He recurred to Gower Woodseer’s letter.

The pictures and images in it were not the principal matter,—­the impression had been deep.  A plain transcription of the young mother’s acts and words did more to portray her:  the reader could supply reflections.

Would her boy’s father be very pleased to see him? she had asked.

And she spoke of a fear that the father would try to take her boy from her.

‘Never that—­you have my word!’ Fleetwood said; and he nodded consentingly over her next remark—­

‘Not while I live, till he must go to school!’

The stubborn wife would be the last of women to sit and weep as a rifled mother.

A child of the Countess Carinthia (he phrased it) would not be deficient in will, nor would the youngster lack bravery.

For his part, comparison rushing at him and searching him, he owned that he leaned on pride.  To think that he did, became a theme for pride.  The mother had the primitive virtues, the father the developed:  he was the richer mine.  And besides, he was he, the unriddled, complex, individual he; she was the plain barbarian survival, good for giving her offspring bone, muscle, stout heart.

Shape the hypothesis of a fairer woman the mother of the heir to the earldom.

Henrietta was analyzed in a glimpse.  Courage, animal healthfulness, she, too, might—­her husband not obstructing—­transmit; and good looks, eyes of the sapphire AEgean.  And therewith such pliability as the Mother of Love requires of her servants.

Could that woman resist seductions?

Fleetwood’s wrath with her for refusing him and inducing him in spite to pledge his word elsewhere, haphazard, pricked a curiosity to know whether the woman could be—­and easily! easily! he wagered—­led to make her conduct warrant for his contempt of her.  Led,—­that is, misled, you might say, if you were pleading for a doll.  But it was necessary to bait the pleasures for the woman, in order to have full view of the precious fine fate one has escaped.  Also to get well rid of a sort of hectic in the blood, which the woman’s beauty has cast on that reflecting tide:  a fever-sign, where the fever has become quite emotionless and is merely desirous for the stain of it to be washed out.  As this is not the desire to possess or even to taste, contempt will do it.  When we know that the weaver of the fascinations is purchasable, we toss her to the market where men buy; and we walk released from vile subjection to one of the female heap:  subjection no longer, doubtless, and yet a stain of the past flush, often colouring our reveries, creating active phantasms of a passion absolutely extinct, if it ever was the veritable passion.