Then came a rumour, telling of him as engaged upon the composition of his Memoirs.

Lady Charlotte’s impulsive outcry:  “Writing them?” signified her grounds for alarm.

Happily, Memoirs are not among the silly deeds done in a moment; they were somewhere ahead and over the hills:  a band of brigands rather than a homely shining mansion, it was true; but distant; and a principal question shrieked to know whether he was composing them for publication.  She could look forward with a girl’s pleasure to the perusal of them in manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour of partizanship, easily avoiding sight of errors, grammatical or moral.  She chafed at the possible printing and publishing of them.  That would be equivalent to an exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London—­brilliant in himself, spotty in the offence.  Published Memoirs indicate the end of a man’s activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of Lord Ormont’s life when the denial of it should thunder.  They are his final chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed stuff.  They are virtually his apology.  Can those knowing Lord Ormont hear him apologize?  But it is a craven apology if we stoop to expound:  we are seen as pleading our case before the public.  Call it by any name you please, and under any attitude, it is that.  And set aside the writing:  it may be perfect; the act is the degradation.  It is a rousing of swarms.  His friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman of his day, pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an out-poured, undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by his imperturbability over the ridicule he excites:  he who is no more ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an ace more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable sinner on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned half a score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the rope.  Nobody laughs at the judge.  Everybody will be laughing at the scornful man down half-way to his knee-cape with a stutter of an apology for having done his duty to his country, after stigmatizing numbers for inability or ill-will to do it.  But Ormont’s weapon is the sword, not a pen!  Lady Charlotte hunted her simile till the dogs had it or it ran to earth.

She struck at the conclusion, that the young woman had been persuading him.  An adoring young woman is the person to imagine and induce to the commission of such folly.  “What do you think?  You have seen her, you say?” she asked of a man she welcomed for his flavour of the worldling’s fine bile.

Lord Adderwood made answer:  “She may be having a hand in it.  She worships, and that is your way of pulling gods to the ground.”

“Does she understand good English?”

“Speaks it.”

“Can she write?”

“I have never had a letter from her.”