Lady Charlotte and the editor met.  She was racy, he anecdotal.  Stag, fox, and hare ran before them, over fields and through drawing-rooms:  the scent was rich.  They found that they could talk to one another as they thought; that he was not the Isle-bound burgess, nor she the postured English great lady; and they exchanged salt, without which your current scandal is of exhausted savour.  They enjoyed the peculiar novel relish of it, coming from a social pressman and a dame of high society.  The different hemispheres became known as one sphere to these birds of broad wing convening in the upper blue above a quartered carcase earth.

A week later a letter, the envelope of a bulky letter in Lord Ormont’s handwriting, reached Lady Charlotte.  There was a line from the editor: 

   “Would it please your ladyship to have this printed?”

She read the letter, and replied: 

   “Come to me for six days; you shall have the best mount in the
   county.”

An editor devoid of malice might probably have forborne to print a letter that appealed to Lady Charlotte, or touched her sensations, as if a glimpse of the moon, on the homeward ride in winter on a nodding horse, had suddenly bared to view a precipitous quarry within two steps.  There is no knowing:  few men can forbear to tell a spicy story of their friends; and an editor, to whom an exhibition of the immensely preposterous on the part of one writing arrogantly must be provocative, would feel the interests of his Journal, not to speak of the claims of readers, pluck at him when he meditated the consignment of such a precious composition to extinction.  Lady Charlotte withheld a sight of the letter from Mr. Eglett.  She laid it in her desk, understanding well that it was a laugh lost to the world.  Poets could reasonably feign it to shake the desk inclosing it.  She had a strong sense of humour; her mind reverted to the desk in a way to make her lips shut grimly.  She sided with her brother.

Only pen in hand did he lay himself open to the enemy.  In his personal intercourse he was the last of men to be taken at a disadvantage.  Lady Charlotte was brought round to the distasteful idea of some help coming from a legitimate adjunct at his elbow:  a restraining woman—­wife, it had to be said.  And to name the word wife for Thomas Rowsley, Earl of Ormont, put up the porcupine quills she bristled with at the survey of a sex thirsting, and likely to continue thirsting, for such honour.  What woman had she known fit to bear the name?  She had assumed the judicial seat upon the pretensions of several, and dismissed them to their limbo, after testifying against them.  Who is to know the fit one in these mines of deception?  Women of the class offering wives decline to be taken on trial; they are boxes of puzzles—­often dire surprises.  Her brother knew them well enough to shy at the box.  Her brother Rowsley had a funny pride, like a boy at a game, at the never having been caught by one among the many he made captive.  She let him have it all to himself.