‘Parliament, you mean,’ said Elizabeth with a frank and tender smile.  The hostess was summoned to welcome a new guest, and she left me, pleased with her successful effort to reach my meaning, and absorbed by it.

I would not have challenged Machiavelli; but I should not have encountered the Florentine ruefully.  I feel the same keen delight in intellectual dexterity.  On some points my sister is not a bad match for me.  She can beat me seven games out of twelve at chess; but the five I win sequently, for then I am awake.  There is natural art and artificial art, and the last beats the first.  Fortunately for us, women are strangers to the last.  They have had to throw off a mask before they have, got the schooling; so, when they are thus armed we know what we meet, and what are the weapons to be used.

Alice, if she is a fine fencer at all, will expect to meet the ordinary English squire in me.  I have seen her at the baptismal font!  It is inconceivable.  She will fancy that at least she is ten times more subtle than I. When I get the mastery—­it is unlikely to make me the master.  What may happen is, that the nature of the girl will declare itself, under the hard light of intimacy, vulgar.  Charles I cause to be absent for six weeks; so there will be time enough for the probation.  I do not see him till he returns.  If by chance I had come earlier to see him and he to allude to her, he would have had my conscience on his side, and that is what a scrupulous man takes care to prevent.

I wonder whether my friends imagine me to be the same man whom they knew as Gilbert Pollingray a month back?  I see the change, I feel the change; but I have no retrospection, no remorse, no looking forward, no feeling:  none for others, very little, for myself.  I am told that I am losing fluency as a dinner-table talker.  There is now more savour to me in a silvery laugh than in a spiced wit.  And this is the man who knows women, and is far too modest to give a decided opinion upon any of their merits.  Search myself through as I may, I cannot tell when the change began, or what the change consists of, or what is the matter with me, or what charm there is in the person who does the mischief.  She is the counterpart of dozens of girls; lively, brown-eyed, brown-haired, underbred—­it is not too harsh to say so—­underbred slightly; half-educated, whether quickwitted I dare not opine.  She is undoubtedly the last whom I or another person would have fixed upon as one to work me this unmitigated evil.  I do not know her, and I believe I do not care to know her, and I am thirsting for the hour to come when I shall study her.  Is not this to have the poison of a bite in one’s blood?  The wrath of Venus is not a fable.  I was a hard reader and I despised the sex in my youth, before the family estates fell to me; since when I have playfully admired the sex; I have dallied with a passion, and not read at all, save for diversion:  her anger is not a fable.