He prepared to listen to her with a disconnected smile of acute attentiveness.

She had changed.  She spoke of money.  Ten thousand pounds must be settled on his daughter.  ‘And now,’ said she, ’you will remember that you are wanting a collar.’

He acquiesced.  He craved permission to retire for ten minutes.

‘Simplest of men! what will cover you?’ she exclaimed, and peremptorily bidding him sit down in the drawing-room, she took one of the famous pair of pistols in her hand, and said, ’If I put myself in a similar position, and make myself decodletee too, will that satisfy you?  You see these murderous weapons.  Well, I am a coward.  I dread fire-arms.  They are laid there to impose on the world, and I believe they do.  They have imposed on you.  Now, you would never think of pretending to a moral quality you do not possess.  But, silly, simple man that you are!  You can give yourself the airs of wealth, buy horses to conceal your nakedness, and when you are taken upon the standard of your apparent income, you would rather seem to be beating a miserly retreat than behave frankly and honestly.  I have a little overstated it, but I am near the mark.’

‘Your ladyship wanting courage!’ cried the General.

‘Refresh yourself by meditating on it,’ said she.  ’And to prove it to you, I was glad to take this house when I knew I was to have a gallant gentleman for a neighbour.  No visitors will be admitted, General Ople, so you are bare-throated only to me:  sit quietly.  One day you speculated on the paint in my cheeks for the space of a minute and a half:—­I had said that I freckled easily.  Your look signified that you really could not detect a single freckle for the paint.  I forgave you, or I did not.  But when I found you, on closer acquaintance, as indifferent to your daughter’s happiness as you had been to her reputation . . .’

‘My daughter! her reputation! her happiness!’

General Ople raised his eyes under a wave, half uttering the outcries.

’So indifferent to her reputation, that you allowed a young man to talk with her over the wall, and meet her by appointment:  so reckless of the girl’s happiness, that when I tried to bring you to a treaty, on her behalf, you could not be dragged from thinking of yourself and your own affair.  When I found that, perhaps I was predisposed to give you some of what my sisters used to call my spice.  You would not honestly state the proportions of your income, and you affected to be faithful to the woman of seventy.  Most preposterous!  Could any caricature of mine exceed in grotesqueness your sketch of yourself?  You are a brave and a generous man all the same:  and I suspect it is more hoodwinking than egotism—­or extreme egotism—­that blinds you.  A certain amount you must have to be a man.  You did not like my paint, still less did you like my sincerity; you were annoyed by my corrections of your habits of speech; you were horrified