’Good anchorage!  You must fight it out with the girl.  And depend upon this—­you’re not the poorer for being the husband of a girl of character; unless you try to bridle her.  She belongs to her time.  I don’t mind owning to you, she has given me a lead.—­Fredi ’ll be merry to-night.  Here’s a letter I have from the Sanfredini, dated Milan, fresh this morning; invitation to bring the god-child to her villa on Como in May; desirous to embrace her.  She wrote to the office.  Not a word of her duque.  She has pitched him to the winds.  You may like to carry it off to Fredi and please her.’

‘I have business,’ Dudley replied.

‘Away to it, then!’ said Victor.  ’You stand by me?—­we expect our South London borough to be open in January; early next year, at least; may be February.  You have family interest there.’

‘Personally, I will do my best,’ Dudley said; and he escaped, feeling, with the universal censor’s angry spite, that the revolutions of the world had made one of the wealthiest of City men the head of a set of Bohemians.  And there are eulogists of the modern time!  And the man’s daughter was declared to belong to it!  A visit in May to the Italian cantatrice separated from her husband, would render the maiden an accomplished flinger of caps over the windmills.

At home Victor discovered, that there was not much more than a truce between Nesta and Nataly.  He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison, and he counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be:  particularly in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after opposing, strongly favoured.  How are we ever to get a clue to the labyrinthine convolutions and changeful motives of the sex!  Dartrey’s theories were absurd.  Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman?  The guess hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her veering.

‘Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,’ said Nesta.

’Mr. Sowerby!  My dear, he is bound, bound in honour, bound at heart.  You did not dismiss him?’

’I repeated the word he used.  I thought of mother.  The blood leaves her cheeks at a disappointment now.  She has taken to like him.’

‘Why, you like him!’

‘I could not vow.’

‘Tush.’

‘Ah, don’t press me, dada.  But you will see, he has disengaged himself.’

He had done it, though not in formal speech.  Slow digestion of his native antagonism to these Bohemians, to say nothing of his judicial condemnation of them, brought him painfully round to the writing of a letter to Nataly; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his instinct told him he had the strongest hold.

She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter forming Dudley’s grievance and her own with Nesta; and it was a woeful half-hour for them.  But Nataly was not the weeper.