The rule is, that when we have yielded initiative to a woman, we are unable to recover it without uncivil bluster.  So, therefore, women dealing with gentlemen are allowed unreasonable advantages.  He had never granted it in colloquy or act to any woman but this one.  Consequently, he was to see, that if the gentleman in him was not put aside, the lady would continue moving on lines of the independence he had likewise yielded, or rather flung, to her.  Unless, as a result, he besieged and wooed his wife, his wife would hold on a course inclining constantly farther from the union he desired.  Yet how could he begin to woo her if he saw no spark of womanly tenderness?  He asked himself, because the beginning of the wooing might be checked by the call on him for words of repentance only just possible to conceive.  Imagine them uttered, and she has the initiative for life.

She would not have it, certainly, with a downright brute.  But he was not that.  In an extremity of bitterness, he fished up a drowned old thought, of all his torments being due to the impulsive half-brute he was.  And between the good and the bad in him, the sole point of strength was a pride likely, as the smooth simplicity of her indifference showed him, soon to be going down prostrate beneath her feet.  Wholly a brute—­well?  He had to say, that playing the perfect brute with any other woman he would have his mastery.  The summoning of an idea of personal power to match this woman in a contest was an effort exhausting the idea.

They passed out of Esslemont gates together at that hour of the late afternoon when South-westerly breezes, after a summer gale, drive their huge white flocks over blue fields fresh as morning, on the march to pile the crown of the sphere, and end a troubled day with grandeur.  Up the lane by the park they had open land to the heights of Croridge.

‘Splendid clouds,’ Fleetwood remarked.

She looked up, thinking of the happy long day’s walk with her brother to the Styrian Baths.  Pleasure in the sight made her face shine superbly.  ’A flying Switzerland, Mr. Woodseer says,’ she replied.  ’England is beautiful on days like these.—­For walking, I think the English climate very good.’

He dropped a murmur:  ‘It should suit so good a walker,’ and burned to compliment—­her spirited easy stepping, and scorned himself for the sycophancy it would be before they were on the common ground of a restored understanding.  But an approval of any of her acts threatened him with enthusiasm for the whole of them, her person included; and a dam in his breast had to keep back the flood.

’You quote Woodseer to me, Carinthia.  I wish you knew Lord Feltre.  He can tell you of every cathedral, convent, and monastery in Europe and Syria.  Nature is well enough; she is, as he says, a savage.  Men’s works, acting under divine direction to escape from that tangle, are better worthy of study, perhaps.  If one has done wrong, for example.’