‘ideal;’ and to this he wantonly pinned his faith.  Alas! in our world, where all things must move, it becomes, by-and-by, manifest that an ‘ideal,’ or idol, which you will, has not been gifted with two legs.  What is, then, the duty of the worshipper?  To make, as I should say, some compromise between his superstitious reverence and his recognition of facts.  Cornelia, on her pedestal, could not prefer such a request plainly; but it would have afforded her exceeding gratification, if the man who adored her had quietly taken her up and fixed her in a fresh post, of his own choosing entirely, in the new circles of changeing events.  Far from doing that, he appeared to be unaware that they went, with the varying days, through circles, forming and reforming.  He walked rather as a man down a lengthened corridor, whose light to which he turns is in one favourite corner, visible till he reaches the end.  What Cornelia was, in the first flaming of his imagination around her, she was always, unaffected by circumstance, to remain.  It was very hard.  The ‘ideal’ did feel the want—­if not of legs—­of a certain tolerant allowance for human laws on the part of her worshipper; but he was remorselessly reverential, both by instinct and of necessity.  Women are never quite so mad in sentimentalism as men.

We have now looked into the hazy interior of their systems—­our last halt, I believe, and last examination of machinery, before Emilia quits England.

About the time of the pairing of the birds, and subsequent to the Brookfield explosion, Cornelia received a letter from her lover, bearing the tone of a summons.  She was to meet him by the decayed sallow—­the ‘fruitless tree,’ as he termed it.  Startled by this abruptness, her difficulties made her take counsel of her dignity.  “He knows that these clandestine meetings degrade me.  He is wanting in faith, to require constant assurances.  He will not understand my position!” She remembered the day at Besworth, of which Adela (somewhat needlessly, perhaps) had told her; that it had revealed two of the family, in situations censurable before a gossiping world, however intrinsically blameless.  That day had been to the ladies a lesson of deference to opinion.  It was true that Cornelia had met her lover since, but she was then unembarrassed.  She had now to share in the duties of the household—­duties abnormal, hideous, incredible.  Her incomprehensible father was absent in town.  Daily Wilfrid conducted Adela thither on mysterious business, and then Mrs. Chump was left to Arabella and herself in the lonely house.  Numberless things had to be said for the quieting of this creature, who every morning came downstairs with the exclamation that she could no longer endure her state of uncertainty, and was “off to a lawyer.”  It was useless to attempt the posture of a reply.  Words, and energetic words, the woman demanded, not expostulations—­petitions that she would be respectful to the house before the household.  Yes, occasionally (so gross was she!) she had to be fed with lies.  Arabella and Cornelia heard one another mouthing these dreadful things, with a wretched feeling of contemptuous compassion.  The trial was renewed daily, and it was a task, almost a physical task, to hold the woman back from London, till the hour of lunch came.  If they kept her away from her bonnet till then they were safe.