Turn the mind to something brighter.  Fleetwood strung himself to do so, and became agitated by the question whether the bride sat to left or to right of him when the South-wester blew-a wind altogether preferable to the chill North-east.  Women, when they are no longer warm, are colder than the deadliest catarrh wind scything across these islands.  Of course she sat to left of him.  In the line of the main road, he remembered a look he dropped on her, a look over his left shoulder.

She never had a wooing:  she wanted it, had a kind of right to it, or the show of it.  How to begin?  But was she worth an effort?  Turn to something brighter.  Religion is the one refuge from women, Feltre says:  his Roman Catholic recipe.  The old shoemaker, Mr. Woodseer, hauls women into his religion, and purifies them by the process,—­fancies he does.  He gets them to wear an air.  Old Gower, too, has his Religion of Nature, with free admission for women, whom he worships in similes, running away from them, leering sheepishly.  No, Feltre’s’ rigid monastic system is the sole haven.  And what a world, where we have no safety except in renouncing it!  The two sexes created to devour one another must abjure their sex before they gain ‘The Peace,’ as Feltre says, impressively, if absurdly.  He will end a monk if he has the courage of his logic.  A queer spectacle—­an English nobleman a shaven monk!

Fleetwood shuddered.  We are twisted face about to discover our being saved by women from that horror—­the joining the ranks of the nasal friars.  By what women?  Bacchante, clearly, if the wife we have is a North-easter to wither us, blood, bone, and soul.

He was hungry; he waxed furious with the woman who had flung him out upon the roads.  He was thirsty as well.  The brightest something to refresh his thoughts grew and glowed in the form of a shiny table, bearing tasty dishes, old wines; at an inn or anywhere.  But, out of London, an English inn to furnish the dishes and the wines for a civilized and self-respecting man is hard to seek, as difficult to find as a perfect skeleton of an extinct species.  The earl’s breast howled derision of his pursuit when he drew up at the; sign of the Royal Sovereign, in the dusky hour, and handed himself desperately to Mrs. Rundles’ mercy.

He could not wait for a dinner, so his eating was cold meat.  Warned by a sip, that his drinking, if he drank, was to be an excursion in chemical acids, the virtues of an abstainer served for his consolation.  Tolerant of tobacco, although he did not smoke, he fronted the fire, envying Gower Woodseer the contemplative pipe, which for half a dozen puffs wafted him to bracing deserts, or primaeval forests, or old highways with the swallow thoughts above him, down the Past, into the Future.  A pipe is pleasant dreams at command.  A pipe is the concrete form of philosophy.  Why, then, a pipe is the alternative of a friar’s frock for an escape from women.  But if one does not smoke! . . .  Here and there a man is visibly in the eyes of all men cursed:  let him be blest by Fortune; let him be handsome, healthy, wealthy, courted, he is cursed.