The fog down a wet laurel-walk contracted his mind with the chilling of his blood, and he felt that he would have to see the thing if he was to believe in it.  Of course he believed, but life throbbed rebelliously, and a picture of a desk near a lively fire-grate, books and pen and paper, and a piece of writing to be approved of by the Hesper of ladies, held ground with a pathetic heroism against the inevitable.  He got his wits to the front by walking faster; and then thought of the young countess and the friend she might be about to lose.  She could number her friends on her fingers.  Admiral Fakenham’s exclamations of the name of the place where she now was, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had undergone.  Counting her absent brother, with himself, his father, and the two Whitechapel girls, it certainly was an unexampled fall, to say of her, that they and those two girls had become by the twist of circumstances the most serviceable of her friends.

Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young lord,—­ burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the moment it was his own.  Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the gamingtables,—­fine haunts for the study of our lower man.  He could be magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness.  He coveted beauty in women hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower judged by the light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent observations of him.  Why marry her to cast her off instantly?  The crude philosopher asked it as helplessly as the admiral.  And, further, what did the girl Madge mean by the drop of her voice to a hum of enforced endurance under injury, like the furnace behind an iron door?  Older men might have understood, as he was aware; he might have guessed, only he had the habit of scattering meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.

Dame Gossip boils.  Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed, that is the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the succession of collisions.  The fault of the method is, that they do not instruct; so the breath is out of them before they are put aside; for the uninstructive are the humanly deficient:  they remain with us like the tolerated old aristocracy, which may not govern, and is but socially seductive.  The deuteragonist or secondary person can at times tell us more of them than circumstances at furious heat will help them to reveal; and the Dame will have him only as an index-post.  Hence her endless ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the inscrutability of character, —­in a plain world, in the midst of such readable people!  To preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than shaking the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing activity of the head.