An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.

She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat for her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance with the admiral had quieted her suspicions.  The world had only to stand beside her, and it would hear what she had heard.  She rushed to the conclusion that Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.

’Really, really, that young man’s freaks appear designed for the express purpose of heightening our amazement!’ she exclaimed.  ’He won’t easily get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there’s no knowing.  Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham’s I hold sacred.  At least I can see for myself.  You can’t tell me more of the facts?  If Lord Fleetwood’s in town, I will call him here at once.  I will drive down to this address you give me.  She is a civil person?’

‘Her breeding is perfect,’ said Gower.

‘Perfect breeding, you say?’ Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur.  She considered the speaker:  his outlandish garb, his unprotesting self-possession.  He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her.  She was of an eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance of an opinion from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have denied to his clothing.  Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though a tangle of the complexities inwardly, he was a touchstone for true aristocracy, as the humblest who bear the main elements of it must be.  Certain humorous turns in his conversation won him an amicable smile when he bowed to leave:  they were the needed finish of a favourable impression.

One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer’s brief words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a great lady’s plain imperative.  She was connected with his family on the paternal side.

He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the Marriage, turning over documents, here say.  He went to Lady Arpington disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension; equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the drum of the ear.  He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way.  When very young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had spiritualized the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him.  Another fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word.  He had plunged for a short space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic life—­’the clean soul for the macerated flesh,’ as that fellow Woodseer said once:  and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre, moodily talked of getting in his intervals.  He had gone down to a young and novel trial establishment of English penitents in the forest of a Midland county, and had watched and envied, and seen the escape from a lifelong bondage to the ‘beautiful Gorgon,’ under cover of a white flannel frock.  The world pulled hard, and he gave his body into chains of a woman, to redeem his word.