On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not intelligibly, not communicably:  a subject thickly veiled; one which struck at her through her sex and must, she thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young creature saw it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams of a body rageing with fire behind the veil):  on this one subject, her hopes and prayers were dumb in her bosom.  It signified shame.  She knew not the how, for she had no power to contemplate it:  there was a torment of earth and a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse.  But if the new crusading Hero were to come attacking that—­if some born prince nobly man would head the world to take away the withering scarlet from the face of women, she felt she could kiss the print of his feet upon the ground.  Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the inmost forest-well of mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of good aspiration through their obscurities find much akin to them.

She had an eye for little Skepsey too:  unaware that these French Princes had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and the old result—­poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly!  What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the slow parade, and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification of a holiday on arrested legs.  Dudley Sowerby’s attention to him, in elucidating the scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her.  The Rev. Septimus of course occupied her chiefly.

Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of gratitude for the route she had counselled.  Without personal objections to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble muteness of a Frenchwoman’s closed lips; not a smile at all, and certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment in the sentence of French.  Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong sentiment rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility of her lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in England:  an all but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon mention of marriages of his clergy:  particularly once, at his reading of a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony involving his favourite Bishop for bridegroom:  a report to make one glow like Hymen rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying slipper.  He remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the slumbering features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower, entering into nuptials in his fifty-fourth year.  Why not?  But we ask it of Heaven and Man, why not?  Mademoiselle was pleasant:  she was young or youngish; her own clergy were celibates, and—­no, he could not argue the matter with a young or youngish person of her sex.  Could it be a reasonable woman—­a woman!—­who, disapproved the holy nuptials of the pastors of the flocks?  But we are forbidden to imagine the conducting of an argument thereon with a lady.