‘She is a girl?’ cried Lord Fleetwood, frowning over an utter revolution of sentiment at the thought of the beautiful Gorgon being a girl; for, rapid as he was to imagine, he had raised a solid fabric upon his conception of Carinthia the woman, necessarily the woman—­logically.  Who but the woman could look the Gorgon!  He tried to explain it to be impossible for a girl to wear the look:  and his notion evidently was, that it had come upon a beautiful face in some staring horror of a world that had bitten the tender woman.  She touched him sympathetically through the pathos.

Woodseer flung out vociferously for the contrary.  Who but a girl could look the beautiful Gorgon!  What other could seem an emanation of the mountain solitude?  A woman would instantly breathe the world on it to destroy it.  Hers would be the dramatic and not the poetic face.  It would shriek of man, wake the echoes with the tale of man, slaughter all. quietude.  But a girl’s face has no story of poisonous intrusion.  She indeed may be cast in the terrors of Nature, and yet be sweet with Nature, beautiful because she is purely of Nature.  Woodseer did his best to present his view irresistibly.  Perhaps he was not clear; it was a piece of skiamachy, difficult to render clear to the defeated.

Lord Fleetwood had nothing to say but ‘Gorgon! a girl a Gorgon!’ and it struck Woodseer as intensely unreasonable, considering that he had seen the girl whom, in his effort to portray her, he had likened to a beautiful Gorgon.  He recounted the scene of the meeting with her, pictured it in effective colours, but his companion gave no response, nor a nod.  They ceased to converse, and when the young lord’s hired carriage drew up on the road, Woodseer required persuasion to accompany him.  They were both in their different stations young tyrants of the world, ready to fight the world and one another for not having their immediate view of it such as they wanted it.  They agreed, however, not to sleep in the city.  Beds were to be had near the top of a mountain on the other side of the Salza, their driver informed them, and vowing themselves to that particular height, in a mutual disgust of the city, they waxed friendlier, with a reserve.

Woodseer soon had experience that he was receiving exceptional treatment from Lord Fleetwood, whose manservant was on the steps of the hotel in Salzburg on the lookout for his master.

‘Sir Meeson has been getting impatient, my lord,’ said the man.

Sir Meeson Corby appeared; Lord Fleetwood cut him short:  ’You ’re in a hurry; go at once, don’t wait for me; I join you in Baden.—­Do me the favour to eat with me,’ he turned to Woodseer.  ’And here, Corby! tell the countess I have a friend to bear me company, and there is to be an extra bedroom secured at her hotel.  That swinery of a place she insists on visiting is usually crammed.  With you there,’ he turned to Woodseer, ’I might find it agreeable.—­You can take my man, Corby; I shall not want the fellow.’