He gazed at the string of visions of the woman naming him husband, making him a father:  the imagined Carinthia—­beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus; the Carinthia of the precipice tree-shoot; Carinthia of the ducal dancing-hall; and she at the altar rails; she on the coach box; she alternately softest of brides, doughtiest of Amazons.  A mate for the caress, an electrical heroine, fronted him.

Yes, and she was Lord Fleetwood’s wife, cracking sconces,—­a demoiselle Moll Flanders,—­the world’s Whitechapel Countess out for an airing, infernally earnest about it, madly ludicrous; the schemer to catch his word, the petticoated Shylock to bind him to the letter of it; now persecuting, haunting him, now immoveable for obstinacy; malignant to stay down in those vile slums and direct tons of sooty waters on his head from its mains in the sight of London, causing the least histrionic of men to behave as an actor.  He beheld her a skull with a lamp behind the eyeholes.

But this woman was the woman who made him a father; she was the mother of the heir of the House; and the boy she clasped and suckled as her boy was his boy.  They met inseparably in that new life.

Truly, there could not be a woman of flesh so near to a likeness with the beatific image of Feltre’s worshipped Madonna!

The thought sparkled and darkened in Fleetwood’s mind, as a star passing into cloud.  For an uproarious world claimed the woman, jeered at all allied with her; at her husband most, of course:—­the punctilious noodle! the golden jackass, tethered and goaded!  He had choice among the pick of women:  the daughter of the Old Buccaneer was preferred by the wiseacre Coelebs.  She tricked him cunningly and struck a tremendous return blow in producing her male infant.

By the way, was she actually born in wedlock?  Lord Levellier’s assurances regarding her origin were, by the calculation, a miser’s shuffles to clinch his bargain.  Assuming the representative of holy motherhood to be a woman of illegitimate birth, the history of the House to which the spotted woman gave an heir would suffer a jolt when touching on her.  And altogether the history fumed rank vapours.  Imagine her boy in his father’s name a young collegian!  No commonly sensitive lad could bear the gibes of the fellows raking at antecedents:  Fleetwood would be the name to start roars.  Smarting for his name, the earl chafed at the boy’s mother.  Her production of a man-child was the further and grosser offence.

The world sat on him.  His confession to some degree of weakness, even to folly, stung his pride of individuality so that he had to soothe the pain by tearing himself from a thought of his folly’s partner, shutting himself up and away from her.  Then there was a cessation of annoyance, flatteringly agreeable:  which can come to us only of our having done the right thing, young men will think.  He felt at once warmly with the world, enjoyed the world’s kind shelter, and in return for its eulogy of his unprecedented attachment to the pledge of his word, admitted an understanding of its laughter at the burlesque edition of a noble lady in the person of the Whitechapel Countess.  The world sat on him heavily.