The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to snappish irritability or the thirst for tenderness.  Gower had singular experiences of him on the drive North-westward.  He scarcely spoke; he said once:  ’If you mean to marry, you’ll be wanting to marry soon, of course,’ and his curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to signify, the sooner the better, and deliverance for both of us.  Honest though he might, be sometimes deep and sometimes picturesque, the philosopher’s day had come to an end.  How can Philosophy minister to raw wounds, when we are in a rageing gale of the vexations, battered to right and left!  Religion has a nourishing breast:  Philosophy is breastless.  Religion condones offences:  Philosophy has no forgiveness, is an untenanted confessional:  ‘wide air to a cry in anguish,’ Feltre says.

All the way to London Fleetwood endured his companion, letting him talk when he would.

He spent the greater part of the night discussing human affairs and spiritual with Lord Feltre, whose dialectical exhortations and insinuations were of the feeblest, but to an isolated young man, yearning for the tenderness of a woman thinking but of her grievances, the ointment brought comfort.

It soothed him during his march to and away from Ambrose Mallard’s grave; where it seemed to him curious and even pitiable that Chumley Potts should be so inconsolably shaken.  Well, and if the priests have the secret of strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity, why not go to the priests, Chummy?  Potts’s hearing was not addressed; nor was the chief person in the meditation affected by a question that merely jumped out of his perturbed interior.

Business at Calesford kept Fleetwood hanging about London several days further; and his hatred of a place he wasted time and money to decorate grew immeasurable.  It distorted the features of the beautiful woman for whose pleasure the grand entertainments to be held there had, somewhere or other—­when felon spectres were abroad over earth—­been conceived.

He could then return to Esslemont.  Gower was told kindly, with intentional coldness, that he could take a seat in the phaeton if he liked; and he liked, and took it.  Anything to get to that girl of his!

Whatever the earl’s inferiors did, their inferior station was not suffered to discolour it for his judgement.  But an increasing antagonism to Woodseer’s philosophy—­which the fellow carried through with perpetual scorings of satisfaction—­caused him to set a hard eye on the damsel under the grisly spotting shadow of the sottish bruiser, of whom, after once touching the beast, he could not rub his hands clean; and he chose to consider the winning of the prize-fighter’s lass the final triumph or flag on the apex of the now despised philosophy.  Vain to ask how he had come to be mixed up with the lot, or why the stolidly conceited, pretentious fellow had seat here, as by right, beside him!  We sow and we reap; ‘plant for sugar and taste the cane,’ some one says—­this Woodseer, probably; he can, when it suits him, tickle the ears of the worldlings.  And there is worthier stuff to remember; stuff to nourish:  Feltre’s ‘wisdom of our fathers,’ rightly named Religion.