’Oh, Victor! if money . . . !  But why did you say “poor fellow” of Dartrey Fenellan?’

‘You know how he’s . . .’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said hastily.  ’But has that woman been causing fresh anxiety?’

‘And Natata’s chief hero on earth is not to be named a poor fellow,’ said he, after a negative of the head on a subject they neither of them liked to touch.

Then he remembered that Dartrey Fenellan was actually a lucky fellow; and he would have mentioned the circumstance confided to him by Simeon, but for a downright dread of renewing his painful fit of envy.  He had also another, more distant, very faint idea, that it had better not be mentioned just yet, for a reason entirely undefined.

He consulted his watch.  The maid had come in for the robeing of her mistress.  Nataly’s mind had turned to the little country cottage which would have given her such great happiness.  She raised her eyes to him; she could not check their filling; they were like a river carrying moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall.

He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them.  With an impatient, ’There, there!’ and a smart affectionate look, he retired, thinking in our old satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour to satisfy a woman’s mind without the intrusion of hard material statements, facts.  Even the best of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts.  You must not expect to appease them unless you administer solids.  It would almost appear that man is exclusively imaginative and poetical; and that his mate, the fair, the graceful, the bewitching, with the sweetest and purest of natures, cannot help being something of a groveller.

Nataly had likewise her thoughts.

CHAPTER VII

BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THIN WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL

Rather earlier in the afternoon of that day, Simeon Fenellan, thinking of the many things which are nothing, and so melancholy for lack of amusements properly to follow Old Veuve, that he could ask himself whether he had not done a deed of night, to be blinking at his fellow-men like an owl all mad for the reveller’s hoots and flights and mice and moony roundels behind his hypocritical judex air of moping composure, chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln’s Inn pumps lawyers into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of Chancery Lane.  He was in the state of the wine when a shake will rouse the sluggish sparkles to foam.  Sight of Mrs. Burman’s legal adviser had instantly this effect upon him:  his bubbling friendliness for Victor Radnor, and the desire of the voice in his bosom for ears to hear, combined like the rush of two waves together, upon which he may be figured as the boat:  he caught at Mr. Carling’s hand more heartily than their acquaintanceship quite sanctioned; but his grasp and his look of overflowing were immediately privileged; Mr. Carling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman’s conversation as he did, liked the warmth, and was flattered during the squeeze with a prospect of his wife and friends partaking of the fun from time to time.