woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but together.  Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title of madness.  Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won’t forgive an injury, nurses rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can’t—­to use the old schoolboy words—­take a licking!

These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of which they were the sign.  He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of worship; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.

The person criticized was manifest.  Who was the woman he twirled with?  She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the sex, or all the sex:  the sex to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the chosen one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift of our whole self for her.

She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or seemed to murmur—­for there was no sound—­a complaint of Lord Ormont.  And she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid military hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had no understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal life with him on earth.

She was put aside rather petulantly, and she took her seat out of the whirl with submission.  Thinking she certainly was not Browny, whom he would have known among a million, he tried to quit the hall, and he twirled afresh, necessarily not alone; it is the unpardonable offence both to the Graces and the Great Mother for man to valse alone.  She twirled on his arm, uninvited; accepted, as in the course of nature; hugged, under dictate of the nature of the man steeled against her by the counting of gain, and going now at desperation’s pace, by very means of those defensive locked steam-valves meant to preserve him from this madness,—­for the words of the red-lipped mate, where there were no words, went through him like a music when the bow is over the viol, sweeping imagination, and they said her life was wasting.

Was not she a priceless manuscript cast to the flames?  Her lord had been at some trouble to win her.  Or his great fame and his shadowed fortunes had won her.  He took her for his own, and he would not call her his own.  He comported himself with absolute, with kindly deference to the lady whose more than vital spark he let the gossips puff at and blur.  He praised her courage, visibly admired her person, admitted her in private to be his equal, degraded her in public.  Could anything account for the behaviour of so manly and noble a gentleman?—­Rhetoric made the attempt, and Weyburn gave up the windy business.

Discovering that his fair partner of the wasting life was—­he struggled to quench the revelation—­Aminta, he stopped the dance.  If there was no gain in whirling fancifully with one of the sex, a spin of a minute with her was downright bankruptcy.