Now, to see what banquet there is for the big of heart in the world’s hot stress, take the view of Carinthia, to whom her brother’s thoughtful little act of gentleness at the moment of the red-of-the-powder smoke was divinest bread and wine, when calamity hung around, with the future an unfooted wilderness, her powers untried, her husband her enemy.

CHAPTER XXXI

WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN

The most urgent of Dames is working herself up to a grey squall in her detestation of imagerial epigrams.  Otherwise Gower Woodseer’s dash at the quintessential young man of wealth would prompt to the carrying of it further, and telling how the tethered flutterer above a ’devil on his back on a river’ was beginning to pull if not drag his withholder and teaser.

Fleetwood had almost a desire to see the small dot of humanity which drew the breath from him;—­and was indistinguishably the bubbly grin and gurgle of the nurses, he could swear.  He kicked at the bondage to our common fleshly nature imposed on him by the mother of the little animal.  But there had been a mother to his father:  odd movements of a warmish curiosity brushed him when the cynic was not mounting guard.  They were, it seemed, external—­no part of him:  like blasts of a wayside furnace across wintry air.  They were, as it chanced, Nature’s woman in him plucking at her separated partner, Custom’s man; something of an oriental voluptuary on his isolated regal seat; and he would suck the pleasures without a descent into the stale old ruts where Life’s convict couple walk linked to one another, to their issue more.

There was also a cold curiosity to see the male infant such a mother would have.  The grandson of Old Lawless might turn out a rascal,—­he would be no mean one, no coward.

That mother, too, who must have been a touch astonished to find herself a mother:—­Fleetwood laughed a curt bark, and heard rebukes, and pleaded the marriage-trap to the man of his word; devil and cherub were at the tug, or say, dog and gentleman, a survival of the schoolboy—­that mother, a girl of the mountains, perhaps wanted no more than smoothing by the world.  ‘It is my husband’ sounded foolish, sounded freshish,—­a new note.  Would she repeat it?  The bit of simplicity would bear repeating once.  Gower Woodseer says the creature grows and studies to perfect herself.  She’s a good way off that, and may spoil herself in the process; but she has a certain power.  Her donkey obstinacy in refusing compliance, and her pursuit of ‘my husband,’ and ability to drench him with ridicule, do not exhibit the ordinary young female.  She stamps her impression on the people she meets.  Her husband is shaken to confess it likewise, despite a disagreement between them.