'Ay, my good Sir Willoughby, but are we so very admirable and exact? Are we never to know our own minds?'
He produced a polysyllabic sigh, like those many-jointed compounds of poets in happy languages, which are copious in a single expression: 'Mine is known to me. It always has been. Cleverness in women is not uncommon. Intellect is the pearl. A woman of intellect is as good as a Greek statue; she is divinely wrought, and she is divinely rare.'
'Proceed,' said the lady, confiding a cough to the air.
'The rarity of it: and it is not mere intellect, it is a sympathetic intellect; or else it is an intellect in perfect accord with an intensely sympathetic disposition; — the rarity of it makes it too precious to be parted with when once we have met it. I prize it the more the older I grow.'
'Are we on the feminine or the neuter?'
'I beg pardon?'
'The universal or the individual?'
He shrugged. 'For the rest, psychological affinities may exist coincident with and entirely independent of material or moral prepossessions, relations, engagements, ties.'
'Well, that is not the raving of passion, certainly,' said Mrs Mountstuart, 'and it sounds as if it were a comfortable doctrine for men. On that plea, you might all of you be having Aspasia and a wife. We saw your fair Middleton and Colonel de Craye at a distance as we entered the park. Professor Crooklyn is under some hallucination.'
'What more likely?'
The readiness and the double-bearing of the reply struck her comic sense with awe.
'The Professor must hear that. He insists on the fly, and the inn, and the wet boots, and the warming mixture, and the testimony of the landlady and the railway porter.'
'I say, what more likely?'
'Than that he should insist?'
'If he is under the hallucination!'
'He may convince others.'
'I have only to repeat…'
''What more likely? It's extremely philosophical. Coincident with a pursuit of the psychological affinities.'
'Professor Crooklyn will hardly descend, I suppose, from his classical altitudes to lay his hallucinations before Dr. Middleton?'
'Sir Willoughby, you are the pink of chivalry!'
By harping on L?titia, he had emboldened Mrs. Mountstuart to lift the curtain upon Clara. It was offensive to him, but the injury done to his pride had to be endured for the sake of his general plan of self-protection.
'Simply desirous to save my guests from annoyance of any kind', he said. 'Dr Middleton can look 'Olympus and thunder', as Vernon calls it.'
'Don't. I see him. That look! It is Dictionary-bitten! Angry, homed Dictionary! — an apparition of Dictionary in the night — to a dunce!'
'One would undergo a good deal to avoid the sight.'
'What the man must be in a storm! Speak as you please of yourself: you are a true and chivalrous knight to dread it for her. But now, candidly, how is it you cannot condescend to a little management? Listen to an old friend. You are too lordly. No lover can afford to be incomprehensible for half an hour. Stoop a little. Sermonizings are not to be thought of. You can govern unseen. You are to know that I am one who disbelieves in philosophy in love. I admire the look of it, I give no credit to the assumption. I rather like lovers to be out at times: it makes them picturesque, and it enlivens their monotony. I perceived she had a spot of wildness. It's proper that she should wear it off before marriage.'
'Clara? The wildness of an infant!' said Willoughby, paternally, musing over an inward shiver. 'You saw her at a distance just now, or you might have heard her laughing. Horace diverts her excessively.'
'I owe him my eternal gratitude for his behaviour last night. She was one of my bright faces. Her laughter was delicious; rain in the desert! It will tell you what the load on me was, when I assure you those two were merely a spectacle to me — points I scored in a lost game. And I know they were witty.'
'They both have wit; a kind of wit,' Willoughby assented.
'They struck together like a pair of cymbals.'
'Not the highest description of instrument. However, they amuse me. I like to hear them when I am in the vein.'
'That vein should be more at command with you, my friend. You can be perfect, if you like.'
'Under your tuition.'
Willoughby leaned to her, bowing languidly. He was easier in his pain for having hoodwinked the lady. She was the outer world to him; she could tune the world's voice; prescribe which of the two was to be pitied, himself or Clara; and he did not intend it to be himself, if it came to the worst. They were far away from that at present, and he continued:
'Probably a man's power of putting on a face is not equal to a girl's. I detest petty dissensions. Probably I show it when all is not quite smooth. Little fits of suspicion vex me. It is a weakness, not to play them off, I know. Men have to learn the arts which come to women by nature. I don't sympathize with suspicion, from having none myself.'
His eyebrows shot up. That ill-omened man Flitch had sidled round by the bushes to within a few feet of him. Flitch primarily defended himself against the accusation of drunkenness, which was hurled at him to account for his audacity in trespassing against the interdict; but he admitted that he had taken 'something short' for a fortification in visiting scenes where he had once been happy — at Christmastide, when all the servants, and the butler at head, grey old Mr. Chessington, sat in rows, toasting the young heir of the old Hall in the old port wine! Happy had he been then, before ambition for a shop, to be his own master and an independent gentleman, had led him into his quagmire: — to look back envying a dog on the old estate, and sigh for the smell of Patterne stables: sweeter than Arabia, his drooping nose appeared to say.
He held up close against it something that imposed silence on Sir Willoughby as effectively as a cunning exordium in oratory will enchain mobs to swallow what is not complimenting them; and this he displayed secure in its being his licence to drivel his abominable pathos. Sir Willoughby recognized Clara's purse. He understood at once how the must have come by it: he was not so quick in devising a means of stopping the tale. Flitch foiled him. 'Intact,' he replied to the question: 'What have you there?' He repeated this grand word. And then he turned to Mrs. Mountstuart to speak of Paradise and Adam, in whom he saw the prototype of himself: also the Hebrew people in the bondage of Egypt, discoursed of by the clergymen, not without a likeness to him.
'Sorrows have done me one good, to send me attentive to church, my lady,' said Flitch, 'when I might have gone to London, the coachman's home, and been driving some honourable family, with no great advantage to my morals, according to what I hear of. And a purse found under the seat of a fly in London would have a poor chance of returning intact to the young lady losing it.'
'Put it down on that chair; inquiries will be made, and you will see Sir Willoughby,' said Mrs. Mountstuart. 'Intact, no doubt; it is not disputed.'
With one motion of a finger she set the man rounding.
Flitch halted; he was very regretful of the termination of his feast of pathos, and he wished to relate the finding of the purse, but he could not encounter Mrs. Mountstuart's look; he slouched away in very close resemblance to the ejected Adam of illustrated books.
'It's my belief that naturalness among the common people has died out of the kingdom,' she said.
Willoughby charitably apologized for him. 'He has been fuddling himself.'
Her vigilant considerateness had dealt the sensitive gentleman a shock, plainly telling him she had her ideas of his actual posture. Nor was he unhurt by her superior acuteness and her display of authority on his grounds.
He said, boldly, as he weighed the purse, half tossing it: 'It's not unlike Clara's.'
He feared that his lips and cheeks were twitching, and as he grew aware of a glassiness of aspect that would reflect any suspicion of a keen-eyed woman, he became bolder still!
'L?titia's, I know it is not. Hers is an ancient purse.'
'A present from you!'
