for the risk they ran to save a probably broken-legged little beast:  and he escaped the melting mood by forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are woven.  Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and sentimental female compassion swamp thought of a mother’s duties.  If both those women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself into fits for the mother, there she would have remained.

Gower wrote in a language transparent of the act, addressed to a reader whose memory was to be impregnated.  His reader would have flown away from the simple occurrence on arabesques and modulated tones; and then envisaging them critically, would have tossed his poor little story to the winds, as a small thing magnified:  with an object, being the next thought about it.  He knew his Fleetwood so far.

His letter concluded:  ’I am in a small Surrey village over a baker’s shop, rent eight shillings per week, a dame’s infant school opposite my window, miles of firwood, heath, and bracken openings, for the winged or the nested fancies.  Love Nature, she makes you a lord of her boundless, off any ten square feet of common earth.  I go through my illusions and come always back on that good truth.  It says, beware of the world’s passion for flavours and spices.  Much tasted, they turn and bite the biter.  My exemplars are the lately breeched youngsters with two pence in their pockets for the gingerbread-nut booth on a fair day.  I learn more from one of them than you can from the whole cavalcade of your attendant Ixionides.’

Mounting the box of his coach for the drive to London, Fleetwood had the new name for the parasitic and sham vital troop at his ears.

‘My Ixionides!’ he repeated, and did not scorn them so much as he rejoiced to be enlightened by the title.  He craved the presence of the magician who dropped illumination with a single word; wholesomer to think of than the whole body of those Ixionides—­not bad fellows, here and there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish fun.  Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled?  No, they had merely parted at one of the crossways.  The plebeian could teach that son of the, genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners.  Woodseer was the better comrade and director of routes.  Into the forest, up on the heights; and free, not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick for all that the world has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds of it be composed of Ixionides:  that way lies wisdom, and his index was cut that way.

Arrived in town, he ran over the headings of his letters, in no degree anxious for a communication from Wales.  There was none.  Why none?

She might as well have scrawled her announcement of an event pleasing to her, and, by the calculation, important to him, if not particularly interesting.  The mother’s wifeish lines would, perhaps, have been tested in a furnace.  He smarted at the blank of any, of even two or three formal words.  She sulked?  ‘I am not a fallen lamb!’ he said.  Evidently one had to be a shivering beast in trouble, to excite her to move a hand.