.  He held the letter out to seize it in the large, entire.