‘A panic, Nevil.’  Cecilia threw stress on the memorable word.

He would hear no reminder in it.  The internal condition of the country was now the point for seriously-minded Englishmen.

‘My dear boy, what have you seen of the country?’ Colonel Halkett inquired.

’Every time I have landed, colonel, I have gone to the mining and the manufacturing districts, the centres of industry; wherever there was dissatisfaction.  I have attended meetings, to see and hear for myself.  I have read the papers . . . .’

‘The papers!’

‘Well, they’re the mirror of the country.’

‘Does one see everything in a mirror, Nevil?’ said Cecilia:  ’even in the smoothest?’

He retorted softly:  ‘I should be glad to see what you see,’ and felled her with a blush.

For an example of the mirror offered by the Press, Colonel Halkett touched on Mr. Timothy Turbot’s article in eulogy of the great Commander Beauchamp.  ‘Did you like it?’ he asked.  ’Ah, but if you meddle with politics, you must submit to be held up on the prongs of a fork, my boy; soaped by your backers and shaved by the foe; and there’s a figure for a gentleman! as your uncle Romfrey says.’

Cecilia did not join this discussion, though she had heard from her father that something grotesque had been written of Nevil.  Her foolishness in blushing vexed body and mind.  She was incensed by a silly compliment that struck at her feminine nature when her intellect stood in arms.  Yet more hurt was she by the reflection that a too lively sensibility might have conjured up the idea of the compliment.  And again, she wondered at herself for not resenting so rare a presumption as it implied, and not disdaining so outworn a form of flattery.  She wondered at herself too for thinking of resentment and disdain in relation to the familiar commonplaces of licenced impertinence.  Over all which hung a darkened image of her spirit of independence, like a moon in eclipse.

Where lay his weakness?  Evidently in the belief that he had thought profoundly.  But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was discernible?  She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes and metaphors they set him staggering and groping like an ancient knight of faery in a forest bewitched.

‘Your specific for the country is, then, Radicalism,’ she said, after listening to an attack on the Tories for their want of a policy and indifference to the union of classes.

‘I would prescribe a course of it, Cecilia; yes,’ he turned to her.

‘The Dr. Dulcamara of a single drug?’

‘Now you have a name for me!  Tory arguments always come to epithets.’

’It should not be objectionable.  Is it not honest to pretend to have only one cure for mortal maladies?  There can hardly be two panaceas, can there be?’

‘So you call me quack?’

‘No, Nevil, no,’ she breathed a rich contralto note of denial:  ’but if the country is the patient, and you will have it swallow your prescription . . .’