‘Or is it my powers as an artist?’

‘Your mind, your extraordinary powers of mind.’

‘Well,’ said Lady Camper, ’a veteran General of Brigade is as good a crutch as a childless old grannam can have.’

And as a crutch, General Ople, parading her grounds with the aged woman, found himself used and treated.

The accuracy of his perceptions might be questioned.  He was like a man stunned by some great tropical fruit, which responds to the longing of his eyes by falling on his head; but it appeared to him, that she increased in bitterness at every step they took, as if determined to make him realize her wrinkles.

He was even so inconsequent, or so little recognized his position, as to object in his heart to hear himself called Wilson.

It is true that she uttered Wilsonople as if the names formed one word.  And on a second occasion (when he inclined to feel hurt) she remarked, ’I fear me, Wilsonople, if we are to speak plainly, thou art but a fool.’  He, perhaps, naturally objected to that.  He was, however, giddy, and barely knew.

Yet once more the magical woman changed.  All semblance of harshness, and harridan-like spike-tonguedness vanished when she said adieu.

The astronomer, looking at the crusty jag and scoria of the magnified moon through his telescope, and again with naked eyes at the soft-beaming moon, when the crater-ridges are faint as eyebrow-pencillings, has a similar sharp alternation of prospect to that which mystified General Ople.

But between watching an orb that is only variable at our caprice, and contemplating a woman who shifts and quivers ever with her own, how vast the difference!

And consider that this woman is about to be one’s wife!  He could have believed (if he had not known full surely that such things are not) he was in the hands of a witch.

Lady Camper’s ‘adieu’ was perfectly beautiful—­a kind, cordial, intimate, above all, to satisfy his present craving, it was a lady-like adieu—­the adieu of a delicate and elegant woman, who had hardly left her anchorage by forty to sail into the fifties.

Alas! he had her word for it, that she was not less than seventy.  And, worse, she had betrayed most melancholy signs of sourness and agedness as soon as he had sworn himself to her fast and fixed.

‘The road is open to you to retreat,’ were her last words.

‘My road,’ he answered gallantly, ‘is forward.’

He was drawing backward as he said it, and something provoked her to smile.

CHAPTER V

It is a noble thing to say that your road is forward, and it befits a man of battles.  General Ople was too loyal a gentleman to think of any other road.  Still, albeit not gifted with imagination, he could not avoid the feeling that he had set his face to Winter.  He found himself suddenly walking straight into the heart of Winter, and a nipping Winter.  For her ladyship had proved acutely nipping.  His little customary phrases, to which Lady Camper objected, he could see no harm in whatever.  Conversing with her in the privacy of domestic life would never be the flowing business that it is for other men.  It would demand perpetual vigilance, hop, skip, jump, flounderings, and apologies.