Fleetwood asked with the simplicity of the superior being who will consequently perhaps bestow the debt he owes. . .

But his was not the surface nature which can put a question of the sort and pass it.  As soon as it had been formed, a vision of the elemental creature calling him husband smote to shivers the shell we walk on, and caught him down among the lower forces, up amid the higher; an infernal and a celestial contest for the extinction of the one or the other of them, if it was not for their union.  She wrestled with him where the darknesses roll their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns of the netherworld.  She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital heat, to bear unwithering beside her the test of light.  They flew, they chased, battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the count of their deeds, compared them,—­and name the one crushed!  It was the one weighted to shame, thrust into the cellar-corner of his own disgust, by his having asked whether that starry warrior spirit in the woman’s frame would ‘take polish a little.’

Why should it be a contention between them?  For this reason:  he was reduced to admire her act; and if he admired, he could not admire without respecting; if he respected, perforce he reverenced; if he reverenced, he worshipped.  Therefore she had him at her feet.  At the feet of any woman, except for the trifling object!  But at the feet of ’It is my husband!’ That would be a reversal of things.

Are not things reversed when the name Carinthia sounds in the thought of him who laughed at the name not less angelically martial than Feltre’s adored silver trumpets of his Papal procession; sweeter of the new morning for the husband of the woman; if he will but consent to the worshipper’s posture?  Yes, and when Gower Woodseer’s ’Malady of the Wealthy,’ as he terms the pivotting of the whole marching and wheeling world upon the favoured of Fortune’s habits and tastes, promises to quit its fell clutch on him?

Another voice in the young nobleman cried:  Pooh, dolt and dupe! and surrounded her for half a league with reek of burnt flesh and shrieks of a tortured child; giving her the aspect of a sister of the Parcw.  But it was not the ascendant’ voice.  It growled underneath, much like the deadly beast at Carinthia’s gown while she stood:—­an image of her to dominate the princeliest of men.

The princeliest must have won his title to the place before he can yield other than complimentary station to a woman without violation of his dignity; and vast wealth is not the title; worldly honours are not; deeds only are the title.  Fleetwood consented to tell himself that he had not yet performed the deeds.

Therefore, for him to be dominated was to be obscured, eclipsed.  A man may outrun us; it is the fortune of war.  Eclipsed behind the skirts of a woman waving her upraised hands, with, ’Back, pray!’—­no, that ignominy is too horribly abominable!  Be sure, the situation will certainly recur in some form; will constantly recur.  She will usurp the lead; she will play the man.