She raised her defences against the basilisk fascinating Philippa; and with a vow to keep them apart and deprive him of his chance, she relapsed upon the stiff frigidity which was not natural to her.  It lasted long enough to put him on his guard under the seductions of a noble dame’s condescension to a familiar tone.  But, as he was too well bred to show the change in his mind for her change of manner, and as she was the sister of his boyhood’s hero, and could be full of flavour, his eyes retained something of their sparkle.  They were ready to lighten again, in the way peculiar to him, when she, quite forgetting her defence of Philippa, disburdened herself of her antagonisms and enthusiasms, her hates and her loves all round the neighbourhood and over the world, won to confidential communication by this young man’s face.  She confessed as much, had he been guided to perceive it.  She said, “Arthur Abner’s a reader of men:  I can trust his word about them.”

Presently, it is true, she added:  “No man’s to be relied upon where there’s a woman.”  She refused her implicit trust to saints—­“if ever a man really was a saint before he was canonized!”

Her penetrative instinct of sex kindled the scepticism.  Sex she saw at play everywhere, dogging the conduct of affairs, directing them at times; she saw it as the animation of nature, senselessly stigmatized, hypocritically concealed, active in our thoughts where not in our deeds; and the declining of the decorous to see it, or admit the sight, got them abhorred bad names from her, after a touch at the deadly poison coming of that blindness, or blindfoldedness, and a grimly melancholy shrug over the cruelties resulting—­cruelties chiefly affecting women.

“You’re too young to have thought upon such matters,” she said, for a finish to them.

That was hardly true.

“I have thought,” said Weyburn, and his head fell to reckoning of the small sum of his thoughts upon them.

He was pulled up instantly for close inspection by the judge.  “What is your age?”

“I am in my twenty-sixth year.”

“You have been among men:  have you studied women?”

“Not largely, Lady Charlotte.  Opportunity has been wanting at French and German colleges.”

“It’s only a large and a close and a pretty long study of them that can teach you anything; and you must get rid of the poetry about them, and be sure you haven’t lost it altogether.  That’s what is called the golden mean.  I’m not for the golden mean in every instance; it’s a way of exhorting to brutal selfishness.  I grant it’s the right way in those questions.  You’ll learn in time.”  Her scanning gaze at the young man’s face drove him along an avenue of his very possible chances of learning.  “Certain to.  But don’t tell me that at your age you have thought about women.  You may say you have felt.  A young man’s feelings about women are better reading for him six or a dozen chapters farther on.  Then he can sift and strain.  It won’t be perfectly clear, but it will do.”