Carinthia’s attitude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect for the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen.  The sight of her lashed him.  She made it her business or it was her pleasure to go the rounds beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people.  She spoke of the scenes she witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness, having only the wish to assist in ministering.  Probably the great wretchedness bubbling over the place blunted her feeling of loss at the word of Admiral Baldwin’s end; her bosom sprang up:  ‘He was next to father,’ was all she said; and she soon reverted to this and that house of the lodgings of poverty.  She had descended on the world.  There was of course a world outside Whitechapel, but Whitechapel was hot about her; the nests of misery, the sharp note of want in the air, tricks of an urchin who had amused her.

As to the place itself, she had no judgement to pronounce, except that:  ‘They have no mornings here’; and the childish remark set her quivering on her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower’s memory.  Scarce anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible:  she had come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon:  before her brother’s return, she could have added.  She mentioned the goodness of Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support.  Money and its uses had impressed her; the quantity possessed by some, the utter need of it for the first of human purposes by others.  Her speech was not of so halting or foreign an English.  She grew rapidly wherever she was planted.

Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be, was necessitated in Gower.  He pursued it, and listened to his father similarly at work:  ’A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of souls, a born charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all she—­does and thinks to the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake her on the day of their nuptials.

She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant.  Can you imagine the doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?’

Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say: 

’Yes, I can imagine it, I’m doing it myself.  I shall be doing it till I’ve written a letter and paid a visit.’

He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the plant henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because of the insensibility to beauty.  Out of which he passed to the writing of the letter to Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended immediately to deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from Admiral Baldwin Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood.  A duty was easily done by Gower when he had surmounted the task of conceiving his resolution to do it; and this task, involving an offence to the Lady Livia and intrusion of his name on a nobleman’s recollection, ranked next in severity to the chopping off of his fingers by a man suspecting them of the bite of rabies.