The day of Nesta’s return was one of a number of late when Victor was robbed of his walk Westward by Lady Grace Halley, who seduced his politeness with her various forms of blandishment to take a seat in her carriage; and she was a practical speaker upon her quarter of the world when she had him there.  Perhaps she was right in saying—­though she had no right to say—­that he and she together might have the world under their feet.  It was one of those irritating suggestions which expedite us up to a bald ceiling, only to make us feel the gas-bladder’s tight extension upon emptiness:  It moved him to examine the poor value of his aim, by tying him to the contemptible means:  One estimate involved the other, whichever came first.  Somewhere he had an idea, that would lift and cleanse all degradations.  But it did seem as if he were not enjoying:  things pleasant enough in the passage of them were barren, if not prickly, in the retrospect.

He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp round it, in the gloom of the girdle of lights, to recover his deadened relish of the thin phantasmal strife to win an intangible prize.  His dulled physical system asked, as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in the hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was the substance of his gains:  what! if other than a precipitous intimacy, a deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of a whimsical nudity; hardly more.  Nay, not more! he said; and at the end of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the Society, lured with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishing picture; the little woman was esteemed as a serviceable lieutenant; and her hand was a small soft one, agreeable to fondle—­and avaunt!  But so it is in war:  we must pay for our allies.  What if it had been, that he and she together, with their united powers . . . ?  He dashed the silly vision aside, as vainer than one of the bubble-empires blown by boys; and it broke, showing no heart in it.  His heart was Nataly’s.

Let Colney hint his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any strain coming in the round of her duties:  and if she would but walk, or if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency besetting the phlegmatic, like this day’s breeze the morning fog; or as he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.

Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighted London, with its ocean-voice of the heart at beat along the lighted outer ring, Victor entered at his old door of the two houses he had knocked into one:  a surprise for Fredi!—­and heard that his girl had arrived in the morning.

‘And could no more endure her absence from her Mammy O!’ The songful satirical line spouted in him, to be flung at his girl, as he ran upstairs to the boudoir off the drawing-room.