Wholly Cambrian Fleetwood was not.  But he had to the full the Cambrian’s reverential esteem for high qualities.  His good-bye with Henrietta, and estimate of her, left a dusky mental, void requiring an orb of some sort for contemplation; and an idea of the totally contrary Carinthia, the woman he had avowedly wedded, usurped her place.  Qualities were admitted.  She was thrust away because she had offended:  still more because he had offended.  She bore the blame for forcing him to an examination of his conduct at this point and that, where an ancestral savage in his lineaments cocked a strange eye.  Yet at the moment of the act of the deed he had known himself the veritable Fleetwood.  He had now to vindicate himself by extinguishing her under the load of her unwomanliness:  she was like sun-dried linen matched beside oriental silk:  she was rough, crisp, unyielding.  That was now the capital charge.  Henrietta could never be guilty of the unfeminine.  Which did he prefer?

It is of all questions the one causing young men to screw wry faces when they are asked; they do so love the feminine, the ultra-feminine, whom they hate for her inclination to the frail.  His depths were sounded, and he answered independently of his will, that he must be up to the heroical pitch to decide.  Carinthia stood near him then.  The confession was a step, and fraught with consequences.  Her unacknowledged influence expedited him to Sarah Winch’s shop, for sight of one of earth’s honest souls; from whom he had the latest of the two others down in Wales, and of an infant there.

He dined the host of his Ixionides, leaving them early for a drive at night Eastward, and a chat with old Mr. Woodseer over his punching and sewing of his bootleather.  Another honest soul.  Mr. Woodseer thankfully consented to mount his coach-box next day, and astonish Gower with a drop on his head from the skies about the time of the mid-day meal.

There we have our peep into Dame Gossip’s young man mysterious.

CHAPTER XXIX

CARINTHIA IN WALES

An August of gales and rains drove Atlantic air over the Welsh highlands.  Carinthia’s old father had impressed on her the rapture of ’smelling salt’ when by chance he stood and threw up his nostrils to sniff largely over a bed of bracken, that reminded him of his element, and her fancy would be at strain to catch his once proud riding of the seas.  She felt herself an elder daughter of the beloved old father, as she breathed it in full volume from the billowy West one morning early after sunrise and walked sisterly with the far-seen inexperienced little maid, whom she saw trotting beside him through the mountain forest, listening, storing his words, picturing the magnetic, veined great gloom of an untasted world.