Gower left the two young noblemen to their greetings.  Happily for him, philosophy, in the present instance, after a round of profundities, turned her lantern upon the comic aspect of his errand.  Considering the Countess Livia, and himself, and the tyrant, who benevolently and providentially, or sardonically, hurled them to their interview, the situation was comic, certainly, in the sense of its being an illumination of this life’s odd developments.  For thus had things come about, that if it were possible even to think of the lady’s condescending, he, thanks to the fair one he would see before evening, was armed and proof against his old infatuation or any renewal of it.  And he had been taught to read through the beautiful twilighted woman, as if she were burnt paper held at the fire consuming her.  His hopes hung elsewhere.  Nevertheless, an intellectual demon-imp very lively in his head urged him to speculate on such a contest between them, and weigh the engaging forces.  Difficulties were perceived, the scornful laughter on her side was plainly heard; but his feeling of savage mastery, far from beaten down, swelled so as to become irritable for the trial; and when he was near her house he held a review of every personal disadvantage he could summon, incited by an array of limping deficiencies that flattered their arrogant leader with ideas of the power he had in spite of them.

In fact, his emancipation from sentiment inspired the genial mood to tease.  Women, having to encounter a male adept at the weapon for the purpose, must be either voluble or supportingly proud to keep the skin from shrinking:  which is a commencement of the retrogression; and that has frequently been the beginning of a rout.  Now the Countess Livia was a lady of queenly pose and the servitorial conventional speech likely at a push to prove beggarly.  When once on a common platform with a man of agile tongue instigated by his intellectual demon to pursue inquiries into her moral resources, after a ruthless exposure of the wrecked material, she would have to be, after the various fashions, defiant, if she was to hold her own against pressure; and seeing, as she must, the road of prudence point to conciliation, it was calculable that she would take it.  Hence a string of possible events, astounding to mankind, but equally calculable, should one care to give imagination headway.  Gower looked signally Captain Abrane’s ‘fiddler’ while he waited at Livia’s house door.  A studious intimacy with such a lady was rather like the exposure of the silver moon to the astronomer’s telescope.

The Dame will have nought of an interview and colloquy not found mentioned in her collection of ballads, concerning a person quite secondary in Dr. Glossop’s voluminous papers.  She as vehemently prohibits a narration of Gower Woodseer’s proposal some hours later, for the hand of the Countess of Fleetwood’s transfixed maid Madge, because of the insignificance of the couple; and though it was a quaint idyll of