‘But, Skips! if you are ill and we have to nurse you!’ said Nesta.

She forgot the hospital, he told her cordially, and laughed at the notion of a ducking producing a cold or a cold a fever, or anything consumption, with him.  So the ladies had to keep down their anxious minds and allow him to stand in wet clothing to eat his cold pie and salad.

Miss Priscilla Graves entering to them, became a witness that they were seductresses for inducing him to drink wine—­and a sparkling wine.

‘It is to warm him,’ they pleaded; and she said:  ’He must be warm from his walk’; and they said:  ‘But he is wet’; and said she, without a show of feeling:  ‘Warm water, then’; and Skepsey writhed, as if in the grasp of anatomists, at being the subject of female contention or humane consideration.  Miss Graves caught signs of the possible proselyte in him; she remarked encouragingly: 

‘I am sure he does not like it; he still has a natural taste.’

She distressed his native politeness, for the glass was in his hand, and he was fully aware of her high-principled aversion; and he profoundly bowed to principles, believing his England to be pillared on them; and the lady looked like one who bore the standard of a principle; and if we slap and pinch and starve our appetites, the idea of a principle seems entering us to support.  Subscribing to a principle, our energies are refreshed; we have a faith in the country that was not with us before the act; and of a real well-founded faith come the glowing thoughts which we have at times:  thoughts of England heading the nations; when the smell of an English lane under showers challenges Eden, and the threading of a London crowd tunes discords to the swell of a cathedral organ.  It may be, that by the renunciation of any description of alcohol, a man will stand clearer-headed to serve his country.  He may expect to have a clearer memory, for certain:  he will not be asking himself, unable to decide, whether his master named a Mr. Journeyman or a Mr. Jarniman, as the person he declined to receive.  Either of the two is repulsed upon his application, owing to the guilty similarity of sounds but what we are to think of is, our own sad state of inefficiency in failing to remember; which accuses our physical condition, therefore our habits.—­Thus the little man debated, scarcely requiring more than to hear the right word, to be a convert and make him a garland of the proselyte’s fetters.

Destructively for the cause she advocated, Miss Priscilla gestured the putting forth of an abjuring hand, with the recommendation to him, so to put aside temptation that instant; and she signified in a very ugly jerk of her features, the vilely filthy stuff Morality thought it, however pleasing it might be to a palate corrupted by indulgence of the sensual appetites.

But the glass had been handed to him by the lady he respected, who looked angelical in offering it, divinely other than ugly; and to her he could not be discourteous; not even to pay his homage to the representative of a principle.  He bowed to Miss Graves, and drank, and rushed forth; hearing shouts behind him.