’I doubted whether I should be of use to you.  I told you the amount of alloy in my motives.  A year with you, I have subsistence for ten years assured to me.’

‘Don’t be a prosy dog, Gower Woodseer.’

‘Will you come over to the Wythans before you go?’

‘I will not.’

‘You would lengthen your stride across a wounded beast?’

‘I see no wound to the beast.’

‘You can permit yourself to kick under cover of a metaphor.’

‘Tell me what you drive at, Gower.’

’The request is, for you to spare pain by taking one step—­an extra strain on the muscles of the leg.  It ‘s only the leg wants moving.’

‘The lady has legs to run away, let them bring her back.’

’Why have me with you, then?  I’m useless.  But you read us all, see everything, and wait only for the mood to do the right.  You read me, and I’m not open to everybody.  You read the crux of a man like me in my novel position.  You read my admiration of a beautiful woman and effort to keep honest.  You read my downright preference of what most people would call poverty, and my enjoyment of good cookery and good company.  You enlist among the crew below as one of our tempters.  You find I come round to the thing I like best.  Therefore, you have your liking for me; and that’s why you turn to me again, after your natural infidelities.  So much for me.  You read this priceless lady quite as clearly.  You choose to cloud her with your moods.  She was at a disadvantage, ’arriving in a strange country, next to friendless; and each new incident bred of a luckless beginning—­I could say more.’

Fleetwood nodded.  ’You are read without the words:  You read in history, too, I suppose, that there are two sides to most cases.  The loudest is not often the strongest.  However, now the lady shows herself crazed.  That’s reading her charitably.  Else she has to be taken for a spiteful shrew, who pretends to suspect anything that’s villanous, because she can hit on no other way of striking.’

‘Crazed, is a wide shot and hits half the world,’ muttered Gower.  ’Lady Fleetwood had a troubled period after her marriage.  She suffered a sort of kidnapping when she was bearing her child.  There’s a book by an Edinburgh doctor might be serviceable to you.  It enlightens me.  She will have a distrust of you, as regards the child, until she understands you by living with you under one roof.’

‘Such animals these women are!’ Good Lord!’ Fleetwood ejaculated.  ’I marry one, and I ‘m to take to reading medical books!’ He yawned.

‘You speak that of women and pretend to love Nature,’ said Gower.  ’You hate Nature unless you have it served on a dish by your own cook.  That’s the way to the madhouse or the monastery.  There we expiate the sin of sins.  A man finds the woman of all women fitted to stick him in the soil, and trim and point him to grow, and she’s an animal for her pains!  The secret of your malady