They sat at the dinner-table alone, thanks to a handsome wench’s attractions for a philosopher.  Married, and parents of a lusty son, this was their first sitting at table together.  The mouth that said ‘I guard my rooms’ was not obtruded; she talked passingly of her brother, much of Lady Arpington and of old Mr. Woodseer; and, though she reserved a smile, there was no look of a lock on her face.  She seemed pleased to be treated very courteously; she returned the stately politeness in exactest measure; very simply, as well.  Her face had now an air of homeliness, well suited to an English household interior.  She could chat.  Any pauses occurring, he was the one guilty of them; she did not allow them to be barrier chasms, or ‘strids’ for the leap with effort; she crossed them like the mountain maid over a gorge’s plank—­kept her tones perfectly.  Her Madge and Mr. Gower Woodseer made a conversible topic.  She was inquisitive for accounts of Spanish history and the land of Spain.

They passed into the drawing-room.  She had heard of the fate of the poor child in Wales, she said, without a comment.

‘I see now, I ought to have backed your proposal,’ he confessed, and was near on shivering.  She kept silent, proudly or regretfully.

Open on her workbasket was a Spanish guide-book and a map attached to it.  She listened to descriptions of Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Granada.  Her curiosity was chiefly for detailed accounts of Catalonia and the Pyrenees.

’Hardly the place for you; there’s a perpetual heaving of Carlism in those mountains; your own are quieter for travellers,’ he remarked; and for a moment her lips moved to some likeness of a smile; a dimple in a flowing thought.

He remarked the come and go of it.

He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish
Pyrenees.

Books helped her at present, she said.

Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her uninviting civility, he spoke of the assault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower Woodseer’s conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the rascal Ines.

To which her unreproachful answer, ‘You made use of those men, my lord,’ sent a cry ringing through him, recalling Feltre’s words, as to the grip men progressively are held in by their deeds done.

‘Oh, quite true, we change our views and ways of life,’ he said, thinking she might set her considerations on other points of his character.  But this reflection was a piece of humility not yet in his particular estimate of his character, and he spurned it:  an act of pride that drove his mind, for occupation, to contemplate hers; which speedily became an embrace of her character, until he was asking whether the woman he called wife and dared not clasp was one of those rarest, who can be idealized by virtue of their being known.  For the young man embracing a character loses grasp of his own, is plucked out of himself and passes into it, to see the creature he is with the other’s eyes, and feel for the other as a very self.  Such is the privilege and the chastisement of the young.