He has owned he is her husband:  he has not disavowed the consequence.  That fellow, Gower Woodseer, might accuse the husband of virtually lying, if he by his conduct implied her distastefulness or worse.  By heaven! as felon a deed as could be done.  Argue the case anyhow, it should be undone.  Let her but cease to madden.  For whatever the rawness of the woman, she has qualities; and experience of the facile loves of London very sharply defines her qualities.  Think of her as raw, she has the gift of rareness:  forget the donkey obstinacy, her character grasps.  In the grasp of her character, one inclines, and her husband inclines, to become her advocate.  She has only to discontinue maddening.

The wealthy young noble prized any form of rareness wherever it was visible, having no thought of the purchase of it, except with worship.  He could listen pleased to the talk of a Methodist minister sewing bootleather.  He picked up a roadside tramp and made a friend of him, and valued the fellow’s honesty, submitted to his lectures, pardoned his insolence.  The sight of Carinthia’s narrow bedroom and strip of bed over Sarah Winch’s Whitechapel shop had gone a step to drown the bobbing Whitechapel Countess.  At least, he had not been hunted by that gaunt chalk-quarry ghost since his peep into the room.  Own it! she likewise has things to forgive.  Women nurse their larvae of ideas about fair dealing.  But observe the distinction:  aid if women understood justice they would be the first to proclaim, that when two are tied together, the one who does the other serious injury is more naturally excused than the one who-tenfold abhorrent if a woman!—­calls up the grotesque to extinguish both.

With this apology for himself, Lord Fleetwood grew tolerant of the person honourably avowed as his wife.  So; therefore, the barrier between him and his thoughts of her was broken.  The thoughts carrying red doses were selected.  Finally, the taste to meet her sprouted.  If agreeable, she could be wooed; if barely agreeable, tormented; if disagreeable, left as before.

Although it was the hazard of a die, he decided to follow his taste.  Her stay at the castle had kept him long from the duties of his business; and he could imagine it a grievance if he pleased, but he put it aside.  Alighting at his chief manager’s office, he passed through the heated atmosphere of black-browed, wiry little rebels, who withheld the salute as they lounged:  a posture often preceding the spring in compulsorily idle workers.  He was aware of instinct abroad, an antagonism to the proprietor’s rights.  They roused him to stand by them, and were his own form of instinct, handsomely clothed.  It behoved that he should examine them and the claims against them, to be sure of his ground.  He and Mr. Howell Edwards debated the dispute for an hour; agreeing, partially differing.  There was a weakness on the principle in Edwards.  These fellows fixed to the spot are for compromise too much.  An owner of mines has no steady reckoning of income if the rate of wage is perpetually to shift according to current, mostly ignorant, versions of the prosperity of the times.  Are we so prosperous?  It is far from certain.  And if the rate ascends, the question of easing it down to suit the discontinuance of prosperity agitating our exchequer—­whose demand is for fixity—­perplexes us further.