Fleetwood nodded.  ’You are read without the words:  You read in history, too, I suppose, that there are two sides to most cases.  The loudest is not often the strongest.  However, now the lady shows herself crazed.  That’s reading her charitably.  Else she has to be taken for a spiteful shrew, who pretends to suspect anything that’s villanous, because she can hit on no other way of striking.’

‘Crazed, is a wide shot and hits half the world,’ muttered Gower.  ’Lady Fleetwood had a troubled period after her marriage.  She suffered a sort of kidnapping when she was bearing her child.  There’s a book by an Edinburgh doctor might be serviceable to you.  It enlightens me.  She will have a distrust of you, as regards the child, until she understands you by living with you under one roof.’

‘Such animals these women are!’ Good Lord !’ Fleetwood ejaculated.  ’I marry one, and I ‘m to take to reading medical books!’ He yawned.

‘You speak that of women and pretend to love Nature,’ said Gower.  ’You hate Nature unless you have it served on a dish by your own cook.  That’s the way to the madhouse or the monastery.  There we expiate the sin of sins.  A man finds the woman of all women fitted to stick him in the soil, and trim and point him to grow, and she’s an animal for her pains!  The secret of your malady is, you’ve not yet, though you’re on a healthy leap for the practices of Nature, hopped to the primary conception of what Nature means.  Women are in and of Nature.  I’ve studied them here—­had nothing to do but study them.  That most noble of ladies’ whole mind was knotted to preserve her child during her time of endurance up to her moment of trial.  Think it over.  It’s your one chance of keeping sane.

And expect to hear flat stuff from me while you go on playing tyrant.’

‘You certainly take liberties,’ Fleetwood’s mildest voice remarked.

‘I told you I should try you, when you plucked me out of my Surrey nest.’

Fleetwood, passed from a meditative look to a malicious half-laugh.  ’You seem to have studied the “most noble of ladies” latterly rather like a barrister with a brief for the defendant—­plaintiff, if you like!’

’As to that, I’ll help you to an insight of a particular weakness of mine,’ said Gower.  ’I require to have persons of even the highest value presented to me on a stage, or else I don’t grasp them at all—­they ’re simply pictures.  I saw the lady; admired, esteemed, sufficiently, I supposed, until her image appeared to me in the feelings of another.  Then I saw fathoms.  No doubt, it was from feeling warmer.  I went through the blood of the other for my impression.’

‘Name the other,’ said the earl, and his features were sharp.

You can have the name,’ Gower answered.  ‘It was the girl, Madge Winch.’

Fleetwood’s hard stare melted to surprise and contemptuous amusement.  ’You see the lady to be the “most noble of ladies” through the warming you get by passing into the feelings of Madge Winch?’