“Ma’am,” returned De Craye, “the boast of our army is never to know when we are beaten, and that tells of a great-hearted soldiery.  But there’s a field where the Briton must own his defeat, whether smiling or crying, and I’m not so sure that a short howl doesn’t do him honour.”

“She was, I am certain, in love with Vernon Whitford all along.  Colonel De Craye!”

“Ah!” the colonel drank it in.  “I have learnt that it was not the gentleman in whom I am chiefly interested.  So it was not so hard for the lady to vow to friend Willoughby she would marry no one else?”

“Girls are unfathomable!  And Lady Busshe—­I know she did not go by character—­shot one of her random guesses, and she triumphs.  We shall never hear the last of it.  And I had all the opportunities.  I’m bound to confess I had.”

“Did you by chance, ma’am,” De Craye said, with a twinkle, “drop a hint to Willoughby of her turn for Vernon Whitford?”

“No,” said Mrs. Mountstuart, “I’m not a mischief-maker; and the policy of the county is to keep him in love with himself, or Patterne will be likely to be as dull as it was without a lady enthroned.  When his pride is at ease he is a prince.  I can read men.  Now, Colonel De Craye, pray, be lively.”

“I should have been livelier, I’m afraid, if you had dropped a bit of a hint to Willoughby.  But you’re the magnanimous person, ma’am, and revenge for a stroke in the game of love shows us unworthy to win.”

Mrs. Mountstuart menaced him with her parasol.  “I forbid sentiments, Colonel De Craye.  They are always followed by sighs.”

“Grant me five minutes of inward retirement, and I’ll come out formed for your commands, ma’am,” said he.

Before the termination of that space De Craye was enchanting Mrs. Mountstuart, and she in consequence was restored to her natural wit.

So, and much so universally, the world of his dread and his unconscious worship wagged over Sir Willoughby Patterne and his change of brides, until the preparations for the festivities of the marriage flushed him in his county’s eyes to something of the splendid glow he had worn on the great day of his majority.  That was upon the season when two lovers met between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps over the Lake of Constance.  Sitting beside them the Comic Muse is grave and sisterly.  But taking a glance at the others of her late company of actors, she compresses her lips.

THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY

By George Meredith

1892

BOOK 1.

The word ‘fantastical’ is accentuated in our tongue to so scornful an utterance that the constant good service it does would make it seem an appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matter distasteful to those expository pens.  Upon examination, claimants to the epithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters, Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost.  Wherever she can get to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically.  As for that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew and the angry captain, called Human Nature, ‘fantastical’ fits it no less completely than a continental baby’s skull-cap the stormy infant.