The secretary, cheerful at his work, was found for just the opening of a door.  Sometimes she hesitated—­to disturb him, she said to herself,—­and went up-stairs or out visiting.  He protested that he could work on and talk too.  She was able to amuse her lord with some of his ideas.  He had a stock of them, all his own.

Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to the humanity they visit to help uplift, it from the state of beast.  In the England of that, period original or unknown ideas were a smoking brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air, jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and the cherished, the ivy-clad and celestially haloed.  They carried the dishevelled Maenad’s torch.  A step with them, and we were on the Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution.  For a publication of simple ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded:  the horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them up, wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an execrable brimstone stench.

Lord Ormont broke through his shouts or grunts at Aminta’s report of the secretary’s ideas on various topics, particularly the proposal that the lords of the land should head the land in a revolutionary effort to make law of his crazy, top-heavy notions, with a self-satisfied ejaculation:  ‘He has not favoured me with any of these puffballs of his.’

The deduction was, that the author sagaciously considered them adapted for the ear of a woman; they were womanish—­i.e. flighty, gossamer.  To the host of males, all ideas are female until they are made facts.

This idea, proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas, or reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship with the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them in history by certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and publishers, Lord Ormont thought amazingly comical.  English nobles heading the weavers, cobblers, and barbers of England!  He laughed, but he said, ’Charlotte would listen to that.’

The dread, high-sitting Lady Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking, a woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to strike a particular set of bells hanging in her cranium.  She patronized blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of the people, not with a notion of maintaining our English aristocracy eminent in history.

Lady Charlotte, however, would be the foremost to swoop down on the secretary’s ideas about the education of women.

On that subject, Aminta said she did not know what to think.

Now, if a man states the matter he thinks, and a woman does but listen, whether inclining to agree or not, a perceptible stamp is left on soft wax.  Lord Ormont told her so, with cavalier kindness.