It was about eleven o'clock in the day. The London thunder had not begun. There might be a few carts creeping about the streets, but they crept lazily and almost silently; the rattle of a hackney-coach might be heard here and there, but still it was but a temporary rattle; and the comparative stillness of the whole town gave a dreamy sort of quietude to the air, which was pleasant and full of repose. It harmonized well with the character of the day, too, for it was quite a summer morning.
The sun was streaming into Lady Fleetwood's drawing-room, sending oblique rays over the corner of the houses of a neighbouring street, and the motes were dancing drowsily in the long pencils of light. A droning fly, which had somehow or other got into a long-necked, deep blue carnation-glass, and could not get out again, was buzzing as if it had nearly tired itself to sleep; and the waving of the plants at the open windows, stirred by a light air, had a slumberous sound with it.
"Really, this is very pleasant!" thought Lady Fleetwood, as she sat, after breakfast, enjoying the delicious sensation of life which a fine summer day gives; "it is all so calm and tranquil that one could almost go to sleep."
Strange, strange life!--that one of thy best blessings should be to lose the consciousness of thine existence!
She soon found, however, that to go to sleep was not for her. Hardly had the thought passed through her brain when a sharp double knock at the door dispelled the stillness, and the next moment Charles Marston, the incarnation of mobility, entered.
"Well, my dear aunt," he said, "I have determined upon my course for the day; laid out everything in the most methodical and scientific manner; and having just half-an-hour to spare, came to bestow it upon you."
"You should really go and see your uncle, my dear Charles," replied Lady Fleetwood. "It would have been much better to have given it to him instead of to me; for he may well be offended if he hears you have been here twice without going near him."
"You are wrong, dearest of aunts!--you are wrong," answered Charles: "you always are sweetly wrong, you know, most excellent of women. I sent half-an-hour ago, to ask if he was at home; for, although one may have to swallow a bitter pill now and then, there is no reason why one should needlessly walk a mile and a half to take it. But he was out; and so, when I go hence, I shall diligently pursue him to his dingy hole in the city, where pray heaven there may be plenty of business stirring to cut our conference short! I am now only waiting for Winkworth, who is going to the city too."
"I cannot think, Charles, why you should feel such a distaste to your uncle's conversation," said Lady Fleetwood, meditating upon the problem; "everybody admits he is a clever man."
"Undoubtedly, my dear aunt," replied Charles; "but I will tell you why I am not very fond of his conversation. It is because that same conversation of his transforms everything into arithmetic. Now, I never had an arithmetical head in my life: I know that two and two make four, but it has not been the study of my life to discover how many blue beans make five. I cannot calculate friendships by the rules of profit and loss, nor look on love upon the principles of tare and tret, nor subject every feeling of the heart to the computations of the interest-table, nor measure poetry by the square foot, nor extract the cube root of an acquaintance's purse, in order to estimate how intimate I should become with him, nor regulate my own thoughts and wishes by quadratic equations, nor always keep my own conduct and purposes within an exact parallelogram. The sages of Laputa must have been great bores, my dear aunt; but they were nothing, depend upon it, to the men of the present day, who subject not only their understandings, but their very emotions, to the stiffest rules of calculation. Besides, the sight of poor Miss Hayley has not altogether taught me to like my uncle better--nor has what you said about him, it à propos to her."