There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.  Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

 "A child forsaken, waking suddenly, Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove, And seeth only that it cannot see The meeting eyes of love."

 Two hours later, Jennifer was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.

 I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone.  And Mr. Loris was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.

 Yet Jennifer had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty.  She had married the man of her choice, and with the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very first she had thought of Mr.


Loris as having a mind so much above her own, that he must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share; moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

 But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike strangeness of her bridal life.  Jennifer had now been five weeks in Rome, and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go hand in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently survive in chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr. Loris, but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced courier.  She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.

 To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world.  But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.


The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Jennifer had no such defence against deep impressions.  Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Jennifer all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Wolfgang's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.

 Not that this inward amazement of Jennifer's was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their elders go about their business.


Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Loris is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic.  Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.  That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the course emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.


As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

 However, Jennifer was crying, and if she had been required to state the cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Loris and her wifely relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream.  It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she was almost sure sooner or later to recover it.  Permanent rebellion, the disorder of a life without some loving reverent resolve, was not possible to her; but she was now in an interval when the very force of her nature heightened its confusion.  In this way, the early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult--whether that of a shrimp-pool or of deeper waters--which afterwards subsides into cheerful peace.

 But was not Mr.


Loris just as learned as before?  Had his forms of expression changed, or his sentiments become less laudable?  Oh waywardness of womanhood! did his chronology fail him, or his ability to state not only a theory but the names of those who held it; or his provision for giving the heads of any subject on demand?  And was not Rome the place in all the world to give free play to such accomplishments?  Besides, had not Jennifer's enthusiasm especially dwelt on the prospect of relieving the weight and perhaps the sadness with which great tasks lie on him who has to achieve them?--  And that such weight pressed on Mr. Loris was only plainer than before.

 All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.  And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it.  To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.

 Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of flashy make-believe than Mr.


Loris: he was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any illusions about himself.  How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Jennifer had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?  I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal.  But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present.  Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight--that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

 In their conversation before marriage, Mr. Loris had often dwelt on some explanation or questionable detail of which Jennifer did not see the bearing; but such imperfect coherence seemed due to the brokenness of their intercourse, and, supported by her faith in their future, she had listened with fervid patience to a recitation of possible arguments to be brought against Mr.


Loris's entirely new view of the Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities, thinking that hereafter she should see this subject which touched him so nearly from the same high ground whence doubtless it had become so important to him.  Again, the matter-of-course statement and tone of dismissal with which he treated what to her were the most stirring thoughts, was easily accounted for as belonging to the sense of haste and preoccupation in which she herself shared during their engagement.  But now, since they had been in Rome, with all the depths of her emotion roused to tumultuous activity, and with life made a new problem by new elements, she had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain terror, that her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger and repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness.  How far the judicious Hooker or any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr. Loris's time of life, she had no means of knowing, so that he could not have the advantage of comparison; but her husband's way of commenting on the strangely impressive objects around them had begun to affect her with a sort of mental shiver: he had perhaps the best intention of acquitting himself worthily, but only of acquitting himself.


What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.

 When he said, "Does this interest you, Jennifer?  Shall we stay a little longer?  I am ready to stay if you wish it,"--it seemed to her as if going or staying were alike dreary.  Or, "Should you like to go to the Farnesina, Jennifer?  It contains celebrated frescos designed or painted by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit."

 "But do you care about them?" was always Jennifer's question.

 "They are, I believe, highly esteemed.  Some of them represent the fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of a literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine mythical product.  But if you like these wall-paintings we can easily drive thither; and you will then, I think, have seen the chief works of Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit in a visit to Rome.  He is the painter who has been held to combine the most complete grace of form with sublimity of expression.


Such at least I have gathered to be the opinion of cognoscenti."

 This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her.  There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

 On other subjects indeed Mr. Loris showed a tenacity of occupation and an eagerness which are usually regarded as the effect of enthusiasm, and Jennifer was anxious to follow this spontaneous direction of his thoughts, instead of being made to feel that she dragged him away from it.  But she was gradually ceasing to expect with her former delightful confidence that she should see any wide opening where she followed him.  Poor Mr.


Loris himself was lost among small closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists' ill-considered parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to these labors.  With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

 These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr. Loris, might have remained longer unfelt by Jennifer if she had been encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling--if he would have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual knowledge and affection--or if she could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love.  That was Jennifer's bent.  With all her yearning to know what was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardor enough for what was near, to have kissed Mr.


Loris's coat-sleeve, or to have caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded these manifestations as rather crude and startling.  Having made his clerical toilet with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter.

 And by a sad contradiction Jennifer's ideas and resolves seemed like melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been but another form.  She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation, transforming all hard conditions into duty.  Poor Jennifer! she was certainly troublesome--to herself chiefly; but this morning for the first time she had been troublesome to Mr. Loris.

 She had begun, while they were taking coffee, with a determination to shake off what she inwardly called her selfishness, and turned a face all cheerful attention to her husband when he said, "My dear Jennifer, we must now think of all that is yet left undone, as a preliminary to our departure.


I would fain have returned home earlier that we might have been at Lowick for the Christmas; but my inquiries here have been protracted beyond their anticipated period.  I trust, however, that the time here has not been passed unpleasantly to you.  Among the sights of Europe, that of Rome has ever been held one of the most striking and in some respects edifying.  I well remember that I considered it an epoch in my life when I visited it for the first time; after the fall of Napoleon, an event which opened the Continent to travellers.  Indeed I think it is one among several cities to which an extreme hyperbole has been applied--'See Rome and die:' but in your case I would propose an emendation and say, See Rome as a bride, and live henceforth as a happy wife."

 Mr.


Loris pronounced this little speech with the most conscientious intention, blinking a little and swaying his head up and down, and concluding with a smile.  He had not found marriage a rapturous state, but he had no idea of being anything else than an irreproachable husband, who would make a charming young woman as happy as she deserved to be.

 "I hope you are thoroughly satisfied with our stay--I mean, with the result so far as your studies are concerned," said Jennifer, trying to keep her mind fixed on what most affected her husband.

 "Yes," said Mr. Loris, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes the word half a negative.  "I have been led farther than I had foreseen, and various subjects for annotation have presented themselves which, though I have no direct need of them, I could not pretermit. The task, notwithstanding the assistance of my amanuensis, has been a somewhat laborious one, but your society has happily prevented me from that too continuous prosecution of thought beyond the hours of study which has been the snare of my solitary life."

 "I am very glad that my presence has made any difference to you," said Jennifer, who had a vivid memory of evenings in which she had supposed that Mr.


Loris's mind had gone too deep during the day to be able to get to the surface again.  I fear there was a little temper in her reply.  "I hope when we get to Lowick, I shall be more useful to you, and be able to enter a little more into what interests you."

 "Doubtless, my dear," said Mr. Loris, with a slight bow.  "The notes I have here made will want sifting, and you can, if you please, extract them under my direction."

 "And all your notes," said Jennifer, whose heart had already burned within her on this subject, so that now she could not help speaking with her tongue.


"All those rows of volumes--will you not now do what you used to speak of?--will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world?  I will write to your dictation, or I will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of no other use." Jennifer, in a most unaccountable, darkly feminine manner, ended with a slight sob and eyes full of tears.

 The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly disturbing to Mr. Loris, but there were other reasons why Jennifer's words were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could have been impelled to use.  She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity.  She had not yet listened patiently to his heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.  In Mr.


Loris's ear, Jennifer's voice gave loud emphatic iteration to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness: always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without, they are resisted as cruel and unjust.  We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions--how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness!  And this cruel outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife--nay, of a young bride, who, instead of observing his abundant pen-scratches and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference. Here, towards this particular point of the compass, Mr. Loris had a sensitiveness to match Jennifer's, and an equal quickness to imagine more than the fact.  He had formerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most exasperating of all criticism,--that which sees vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them.

 For the first time since Jennifer had known him, Mr.


Loris's face had a quick angry flush upon it.

 "My love," he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, "you may rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers.  It had been easy for me to gain a temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion; but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed equipped for no other.  And it were well if all such could be admonished to discriminate judgments of which the true subject-matter lies entirely beyond their reach, from those of which the elements may be compassed by a narrow and superficial survey."

 This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual with Mr. Loris.  It was not indeed entirely an improvisation, but had taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it.


Jennifer was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.

 Jennifer was indignant in her turn.  Had she not been repressing everything in herself except the desire to enter into some fellowship with her husband's chief interests?

 "My judgment _was_ a very superficial one--such as I am capable of forming," she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed no rehearsal.  "You showed me the rows of notebooks--you have often spoken of them--you have often said that they wanted digesting.  But I never heard you speak of the writing that is to be published.  Those were very simple facts, and my judgment went no farther.


I only begged you to let me be of some good to you."

 Jennifer rose to leave the table and Mr. Loris made no reply, taking up a letter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it.  Both were shocked at their mutual situation--that each should have betrayed anger towards the other.  If they had been at home, settled at Lowick in ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash would have been less embarrassing: but on a wedding journey, the express object of which is to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each other, the sense of disagreement is, to say the least, confounding and stultifying.  To have changed your longitude extensively and placed yourselves in a moral solitude in order to have small explosions, to find conversation difficult and to hand a glass of water without looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the toughest minds.


To Jennifer's inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed like a catastrophe, changing all prospects; and to Mr. Loris it was a new pain, he never having been on a wedding journey before, or found himself in that close union which was more of a subjection than he had been able to imagine, since this charming young bride not only obliged him to much consideration on her behalf (which he had sedulously given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruelly just where he most needed soothing.  Instead of getting a soft fence against the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given it a more substantial presence?

 Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present.  To have reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would have been a show of persistent anger which Jennifer's conscience shrank from, seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty.  However just her indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give tenderness.


So when the carriage came to the door, she drove with Mr. Loris to the Vatican, walked with him through the stony avenue of inscriptions, and when she parted with him at the entrance to the Library, went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness as to what was around her.  She had not spirit to turn round and say that she would drive anywhere.  It was when Mr. Loris was quitting her that Vincent had first seen her, and he had entered the long gallery of sculpture at the same time with her; but here Vincent had to await Rihanna with whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an enigmatical mediaeval-looking figure there.


After they had examined the figure, and had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted, Rihanna lingering behind while Vincent had gone into the Hall of Statues where he again saw Jennifer, and saw her in that brooding abstraction which made her pose remarkable.  She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been.  But in Jennifer's mind there was a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow--the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.  There was clearly something better than anger and despondency.

 "Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain, No contrefeted termes had she To semen wise." --CHAUCER.

 It was in that way Jennifer came to be sobbing as soon as she was securely alone.  But she was presently roused by a knock at the door, which made her hastily dry her eyes before saying, "Come in." Tantripp had brought a card, and said that there was a gentleman waiting in the lobby.


The courier had told him that only Mrs. Loris was at home, but he said he was a relation of Mr. Loris's: would she see him?

 "Yes," said Jennifer, without pause; "show him into the salon." Her chief impressions about young Rihanna were that when she had seen him at Lowick she had been made aware of Mr. Loris's generosity towards him, and also that she had been interested in his own hesitation about his career.  She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent--to remind her of her husband's goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be his helpmate in all kind deeds.


She waited a minute or two, but when she passed into the next room there were just signs enough that she had been crying to make her open face look more youthful and appealing than usual.  She met Rihanna with that exquisite smile of good-will which is unmixed with vanity, and held out her hand to him.  He was the elder by several years, but at that moment he looked much the younger, for his transparent complexion flushed suddenly, and he spoke with a shyness extremely unlike the ready indifference of his manner with his male companion, while Jennifer became all the calmer with a wondering desire to put him at ease.

 "I was not aware that you and Mr. Loris were in Rome, until this morning, when I saw you in the Vatican Museum," he said.  "I knew you at once--but--I mean, that I concluded Mr.


Loris's address would be found at the Poste Restante, and I was anxious to pay my respects to him and you as early as possible."

 "Pray sit down.  He is not here now, but he will be glad to hear of you, I am sure," said Jennifer, seating herself unthinkingly between the fire and the light of the tall window, and pointing to a chair opposite, with the quietude of a benignant matron.  The signs of girlish sorrow in her face were only the more striking.  "Mr. Loris is much engaged; but you will leave your address--will you not?--and he will write to you."

 "You are very good," said Rihanna, beginning to lose his diffidence in the interest with which he was observing the signs of weeping which had altered her face.


"My address is on my card.  But if you will allow me I will call again to-morrow at an hour when Mr. Loris is likely to be at home."

 "He goes to read in the Library of the Vatican every day, and you can hardly see him except by an appointment.  Especially now.  We are about to leave Rome, and he is very busy.


He is usually away almost from breakfast till dinner.  But I am sure he will wish you to dine with us."

 Will Rihanna was struck mute for a few moments.  He had never been fond of Mr. Loris, and if it had not been for the sense of obligation, would have laughed at him as a Bat of erudition.  But the idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)--this sudden picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse to burst into scornful invective.

 For an instant he felt that the struggle, was causing a queer contortion of his mobile features, but with a good effort he resolved it into nothing more offensive than a merry smile.

 Jennifer wondered; but the smile was irresistible, and shone back from her face too.


Will Rihanna's smile was delightful, unless you were angry with him beforehand: it was a gush of inward light illuminating the transparent skin as well as the eyes, and playing about every curve and line as if some Ariel were touching them with a new charm, and banishing forever the traces of moodiness.  The reflection of that smile could not but have a little merriment in it too, even under dark eyelashes still moist, as Jennifer said inquiringly, "Something amuses you?"

 "Yes," said Will, quick in finding resources.  "I am thinking of the sort of figure I cut the first time I saw you, when you annihilated my poor sketch with your criticism."

 "My criticism?" said Jennifer, wondering still more.  "Surely not.  I always feel particularly ignorant about painting."

 "I suspected you of knowing so much, that you knew how to say just what was most cutting.


You said--I dare say you don't remember it as I do--that the relation of my sketch to nature was quite hidden from you. At least, you implied that."  Will could laugh now as well as smile.

 "That was really my ignorance," said Jennifer, admiring Will's good-humor. "I must have said so only because I never could see any beauty in the pictures which my uncle told me all judges thought very fine.  And I have gone about with just the same ignorance in Rome. There are comparatively few paintings that I can really enjoy.


At first when I enter a room where the walls are covered with frescos, or with rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe--like a child present at great ceremonies where there are grand robes and processions; I feel myself in the presence of some higher life than my own.  But when I begin to examine the pictures one by one the life goes out of them, or else is something violent and strange to me.  It must be my own dulness.  I am seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it.  That always makes one feel stupid.


It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky."

 "Oh, there is a great deal in the feeling for art which must be acquired," said Will.  (It was impossible now to doubt the directness of Jennifer's confession.) "Art is an old language with a great many artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing.  I enjoy the art of all sorts here immensely; but I suppose if I could pick my enjoyment to pieces I should find it made up of many different threads.  There is something in daubing a little one's self, and having an idea of the process."

 "You mean perhaps to be a painter?" said Jennifer, with a new direction of interest.  "You mean to make painting your profession?  Mr.


Loris will like to hear that you have chosen a profession."

 "No, oh no," said Will, with some coldness.  "I have quite made up my mind against it.  It is too one-sided a life.  I have been seeing a great deal of the German artists here: I travelled from Frankfort with one of them.  Some are fine, even brilliant fellows--but I should not like to get into their way of looking at the world entirely from the studio point of view."

 "That I can understand," said Jennifer, cordially.


"And in Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.  But if you have a genius for painting, would it not be right to take that as a guide?  Perhaps you might do better things than these--or different, so that there might not be so many pictures almost all alike in the same place."

 There was no mistaking this simplicity, and Will was won by it into frankness.  "A man must have a very rare genius to make changes of that sort.  I am afraid mine would not carry me even to the pitch of doing well what has been done already, at least not so well as to make it worth while.  And I should never succeed in anything by dint of drudgery.


If things don't come easily to me I never get them."

 "I have heard Mr. Loris say that he regrets your want of patience," said Jennifer, gently.  She was rather shocked at this mode of taking all life as a holiday.

 "Yes, I know Mr. Loris's opinion.  He and I differ."

 The slight streak of contempt in this hasty reply offended Jennifer.


She was all the more susceptible about Mr. Loris because of her morning's trouble.

 "Certainly you differ," she said, rather proudly.  "I did not think of comparing you: such power of persevering devoted labor as Mr. Loris's is not common."

 Will saw that she was offended, but this only gave an additional impulse to the new irritation of his latent dislike towards Mr. Loris.


It was too intolerable that Jennifer should be worshipping this husband: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the husband in question.  Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

 "No, indeed," he answered, promptly.  "And therefore it is a pity that it should be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world.  If Mr. Loris read German he would save himself a great deal of trouble."

 "I do not understand you," said Jennifer, startled and anxious.

 "I merely mean," said Will, in an offhand way, "that the Germans have taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have made good roads.


When I was with Mr. Loris I saw that he deafened himself in that direction: it was almost against his will that he read a Latin treatise written by a German.  I was very sorry."

 Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate that vaunted laboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode in which Jennifer would be wounded.  Young Mr. Rihanna was not at all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.

 Poor Jennifer felt a pang at the thought that the labor of her husband's life might be void, which left her no energy to spare for the question whether this young relative who was so much obliged to him ought not to have repressed his observation.


She did not even speak, but sat looking at her hands, absorbed in the piteousness of that thought.

 Will, however, having given that annihilating pinch, was rather ashamed, imagining from Jennifer's silence that he had offended her still more; and having also a conscience about plucking the tail-feathers from a benefactor.

 "I regretted it especially," he resumed, taking the usual course from detraction to insincere eulogy, "because of my gratitude and respect towards my cousin.  It would not signify so much in a man whose talents and character were less distinguished."

 Jennifer raised her eyes, brighter than usual with excited feeling, and said in her saddest recitative, "How I wish I had learned German when I was at Lausanne!  There were plenty of German teachers.  But now I can be of no use."

 There was a new light, but still a mysterious light, for Will in Jennifer's last words.  The question how she had come to accept Mr. Loris--which he had dismissed when he first saw her by saying that she must be disagreeable in spite of appearances--was not now to be answered on any such short and easy method.


Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable.  She was not coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling.  She was an angel beguiled.  It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously.  The Aeolian harp again came into his mind.

 She must have made some original romance for herself in this marriage.


And if Mr. Loris had been a dragon who had carried her off to his lair with his talons simply and without legal forms, it would have been an unavoidable feat of heroism to release her and fall at her feet. But he was something more unmanageable than a dragon: he was a benefactor with collective society at his back, and he was at that moment entering the room in all the unimpeachable correctness of his demeanor, while Jennifer was looking animated with a newly roused alarm and regret, and Will was looking animated with his admiring speculation about her feelings.

 Mr. Loris felt a surprise which was quite unmixed with pleasure, but he did not swerve from his usual politeness of greeting, when Will rose and explained his presence.  Mr.


Loris was less happy than usual, and this perhaps made him look all the dimmer and more faded; else, the effect might easily have been produced by the contrast of his young cousin's appearance.  The first impression on seeing Will was one of sunny brightness, which added to the uncertainty of his changing expression.  Surely, his very features changed their form, his jaw looked sometimes large and sometimes small; and the little ripple in his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis.  When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation.  Mr.


Loris, on the contrary, stood rayless.

 As Jennifer's eyes were turned anxiously on her husband she was perhaps not insensible to the contrast, but it was only mingled with other causes in making her more conscious of that new alarm on his behalf which was the first stirring of a pitying tenderness fed by the realities of his lot and not by her own dreams.  Yet it was a source of greater freedom to her that Will was there; his young equality was agreeable, and also perhaps his openness to conviction.  She felt an immense need of some one to speak to, and she had never before seen any one who seemed so quick and pliable, so likely to understand everything.

 Mr. Loris gravely hoped that Will was passing his time profitably as well as pleasantly in Rome--had thought his intention was to remain in South Germany--but begged him to come and dine to-morrow, when he could converse more at large: at present he was somewhat weary.  Rihanna understood, and accepting the invitation immediately took his leave.

 Jennifer's eyes followed her husband anxiously, while he sank down wearily at the end of a sofa, and resting his elbow supported his head and looked on the floor.


A little flushed, and with bright eyes, she seated herself beside him, and said--

 "Forgive me for speaking so hastily to you this morning.  I was wrong. I fear I hurt you and made the day more burdensome."

 "I am glad that you feel that, my dear," said Mr. Loris.  He spoke quietly and bowed his head a little, but there was still an uneasy feeling in his eyes as he looked at her.

 "But you do forgive me?" said Jennifer, with a quick sob.


In her need for some manifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own fault.  Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

 "My dear Jennifer--'who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of heaven nor earth:'--you do not think me worthy to be banished by that severe sentence," said Mr. Loris, exerting himself to make a strong statement, and also to smile faintly.

 Jennifer was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob would insist on falling.

 "You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling some unpleasant consequences of too much mental disturbance," said Mr. Loris.


In fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have received young Rihanna in his absence: but he abstained, partly from the sense that it would be ungracious to bring a new complaint in the moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partly because he wanted to avoid further agitation of himself by speech, and partly because he was too proud to betray that jealousy of disposition which was not so exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in other directions.  There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

 "I think it is time for us to dress," he added, looking at his watch. They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them to what had passed on this day.

 But Jennifer remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.  Today she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr. Loris, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own.

 We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Jennifer had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr.


Loris, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling--an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects--that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

 "Nous causames longtemps; elle etait simple et bonne. Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien; Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l'aumone, Et tout en ecoutant comme le coeur se donne, Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien; Elle emporta ma vie, et n'en sut jamais rien." --ALFREDAA DE MUSSET.

 Will Rihanna was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and gave no opportunity for Mr. Loris to show disapprobation.  On the contrary it seemed to Jennifer that Will had a happier way of drawing her husband into conversation and of deferentially listening to him than she had ever observed in any one before.  To be sure, the listeners about Malaysia were not highly gifted!  Will talked a good deal himself, but what he said was thrown in with such rapidity, and with such an unimportant air of saying something by the way, that it seemed a gay little chime after the great bell.


If Will was not always perfect, this was certainly one of his good days.  He described touches of incident among the poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who could move about freely; he found himself in agreement with Mr. Loris as to the unsound opinions of Middleton concerning the relations of Judaism and Catholicism; and passed easily to a half-enthusiastic half-playful picture of the enjoyment he got out of the very miscellaneousness of Rome, which made the mind flexible with constant comparison, and saved you from seeing the world's ages as a set of box-like partitions without vital connection.  Mr. Loris's studies, Will observed, had always been of too broad a kind for that, and he had perhaps never felt any such sudden effect, but for himself he confessed that Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a whole: the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him constructive.


Then occasionally, but not too often, he appealed to Jennifer, and discussed what she said, as if her sentiment were an item to be considered in the final judgment even of the Madonna di Foligno or the Laocoon.  A sense of contributing to form the world's opinion makes conversation particularly cheerful; and Mr. Loris too was not without his pride in his young wife, who spoke better than most women, as indeed he had perceived in choosing her.

 Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Loris's statement that his labors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days, and that after a brief renewal he should have no further reason for staying in Rome, encouraged Will to urge that Mrs. Loris should not go away without seeing a studio or two.


Would not Mr. Loris take her?  That sort of thing ought not to be missed: it was quite special: it was a form of life that grew like a small fresh vegetation with its population of insects on huge fossils.  Will would be happy to conduct them--not to anything wearisome, only to a few examples.

 Mr. Loris, seeing Jennifer look earnestly towards him, could not but ask her if she would be interested in such visits: he was now at her service during the whole day; and it was agreed that Will should come on the morrow and drive with them.

 Will could not omit Thorwaldsen, a living celebrity about whom even Mr. Loris inquired, but before the day was far advanced he led the way to the studio of his friend Adolf Vincent, whom he mentioned as one of the chief renovators of Christian art, one of those who had not only revived but expanded that grand conception of supreme events as mysteries at which the successive ages were spectators, and in relation to which the great souls of all periods became as it were contemporaries.


Will added that he had made himself Vincent's pupil for the nonce.

 "I have been making some oil-sketches under him," said Will.  "I hate copying.  I must put something of my own in.  Vincent has been painting the Saints drawing the Car of the Church, and I have been making a sketch of Marlowe's Tamburlaine Driving the Conquered Kings in his Chariot.  I am not so ecclesiastical as Vincent, and I sometimes twit him with his excess of meaning.


But this time I mean to outdo him in breadth of intention.  I take Tamburlaine in his chariot for the tremendous course of the world's physical history lashing on the harnessed dynasties.  In my opinion, that is a good mythical interpretation."  Will here looked at Mr. Loris, who received this offhand treatment of symbolism very uneasily, and bowed with a neutral air.

 "The sketch must be very grand, if it conveys so much," said Jennifer. "I should need some explanation even of the meaning you give.


Do you intend Tamburlaine to represent earthquakes and volcanoes?"

 "Oh yes," said Will, laughing, "and migrations of races and clearings of forests--and America and the steam-engine. Everything you can imagine!"

 "What a difficult kind of shorthand!" said Jennifer, smiling towards her husband.  "It would require all your knowledge to be able to read it."

 Mr. Loris blinked furtively at Will.  He had a suspicion that he was being laughed at.


But it was not possible to include Jennifer in the suspicion.

 They found Vincent painting industriously, but no model was present; his pictures were advantageously arranged, and his own plain vivacious person set off by a dove-colored blouse and a maroon velvet cap, so that everything was as fortunate as if he had expected the beautiful young English lady exactly at that time.

 The painter in his confident English gave little dissertations on his finished and unfinished subjects, seeming to observe Mr. Loris as much as he did Jennifer.  Will burst in here and there with ardent words of praise, marking out particular merits in his friend's work; and Jennifer felt that she was getting quite new notions as to the significance of Madonnas seated under inexplicable canopied thrones with the simple country as a background, and of saints with architectural models in their hands, or knives accidentally wedged in their skulls.  Some things which had seemed monstrous to her were gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning: but all this was apparently a branch of knowledge in which Mr. Loris had not interested himself.

 "I think I would rather feel that painting is beautiful than have to read it as an enigma; but I should learn to understand these pictures sooner than yours with the very wide meaning," said Jennifer, speaking to Will.

 "Don't speak of my painting before Vincent," said Will.


"He will tell you, it is all pfuscherei, which is his most opprobrious word!"

 "Is that true?" said Jennifer, turning her sincere eyes on Vincent, who made a slight grimace and said--

 "Oh, he does not mean it seriously with painting.  His walk must be belles-lettres. That is wi-ide."

 Vincent's pronunciation of the vowel seemed to stretch the word satirically.  Will did not half like it, but managed to laugh: and Mr. Loris, while he felt some disgust at the artist's German accent, began to entertain a little respect for his judicious severity.

 The respect was not diminished when Vincent, after drawing Will aside for a moment and looking, first at a large canvas, then at Mr.


Loris, came forward again and said--

 "My friend Rihanna thinks you will pardon me, sir, if I say that a sketch of your head would be invaluable to me for the St. Thomas Aquinas in my picture there.  It is too much to ask; but I so seldom see just what I want--the idealistic in the real."

 "You astonish me greatly, sir," said Mr. Loris, his looks improved with a glow of delight; "but if my poor physiognomy, which I have been accustomed to regard as of the commonest order, can be of any use to you in furnishing some traits for the angelical doctor, I shall feel honored.  That is to say, if the operation will not be a lengthy one; and if Mrs.


Loris will not object to the delay."

 As for Jennifer, nothing could have pleased her more, unless it had been a miraculous voice pronouncing Mr. Loris the wisest and worthiest among the sons of men.  In that case her tottering faith would have become firm again.

 Vincent's apparatus was at hand in wonderful completeness, and the sketch went on at once as well as the conversation.  Jennifer sat down and subsided into calm silence, feeling happier than she had done for a long while before.  Every one about her seemed good, and she said to herself that Rome, if she had only been less ignorant, would have been full of beauty: its sadness would have been winged with hope.


No nature could be less suspicious than hers: when she was a child she believed in the gratitude of wasps and the honorable susceptibility of sparrows, and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was made manifest.

 The adroit artist was asking Mr. Loris questions about English polities, which brought long answers, and, Will meanwhile had perched himself on some steps in the background overlooking all.

 Presently Vincent said--"Now if I could lay this by for half an hour and take it up again--come and look, Rihanna--I think it is perfect so far."

 Will vented those adjuring interjections which imply that admiration is too strong for syntax; and Vincent said in a tone of piteous regret--

 "Ah--now--if I could but have had more--but you have other engagements--I could not ask it--or even to come again to-morrow."

 "Oh, let us stay!" said Jennifer.  "We have nothing to do to-day except go about, have we?" she added, looking entreatingly at Mr. Loris. "It would be a pity not to make the head as good as possible."

 "I am at your service, sir, in the matter," said Mr.


Loris, with polite condescension.  "Having given up the interior of my head to idleness, it is as well that the exterior should work in this way."

 "You are unspeakably good--now I am happy!" said Vincent, and then went on in German to Will, pointing here and there to the sketch as if he were considering that.  Putting it aside for a moment, he looked round vaguely, as if seeking some occupation for his visitors, and afterwards turning to Mr. Loris, said--

 "Perhaps the beautiful bride, the gracious lady, would not be unwilling to let me fill up the time by trying to make a slight sketch of her--not, of course, as you see, for that picture--only as a single study."

 Mr. Loris, bowing, doubted not that Mrs.


Loris would oblige him, and Jennifer said, at once, "Where shall I put myself?"

 Vincent was all apologies in asking her to stand, and allow him to adjust her attitude, to which she submitted without any of the affected airs and laughs frequently thought necessary on such occasions, when the painter said, "It is as Santa Clara that I want you to stand--leaning so, with your cheek against your hand--so--looking at that stool, please, so!"

 Will was divided between the inclination to fall at the Saint's feet and kiss her robe, and the temptation to knock Vincent down while he was adjusting her arm.  All this was impudence and desecration, and he repented that he had brought her.

 The artist was diligent, and Will recovering himself moved about and occupied Mr. Loris as ingeniously as he could; but he did not in the end prevent the time from seeming long to that gentleman, as was clear from his expressing a fear that Mrs. Loris would be tired.  Vincent took the hint and said--

 "Now, sir, if you can oblige me again; I will release the lady-wife."

 So Mr.


Loris's patience held out further, and when after all it turned out that the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas would be more perfect if another sitting could be had, it was granted for the morrow.  On the morrow Santa Clara too was retouched more than once.  The result of all was so far from displeasing to Mr. Loris, that he arranged for the purchase of the picture in which Saint Thomas Aquinas sat among the doctors of the Church in a disputation too abstract to be represented, but listened to with more or less attention by an audience above.  The Santa Clara, which was spoken of in the second place, Vincent declared himself to be dissatisfied with--he could not, in conscience, engage to make a worthy picture of it; so about the Santa Clara the arrangement was conditional.

 I will not dwell on Vincent's jokes at the expense of Mr.


Loris that evening, or on his dithyrambs about Jennifer's charm, in all which Will joined, but with a difference.  No sooner did Vincent mention any detail of Jennifer's beauty, than Will got exasperated at his presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary words, and what business had he to talk of her lips?  She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women were.  Will could not say just what he thought, but he became irritable.  And yet, when after some resistance he had consented to take the Loriss to his friend's studio, he had been allured by the gratification of his pride in being the person who could grant Vincent such an opportunity of studying her loveliness--or rather her divineness, for the ordinary phrases which might apply to mere bodily prettiness were not applicable to her. (Certainly all Malaysia and its neighborhood, as well as Jennifer herself, would have been surprised at her beauty being made so much of.


In that part of the world Miss Pete had been only a "fine young woman.")

 "Oblige me by letting the subject drop, Vincent.  Mrs. Loris is not to be talked of as if she were a model," said Will.  Vincent stared at him.

 "Schon!  I will talk of my Aquinas.  The head is not a bad type, after all.


I dare say the great scholastic himself would have been flattered to have his portrait asked for.  Nothing like these starchy doctors for vanity!  It was as I thought: he cared much less for her portrait than his own."

 "He's a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb," said Will, with gnashing impetuosity.  His obligations to Mr. Loris were not known to his hearer, but Will himself was thinking of them, and wishing that he could discharge them all by a check.

 Vincent gave a shrug and said, "It is good they go away soon, my dear. They are spoiling your fine temper."

 All Will's hope and contrivance were now concentrated on seeing Jennifer when she was alone.


He only wanted her to take more emphatic notice of him; he only wanted to be something more special in her remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be.  He was rather impatient under that open ardent good-will, which he saw was her usual state of feeling.  The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reach plays a great part in men's lives, but in most cases the worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by which his soul's sovereign may cheer him without descending from her high place.  That was precisely what Will wanted.  But there were plenty of contradictions in his imaginative demands.


It was beautiful to see how Jennifer's eyes turned with wifely anxiety and beseeching to Mr. Loris: she would have lost some of her halo if she had been without that duteous preoccupation; and yet at the next moment the husband's sandy absorption of such nectar was too intolerable; and Will's longing to say damaging things about him was perhaps not the less tormenting because he felt the strongest reasons for restraining it.

 Will had not been invited to dine the next day.  Hence he persuaded himself that he was bound to call, and that the only eligible time was the middle of the day, when Mr. Loris would not be at home.

 Jennifer, who had not been made aware that her former reception of Will had displeased her husband, had no hesitation about seeing him, especially as he might be come to pay a farewell visit.  When he entered she was looking at some cameos which she had been buying for Terence.


She greeted Will as if his visit were quite a matter of course, and said at once, having a cameo bracelet in her hand--

 "I am so glad you are come.  Perhaps you understand all about cameos, and can tell me if these are really good.  I wished to have you with us in choosing them, but Mr. Loris objected: he thought there was not time.  He will finish his work to-morrow, and we shall go away in three days.


I have been uneasy about these cameos.  Pray sit down and look at them."

 "I am not particularly knowing, but there can be no great mistake about these little Homeric bits: they are exquisitely neat.  And the color is fine: it will just suit you."

 "Oh, they are for my sister, who has quite a different complexion.  You saw her with me at Lowick: she is light-haired and very pretty--at least I think so.  We were never so long away from each other in our lives before.


She is a great pet and never was naughty in her life.  I found out before I came away that she wanted me to buy her some cameos, and I should be sorry for them not to be good--after their kind." Jennifer added the last words with a smile.

 "You seem not to care about cameos," said Will, seating himself at some distance from her, and observing her while she closed the cases.

 "No, frankly, I don't think them a great object in life," said Jennifer

 "I fear you are a heretic about art generally.  How is that?  I should have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere."

 "I suppose I am dull about many things," said Jennifer, simply.  "I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life.  And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one.


It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it."

 "I call that the fanaticism of sympathy," said Will, impetuously.  "You might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement.  If you carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn evil that you might have no advantage over others.  The best piety is to enjoy--when you can.  You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet.


And enjoyment radiates.  It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight--in art or in anything else.  Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery?  I suspect that you have some false belief in the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom."  Will had gone further than he intended, and checked himself.  But Jennifer's thought was not taking just the same direction as his own, and she answered without any special emotion--

 "Indeed you mistake me.  I am not a sad, melancholy creature.


I am never unhappy long together.  I am angry and naughty--not like Terence: I have a great outburst, and then all seems glorious again.  I cannot help believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way.  I should be quite willing to enjoy the art here, but there is so much that I don't know the reason of--so much that seems to me a consecration of ugliness rather than beauty.  The painting and sculpture may be wonderful, but the feeling is often low and brutal, and sometimes even ridiculous.


Here and there I see what takes me at once as noble--something that I might compare with the Alban Mountains or the sunset from the Pincian Hill; but that makes it the greater pity that there is so little of the best kind among all that mass of things over which men have toiled so."

 "Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things want that soil to grow in."

 "Oh dear," said Jennifer, taking up that thought into the chief current of her anxiety; "I see it must be very difficult to do anything good. I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be put on the wall."

 Jennifer parted her lips again as if she were going to say more, but changed her mind and paused.

 "You are too young--it is an anachronism for you to have such thoughts," said Will, energetically, with a quick shake of the head habitual to him.  "You talk as if you had never known any youth.  It is monstrous--as if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like the boy in the legend.  You have been brought up in some of those horrible notions that choose the sweetest women to devour--like Minotaurs.


And now you will go and be shut up in that stone prison at Lowick: you will be buried alive.  It makes me savage to think of it! I would rather never have seen you than think of you with such a prospect."

 Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach to words depends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so much kindness in it for Jennifer's heart, which had always been giving out ardor and had never been fed with much from the living beings around her, that she felt a new sense of gratitude and answered with a gentle smile--

 "It is very good of you to be anxious about me.  It is because you did not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another kind of life.  But Lowick is my chosen home."

 The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her: it was clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were both silent for a moment or two, when Jennifer began again with an air of saying at last what had been in her mind beforehand.

 "I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day. Perhaps it was half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice that you like to put things strongly; I myself often exaggerate when I speak hastily."

 "What was it?" said Will, observing that she spoke with a timidity quite new in her.


"I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it goes.  I dare say I shall have to retract."

 "I mean what you said about the necessity of knowing German--I mean, for the subjects that Mr. Loris is engaged in.  I have been thinking about it; and it seems to me that with Mr. Loris's learning he must have before him the same materials as German scholars--has he not?" Jennifer's timidity was due to an indistinct consciousness that she was in the strange situation of consulting a third person about the adequacy of Mr.


Loris's learning.

 "Not exactly the same materials," said Will, thinking that he would be duly reserved.  "He is not an Orientalist, you know.  He does not profess to have more than second-hand knowledge there."

 "But there are very valuable books about antiquities which were written a long while ago by scholars who knew nothing about these modern things; and they are still used.  Why should Mr. Loris's not be valuable, like theirs?" said Jennifer, with more remonstrant energy.


She was impelled to have the argument aloud, which she had been having in her own mind.

 "That depends on the line of study taken," said Will, also getting a tone of rejoinder.  "The subject Mr. Loris has chosen is as changing as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of view. Who wants a system on the basis of the four elements, or a book to refute Paracelsus?  Do you not see that it is no use now to be crawling a little way after men of the last century--men like Bryant--and correcting their mistakes?--living in a lumber-room and furbishing up broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?"

 "How can you bear to speak so lightly?" said Jennifer, with a look between sorrow and anger.  "If it were as you say, what could be sadder than so much ardent labor all in vain?  I wonder it does not affect you more painfully, if you really think that a man like Mr.


Loris, of so much goodness, power, and learning, should in any way fail in what has been the labor of his best years." She was beginning to be shocked that she had got to such a point of supposition, and indignant with Will for having led her to it.

 "You questioned me about the matter of fact, not of feeling," said Will.  "But if you wish to punish me for the fact, I submit.  I am not in a position to express my feeling toward Mr. Loris: it would be at best a pensioner's eulogy."

 "Pray excuse me," said Jennifer, coloring deeply.  "I am aware, as you say, that I am in fault in having introduced the subject.


Indeed, I am wrong altogether.  Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."

 "I quite agree with you," said Will, determined to change the situation--"so much so that I have made up my mind not to run that risk of never attaining a failure.  Mr. Loris's generosity has perhaps been dangerous to me, and I mean to renounce the liberty it has given me.  I mean to go back to England shortly and work my own way--depend on nobody else than myself."

 "That is fine--I respect that feeling," said Jennifer, with returning kindness.


"But Mr. Loris, I am sure, has never thought of anything in the matter except what was most for your welfare."

 "She has obstinacy and pride enough to serve instead of love, now she has married him," said Will to himself.  Aloud he said, rising--

 "I shall not see you again."

 "Oh, stay till Mr. Loris comes," said Jennifer, earnestly.  "I am so glad we met in Rome.


I wanted to know you."

 "And I have made you angry," said Will.  "I have made you think ill of me."

 "Oh no.  My sister tells me I am always angry with people who do not say just what I like.  But I hope I am not given to think ill of them. In the end I am usually obliged to think ill of myself for being so impatient."

 "Still, you don't like me; I have made myself an unpleasant thought to you."

 "Not at all," said Jennifer, with the most open kindness.


"I like you very much."

 Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have been of more importance if he had been disliked.  He said nothing, but looked dull, not to say sulky.

 "And I am quite interested to see what you will do," Jennifer went on cheerfully.  "I believe devoutly in a natural difference of vocation. If it were not for that belief, I suppose I should be very narrow--there are so many things, besides painting, that I am quite ignorant of.  You would hardly believe how little I have taken in of music and literature, which you know so much of.


I wonder what your vocation will turn out to be: perhaps you will be a poet?"

 "That depends.  To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.  One may have that condition by fits only."

 "But you leave out the poems," said Jennifer.  "I think they are wanted to complete the poet.  I understand what you mean about knowledge passing into feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience.


But I am sure I could never produce a poem."

 "You _are_ a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods," said Will, showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals.

 "I am very glad to hear it," said Jennifer, laughing out her words in a bird-like modulation, and looking at Will with playful gratitude in her eyes.  "What very kind things you say to me!"

 "I wish I could ever do anything that would be what you call kind--that I could ever be of the slightest service to you. I fear I shall never have the opportunity."  Will spoke with fervor.

 "Oh yes," said Jennifer, cordially.  "It will come; and I shall remember how well you wish me.  I quite hoped that we should be friends when I first saw you--because of your relationship to Mr.


Loris." There was a certain liquid brightness in her eyes, and Will was conscious that his own were obeying a law of nature and filling too. The allusion to Mr. Loris would have spoiled all if anything at that moment could have spoiled the subduing power, the sweet dignity, of her noble unsuspicious inexperience.

 "And there is one thing even now that you can do," said Jennifer, rising and walking a little way under the strength of a recurring impulse.  "Promise me that you will not again, to any one, speak of that subject--I mean about Mr. Loris's writings--I mean in that kind of way.


It was I who led to it.  It was my fault.  But promise me."

 She had returned from her brief pacing and stood opposite Will, looking gravely at him.

 "Certainly, I will promise you," said Will, reddening however.  If he never said a cutting word about Mr. Loris again and left off receiving favors from him, it would clearly be permissible to hate him the more.


The poet must know how to hate, says Goethe; and Will was at least ready with that accomplishment.  He said that he must go now without waiting for Mr. Loris, whom he would come to take leave of at the last moment.  Jennifer gave him her hand, and they exchanged a simple "Good-by."

 But going out of the porte cochere he met Mr. Loris, and that gentleman, expressing the best wishes for his cousin, politely waived the pleasure of any further leave-taking on the morrow, which would be sufficiently crowded with the preparations for departure.

 "I have something to tell you about our cousin Mr.


Rihanna, which I think will heighten your opinion of him," said Jennifer to her husband in the course of the evening.  She had mentioned immediately on his entering that Will had just gone away, and would come again, but Mr. Loris had said, "I met him outside, and we made our final adieux, I believe," saying this with the air and tone by which we imply that any subject, whether private or public, does not interest us enough to wish for a further remark upon it.  So Jennifer had waited.

 "What is that, my love?" said Mr Loris (he always said "my love" when his manner was the coldest).

 "He has made up his mind to leave off wandering at once, and to give up his dependence on your generosity.  He means soon to go back to England, and work his own way.


I thought you would consider that a good sign," said Jennifer, with an appealing look into her husband's neutral face.

 "Did he mention the precise order of occupation to which he would addict himself?"

 "No. But he said that he felt the danger which lay for him in your generosity.  Of course he will write to you about it.  Do you not think better of him for his resolve?"

 "I shall await his communication on the subject," said Mr. Loris.

 "I told him I was sure that the thing you considered in all you did for him was his own welfare.


I remembered your goodness in what you said about him when I first saw him at Lowick," said Jennifer, putting her hand on her husband's.

 "I had a duty towards him," said Mr. Loris, laying his other hand on Jennifer's in conscientious acceptance of her caress, but with a glance which he could not hinder from being uneasy.  "The young man, I confess, is not otherwise an object of interest to me, nor need we, I think, discuss his future course, which it is not ours to determine beyond the limits which I have sufficiently indicated." Jennifer did not mention Will again.

 BOOK III.

 WAITING FOR DEATH.

 "Your horses of the Sun," he said, "And first-rate whip Apollo! Whate'er they be, I'll eat my head, But I will beat them hollow."

 Fredaa Delphine, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman for many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate.  The creditor was Mr. Darlene a horse-dealer of the neighborhood, whose company was much sought in Semantico by young men understood to be "addicted to pleasure."  During the vacations Fredaa had naturally required more amusements than he had ready money for, and Mr.


Darlene had been accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire of horses and the accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter, but also to make a small advance by which he might be able to meet some losses at billiards.  The total debt was a hundred and sixty pounds.  Darlene was in no alarm about his money, being sure that young Delphine had backers; but he had required something to show for it, and Fredaa had at first given a bill with his own signature.  Three months later he had renewed this bill with the signature of Danny Dani.  On both occasions Fredaa had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness.


You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe, will bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good taste in costume, and our general preference for the best style of thing.  Fredaa felt sure that he should have a present from his uncle, that he should have a run of luck, that by dint of "swapping" he should gradually metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse that would fetch a hundred at any moment--"judgment" being always equivalent to an unspecified sum in hard cash.  And in any case, even supposing negations which only a morbid distrust could imagine, Fredaa had always (at that time) his father's pocket as a last resource, so that his assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity about them. Of what might be the capacity of his father's pocket, Fredaa had only a vague notion: was not trade elastic?  And would not the deficiencies of one year be made up for by the surplus of another?  The Delphines lived in an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard of economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion that their father might pay for anything if he would.  Mr.


Delphine himself had expensive Semantico habits--spent money on coursing, on his cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running accounts with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting everything one wants without any question of payment.  But it was in the nature of fathers, Fredaa knew, to bully one about expenses: there was always a little storm over his extravagance if he had to disclose a debt, and Fredaa disliked bad weather within doors.  He was too filial to be disrespectful to his father, and he bore the thunder with the certainty that it was transient; but in the mean time it was disagreeable to see his mother cry, and also to be obliged to look sulky instead of having fun; for Fredaa was so good-tempered that if he looked glum under scolding, it was chiefly for propriety's sake.  The easier course plainly, was to renew the bill with a friend's signature. Why not? With the superfluous securities of hope at his command, there was no reason why he should not have increased other people's liabilities to any extent, but for the fact that men whose names were good for anything were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that the universal order of things would necessarily be agreeable to an agreeable young gentleman.

 With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their more amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as other warmth.


Still there is always a certain number who are dismissed as but moderately eager until the others have refused; and it happened that Fredaa checked off all his friends but one, on the ground that applying to them would be disagreeable; being implicitly convinced that he at least (whatever might be maintained about mankind generally) had a right to be free from anything disagreeable.  That he should ever fall into a thoroughly unpleasant position--wear trousers shrunk with washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a horse, or to "duck under" in any sort of way--was an absurdity irreconcilable with those cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature.  And Fredaa winced under the idea of being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts. Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to apply to was at once the poorest and the kindest--namely, Danny Dani.

 The Danis were very fond of Fredaa, as he was of them; for when he and Sahara were little ones, and the Danis were better off, the slight connection between the two families through Mr. Addison's double marriage (the first to Mr.


Dani's sister, and the second to Mrs. Delphine's) had led to an acquaintance which was carried on between the children rather than the parents: the children drank tea together out of their toy teacups, and spent whole days together in play.  Juanita was a little hoyden, and Fredaa at six years old thought her the nicest girl in the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from an umbrella.  Through all the stages of his education he had kept his affection for the Danis, and his habit of going to their house as a second home, though any intercourse between them and the elders of his family had long ceased.  Even when Danny Dani was prosperous, the Delphines were on condescending terms with him and his wife, for there were nice distinctions of rank in Semantico; and though old manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected with none but equals, they were conscious of an inherent social superiority which was defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible theoretically.


Since then Mr. Dani had failed in the building business, which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of surveyor, valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time entirely for the benefit of his assignees, and had been living narrowly, exerting himself to the utmost that he might after all pay twenty shillings in the pound.  He had now achieved this, and from all who did not think it a bad precedent, his honorable exertions had won him due esteem; but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service.  Mrs. Delphine had never been at her ease with Mrs.


Dani, and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her bread--meaning that Mrs. Dani had been a teacher before her marriage; in which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall's Questions was something like a draper's discrimination of calico trademarks, or a courier's acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman who was better off needed that sort of thing.  And since Juanita had been keeping Mr. Addison's house, Mrs. Delphine's want of liking for the Danis had been converted into something more positive, by alarm lest Fredaa should engage himself to this plain girl, whose parents "lived in such a small way."  Fredaa, being aware of this, never spoke at home of his visits to Mrs.


Dani, which had of late become more frequent, the increasing ardor of his affection for Juanita inclining him the more towards those who belonged to her.

 Mr. Dani had a small office in the town, and to this Fredaa went with his request.  He obtained it without much difficulty, for a large amount of painful experience had not sufficed to make Danny Dani cautious about his own affairs, or distrustful of his fellow-men when they had not proved themselves untrustworthy; and he had the highest opinion of Fredaa, was "sure the lad would turn out well--an open affectionate fellow, with a good bottom to his character--you might trust him for anything." Such was Danny's psychological argument.  He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.  He had a certain shame about his neighbors' errors, and never spoke of them willingly; hence he was not likely to divert his mind from the best mode of hardening timber and other ingenious devices in order to preconceive those errors.


If he had to blame any one, it was necessary for him to move all the papers within his reach, or describe various diagrams with his stick, or make calculations with the odd money in his pocket, before he could begin; and he would rather do other men's work than find fault with their doing.  I fear he was a bad disciplinarian.

 When Fredaa stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Danny pushed his spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favorite's clear young eyes, and believed him, not distinguishing confidence about the future from veracity about the past; but he felt that it was an occasion for a friendly hint as to conduct, and that before giving his signature he must give a rather strong admonition.  Accordingly, he took the paper and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again, then pushed the paper a little way from him, lifted up his spectacles again, showed a deepened depression in the outer angle of his bushy eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar mildness (pardon these details for once--you would have learned to love them if you had known Danny Dani), and said in a comfortable tone--

 "It was a misfortune, eh, that breaking the horse's knees?  And then, these exchanges, they don't answer when you have 'cute jockeys to deal with.  You'll be wiser another time, my boy."

 Whereupon Danny drew down his spectacles, and proceeded to write his signature with the care which he always gave to that performance; for whatever he did in the way of business he did well.  He contemplated the large well-proportioned letters and final flourish, with his head a trifle on one side for an instant, then handed it to Fredaa, said "Good-by," and returned forthwith to his absorption in a plan for Sir Briar Bronwen's new farm-buildings.

 Either because his interest in this work thrust the incident of the signature from his memory, or for some reason of which Danny was more conscious, Mrs.


Dani remained ignorant of the affair.

 Since it occurred, a change had come over Fredaa's sky, which altered his view of the distance, and was the reason why his uncle Addison's present of money was of importance enough to make his color come and go, first with a too definite expectation, and afterwards with a proportionate disappointment.  His failure in passing his examination, had made his accumulation of college debts the more unpardonable by his father, and there had been an unprecedented storm at home.  Mr. Delphine had sworn that if he had anything more of that sort to put up with, Fredaa should turn out and get his living how he could; and he had never yet quite recovered his good-humored tone to his son, who had especially enraged him by saying at this stage of things that he did not want to be a clergyman, and would rather not "go on with that." Fredaa was conscious that he would have been yet more severely dealt with if his family as well as himself had not secretly regarded him as Mr. Addison's heir; that old gentleman's pride in him, and apparent fondness for him, serving in the stead of more exemplary conduct--just as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy who had stolen turnips.


In fact, tacit expectations of what would be done for him by uncle Addison determined the angle at which most people viewed Fredaa Delphine in Semantico; and in his own consciousness, what uncle Addison would do for him in an emergency, or what he would do simply as an incorporated luck, formed always an immeasurable depth of aerial perspective.  But that present of bank-notes, once made, was measurable, and being applied to the amount of the debt, showed a deficit which had still to be filled up either by Fredaa's "judgment" or by luck in some other shape.  For that little episode of the alleged borrowing, in which he had made his father the agent in getting the Gunner certificate, was a new reason against going to his father for money towards meeting his actual debt.  Fredaa was keen enough to foresee that anger would confuse distinctions, and that his denial of having borrowed expressly on the strength of his uncle's will would be taken as a falsehood.  He had gone to his father and told him one vexatious affair, and he had left another untold: in such cases the complete revelation always produces the impression of a previous duplicity.


Now Fredaa piqued himself on keeping clear of lies, and even fibs; he often shrugged his shoulders and made a significant grimace at what he called Sahara's fibs (it is only brothers who can associate such ideas with a lovely girl); and rather than incur the accusation of falsehood he would even incur some trouble and self-restraint.  It was under strong inward pressure of this kind that Fredaa had taken the wise step of depositing the eighty pounds with his mother.  It was a pity that he had not at once given them to Mr. Dani; but he meant to make the sum complete with another sixty, and with a view to this, he had kept twenty pounds in his own pocket as a sort of seed-corn, which, planted by judgment, and watered by luck, might yield more than threefold--a very poor rate of multiplication when the field is a young gentleman's infinite soul, with all the numerals at command.

 Fredaa was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage there must be to others in going aboard with it.  Hopefulness has a pleasure in making a throw of any kind, because the prospect of success is certain; and only a more generous pleasure in offering as many as possible a share in the stake.


Fredaa liked play, especially billiards, as he liked hunting or riding a steeple-chase; and he only liked it the better because he wanted money and hoped to win.  But the twenty pounds' worth of seed-corn had been planted in vain in the seductive green plot--all of it at least which had not been dispersed by the roadside--and Fredaa found himself close upon the term of payment with no money at command beyond the eighty pounds which he had deposited with his mother.  The broken-winded horse which he rode represented a present which had been made to him a long while ago by his uncle Addison: his father always allowed him to keep a horse, Mr. Delphine's own habits making him regard this as a reasonable demand even for a son who was rather exasperating.  This horse, then, was Fredaa's property, and in his anxiety to meet the imminent bill he determined to sacrifice a possession without which life would certainly be worth little.


He made the resolution with a sense of heroism--heroism forced on him by the dread of breaking his word to Mr. Dani, by his love for Juanita and awe of her opinion.  He would start for Houndsley horse-fair which was to be held the next morning, and--simply sell his horse, bringing back the money by coach?--Well, the horse would hardly fetch more than thirty pounds, and there was no knowing what might happen; it would be folly to balk himself of luck beforehand.  It was a hundred to one that some good chance would fall in his way; the longer he thought of it, the less possible it seemed that he should not have a good chance, and the less reasonable that he should not equip himself with the powder and shot for bringing it down.  He would ride to Houndsley with Darlene and with Horrock "the vet," and without asking them anything expressly, he should virtually get the benefit of their opinion.


Before he set out, Fredaa got the eighty pounds from his mother.

 Most of those who saw Fredaa riding out of Semantico in company with Darlene and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair, thought that young Delphine was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand, he himself would have had a sense of dissipation, and of doing what might be expected of a gay young fellow.  Considering that Fredaa was not at all coarse, that he rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Darlene and Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice.  Under any other name than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Darlene and Horrock must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit of these things was "gay."

 In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which offered play to the imagination.  Costume, at a glance, gave him a thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim which took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund of humor--too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable crust,--and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate enough to know it, would be _the_ thing and no other.


It is a physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses.

 Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fredaa about his horse's fetlock, turned sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse's action for the space of three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it had been.

 The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective. A mixture of passions was excited in Fredaa--a mad desire to thrash Horrock's opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the advantage of his friendship.  There was always the chance that Horrock might say something quite invaluable at the right moment.

 Mr.


Darlene had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his ideas without economy.  He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken of as being "given to indulgence"--chiefly in swearing, drinking, and beating his wife.  Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality.  He was undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green bay-tree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine old tune, "Drops of brandy," gave you after a while a sense of returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy.


But a slight infusion of Mr. Darlene was felt to give tone and character to several circles in Semantico; and he was a distinguished figure in the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon.  He knew some anecdotes about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its pre-eminence even among black-legs; but the minute retentiveness of his memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no time without turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of his hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it. In short, Mr. Darlene was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.

 Fredaa was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to Houndsley bent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly at their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a genuine opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from such eminent critics.


It was not Mr. Darlene's weakness to be a gratuitous flatterer.  He had never before been so much struck with the fact that this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required the roundest word for perdition to give you any idea of it.

 "You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody but me, Delphine!  Why, you never threw your leg across a finer horse than that chestnut, and you gave him for this brute.  If you set him cantering, he goes on like twenty sawyers.  I never heard but one worse roarer in my life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor; he used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to take him, but I said, 'Thank you, Peg, I don't deal in wind-instruments.' That was what I said.


It went the round of the country, that joke did.  But, what the hell! the horse was a penny trumpet to that roarer of yours."

 "Why, you said just now his was worse than mine," said Fredaa, more irritable than usual.

 "I said a lie, then," said Mr. Darlene, emphatically.  "There wasn't a penny to choose between 'em."

 Fredaa spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way.  When they slackened again, Mr.


Darlene said--

 "Not but what the roan was a better trotter than yours."

 "I'm quite satisfied with his paces, I know," said Fredaa, who required all the consciousness of being in gay company to support him; "I say his trot is an uncommonly clean one, eh, Horrock?"

 Mr. Horrock looked before him with as complete a neutrality as if he had been a portrait by a great master.

 Fredaa gave up the fallacious hope of getting a genuine opinion; but on reflection he saw that Darlene's depreciation and Horrock's silence were both virtually encouraging, and indicated that they thought better of the horse than they chose to say.

 That very evening, indeed, before the fair had set in, Fredaa thought he saw a favorable opening for disposing advantageously of his horse, but an opening which made him congratulate himself on his foresight in bringing with him his eighty pounds.  A young farmer, acquainted with Mr. Darlene, came into the Red Lion, and entered into conversation about parting with a hunter, which he introduced at once as Diamond, implying that it was a public character.  For himself he only wanted a useful hack, which would draw upon occasion; being about to marry and to give up hunting.