pish, sir!—­as Meeson Corby had the habit of exclaiming when Abrane’s ‘fiddler’ argues him into a corner.  The fellow can fiddle fine things and occasionally clear sense:—­’Men hating Nature are insane.  Women and Nature are close.  If it is rather general to hate Nature and maltreat women, we begin to see why the world is a mad world.’  That is the tune of the fiddler’s fiddling.  As for him, something protects him.  He was the slave of Countess Livia; like Abrane, Mallard, Corby, St. Ombre, young Cressett, and the dozens.  He is now her master.  Can a man like that be foolish, in saying of the Countess Carinthia, she is ‘not only quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding’?  Gower Woodseer said it of her in Wales, and again on the day of his walk up to London from Esslemont, after pedestrian exercise, which may heat the frame, but cools the mind.  She stamped that idea on a thoughtful fellow.

He’s a Welshman.  They are all excitable,—­have heads on hound’s legs for a flying figure in front.  Still, they must have an object, definitely seen by them—­definite to them if dim to their neighbours; and it will run in the poetic direction:  and the woman to win them, win all classes of them, within so short a term, is a toss above extraordinary.  She is named Carinthia—­suitable name for the Welsh pantomimic procession.  Or cry out the word in an amphitheatre of Alpine crags,—­it sounds at home.

She is a daughter of the mountains,—­should never have left them.  She is also a daughter of the Old Buccaneer—­no poor specimen of the fighting Englishman of his day.  According to Rose Mackrell, he, this Old Buccaneer, it was, who, by strange adventures, brought the great Welsh mines into the family!  He would not be ashamed in spying through his nautical glass, up or down, at his daughter’s doings.  She has not yet developed a taste for the mother’s tricks:—­the mother, said to have been a kindler.  That Countess of Cressett was a romantic little fly-away bird.  Both parents were brave:  the daughter would inherit gallantry.  She inherits a kind of thwarted beauty.  Or it needs the situation seen in Wales:  her arms up and her unaffrighted eyes over the unappeasable growl.  She had then the beauty coming from the fathom depths, with the torch of Life in the jaws of Death to light her:  beauty of the nether kingdom mounting to an upper place in the higher.  Her beauty recognized, the name of the man who married her is not Longears—­not to himself, is the main point; nor will it be to the world when he shows that it is not so to himself.

Suppose he went to her, would she be trying at domination?  The woman’s pitch above woman’s beauty was perceived to be no intermittent beam, but so living as to take the stamp of permanence.  More than to say it was hers, it was she.  What a deadly peril brought into view was her character-soul, some call it:  generally a thing rather distasteful in women, or chilling to the masculine temperament.