They were at the steps of the house.  Turning to Weyburn there, the inexhaustible Lady Charlotte remarked that their conversation had given her pleasure.  Leo was hanging on to one of his hands the next minute.  A small girl took the other.  Philippa and Beatrice were banished damsels.

Lady Charlotte’s breath had withered the aspect of Aminta’s fortunes.  Weyburn could forgive her, for he was beginning to understand her.  He could not pardon ‘her brother Rowsley,’ who loomed in his mind incomprehensible, and therefore black.  Once he had thought the great General a great man.  He now regarded him as a mere soldier, a soured veteran; socially as a masker and a trifler, virtually a callous angler playing his cleverly-hooked fish for pastime.

What could be the meaning of Lady Charlotte’s ’that, man Morsfield, who boasts of your Lady Ormont, and does it unwhipped’?

Weyburn stopped his questioning, with the reflection that he had no right to recollect her words thus accurately.  The words, however, stamped Morsfield’s doings and sayings and postures in the presence of Aminta with significance.  When the ladies were looking on at the fencers, Morsfield’s perfect coxcombry had been noticeable.  He knew the art of airing a fine figure.  Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had spoken of it, and Aminta had acquiesced; in the gravely simple manner of women who may be thinking of it much more intently than the vivacious prattler.  Aminta confessed to an admiration of masculine physical beauty; the picador, matador, of the Spanish ring called up an undisguised glow that English ladies show coldly when they condescend to let it be seen; as it were, a line or two of colour on the wintriest of skies.  She might, after all, at heart be one of the leisured, jewelled, pretty-winged; the spending, never harvesting, world she claimed and sought to enter.  And what a primitive world it was!—­world of the glittering beast and the not too swiftly flying prey, the savage passions clothed in silk.  Surely desire to belong to it writes us poor creatures.  Mentally, she could hardly be maturer than the hero-worshipping girl in the procession of Miss Vincent’s young seminarists.  Probably so, but she carried magic.  She was of the order of women who walk as the goddesses of old, bearing the gift divine.  And, by the way, she had the step of the goddess.  Weyburn repeated to himself the favourite familiar line expressive of the glorious walk, and accused Lord Ormont of being in cacophonous accordance with the perpetual wrong of circumstance, he her possessor, the sole person of her sphere insensible to the magic she bore!  So ran his thought.

The young man chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly.  He was, in truth, often casting about for the chances of his meeting on some fortunate day the predestined schoolmaster’s wife:  a lady altogether praiseworthy for carrying principles of sound government instead of magic.  Consequently, susceptible to woman’s graces though he knew himself to be, Lady Ormont’s share of them hung in the abstract for him.  His hopes were bent on an early escape to Switzerland and his life’s work.