But neither he nor his daughter Elizabeth attached importance to so trivial a circumstance.  The General punctiliously avoided glancing at the windows during the passage past them, whether in his wild career or on foot.  Elizabeth took a side-shot, as one looks at a wayside tree.  Their speech concerning Lady Camper was an exchange of commonplaces over her loneliness:  and this condition of hers was the more perplexing to General Ople on his hearing from his daughter that the lady was very fine-looking, and not so very old, as he had fancied eccentric ladies must be.  The rector’s account of her, too, excited the mind.  She had informed him bluntly, that she now and then went to church to save appearances, but was not a church-goer, finding it impossible to support the length of the service; might, however, be reckoned in subscriptions for all the charities, and left her pew open to poor people, and none but the poor.  She had travelled over Europe, and knew the East.  Sketches in watercolours of the scenes she had visited adorned her walls, and a pair of pistols, that she had found useful, she affirmed, lay on the writing-desk in her drawing-room.  General Ople gathered from the rector that she had a great contempt for men:  yet it was curiously varied with lamentations over the weakness of women.  ’Really she cannot possibly be an example of that,’ said the General, thinking of the pistols.

Now, we learn from those who have studied women on the chess-board, and know what ebony or ivory will do along particular lines, or hopping, that men much talked about will take possession of their thoughts; and certainly the fact may be accepted for one of their moves.  But the whole fabric of our knowledge of them, which we are taught to build on this originally acute perception, is shattered when we hear, that it is exactly the same, in the same degree, in proportion to the amount of work they have to do, exactly the same with men and their thoughts in the case of women much talked about.  So it was with General Ople, and nothing is left for me to say except, that there is broader ground than the chessboard.  I am earnest in protesting the similarity of the singular couples on common earth, because otherwise the General is in peril of the accusation that he is a feminine character; and not simply was he a gallant officer, and a veteran in gunpowder strife, he was also (and it is an extraordinary thing that a genuine humility did not prevent it, and did survive it) a lord and conqueror of the sex.  He had done his pretty bit of mischief, all in the way of honour, of course, but hearts had knocked.  And now, with his bright white hair, his close-brushed white whiskers on a face burnt brown, his clear-cut features, and a winning droop of his eyelids, there was powder in him still, if not shot.