“Oh! not England, Italy, Italy!” Renée exclaimed: “Italy, or Greece: anywhere where we have sunlight. Mountains and valleys are my dream. Promise it, Nevil. I will obey you; but this is my wish. Take me through Venice, that I may look at myself and wonder. We can live at sea, in a yacht; anywhere with you but in England. This country frowns on me; I can hardly fetch my breath here, I am suffocated. The people all walk in lines in England. Not here, Nevil! They are good people, I am sure; and it is your country: but their faces chill me, their voices grate; I should never understand them; they would be to me like their fogs eternally; and I to them? O me! it would be like hearing sentence in the dampness of the shroud perpetually. Again I say I do not doubt that they are very good: they claim to be; they judge others; they may know how to make themselves happy in their climate; it is common to most creatures to do so, or to imagine it. Nevil! not England!”
Truly “the mad commander and his French marquise” of the Bevisham Election ballad would make a pretty figure in England!
His friends of his own class would be mouthing it. The story would be a dogging shadow of his public life, and, quite as bad, a reflection on his party. He heard the yelping tongues of the cynics. He saw the consternation and grief of his old Bevisham hero, his leader and his teacher.
“Florence,” he said, musing on the prospect of exile and idleness: “there’s a kind of society to be had in Florence.”
Renée asked him if he cared so much for society.
He replied that women must have it, just as men must have exercise.
“Old women, Nevil; intriguers, tattlers.”
“Young women, Renée.”
She signified no.
He shook the head of superior knowledge paternally.