‘Be civil to the man while it lasts,’ Livia said, attentive to a degradation of tone—­in her cousin, formerly of supreme self-containment.

The beautiful young woman was reminded of her holiday in town.  She brightened, and the little that it was, and the meanness of the satisfaction, darkened her.  Envy of the lucky adventurer Mr. Woodseer, on her husband’s behalf, grew horridly conscious for being reproved.  So she plucked resolution to enjoy her holiday and forget the contrasts of life-palaces running profusion, lodgings hammered by duns; the pinch of poverty distracting every simple look inside or out.  There was no end to it; for her husband’s chivalrous honour forced him to undertake the payment of her father’s heavy debts.  He was right and admirable, it could not be contested; but the prospect for them was a grinding gloom, an unrelieved drag, as of a coach at night on an interminable uphill flinty road.

These were her sensations, and she found it diverting to be admired; admired by many while she knew herself to be absorbed in the possession of her by one.  It bestowed the before and after of her marriage.  She felt she was really, had rapidly become, the young woman of the world, armed with a husband, to take the flatteries of men for the needed diversion they brought.  None moved her; none could come near to touching the happy insensibility of a wife who adored her husband, wrote to him daily, thought of him by the minute.  Her former worshippers were numerous at Livia’s receptions; Lord Fleetwood, Lord Brailstone, and the rest.  Odd to reflect on—­they were the insubstantial but coveted wealth of the woman fallen upon poverty, ignoble poverty!  She could not discard her wealth.  She wrote amusingly of them, and fully, vivacious descriptions, to Chillon; hardly so much writing to him as entering her heart’s barred citadel, where he resided at his ease, heard everything that befell about her.  If she dwelt on Lord Fleetwood’s kindness in providing entertainments, her object was to mollify Chillon’s anger in some degree.  She was doing her utmost to gratify him, ’for the purpose of paving a way to plead Janey’s case.’  She was almost persuading herself she was enjoying the remarks of his friend, confidant, secretary, or what not, Livia’s worshipper, Mr. Woodseer, ’who does as he wills with my lord; directs his charities, his pleasures, his opinions, all because he is believed to have wonderful ideas and be wonderfully honest.’  Henrietta wrote:  ‘Situation unchanged.  Janey still At that place’; and before the letter was posted, she and Livia had heard from Gower Woodseer of the reported disappearance of the Countess of Fleetwood and her maid.  Gower’s father had walked up from Whitechapel, bearing news of it to the earl, she said.

‘And the earl is much disturbed?’ was Livia’s inquiry.

‘He has driven down with my father,’ Gower said carelessly, ambiguously in the sound.

Troubled enough to desire the show of a corresponding trouble, Henrietta read at their faces.