His customary enjoyment of dinner convinced Mr. Weyburn that he had not brooded morbidly over his phantom Browny, and could meet Aminta, Countess of Ormont, on the next occasion with the sentiments proper to a common official. Did she not set him a commendable example? He admired her for not concealing her disdain of the aspirant schoolmaster, quite comprehending, by sympathy, why the woman should reproach the girl who had worshipped heroes, if this was a full-grown specimen; and the reply of the shamed girl, that in her ignorance she could not know better. He spared the girl, but he laughed at the woman he commended, laughed at himself.
Aminta's humour was being stirred about the same time. She and her aunt were at the dinner-table in the absence of my lord. The dinner had passed with the stiff dialogue peculiar to couples under supervision of their inferiors; and, as soon as the room was clear, she had asked her aunt, touching the secretary: "Have you seen him?"
Mrs. Nargett Pagnell's answer could have been amusing only to one whose intimate knowledge of her found it characteristically salt; for she was a lady of speech addressed ever directly or roundabout to the chief point of business between herself and her hearer, and the more she was brief, oblique, far-shooting, the more comically intelligible she was to her niece. She bent her head to signify that she had seen the secretary, and struck the table with both hands, exclaiming:
"Well, to be sure, Lord Ormont!"
Their discussion, before they descended the stairs to dinner, concerned his lordship's extraordinary indifference to the thronging of handsome young men around his young countess.
Here, the implication ran, is one established in the house.
Aminta's thoughts could be phrased: "Yes, that is true, for one part of it."
As for the other part, the ascent of a Phoebus Apollo, with his golden bow and quiver off the fairest of Eastern horizon skies, followed suddenly by the sight of him toppling over in Mr. Cuper's long-skirted brown coat, with spectacles and cane, is an image that hardly exceeds the degradation she conceived. It was past ludicrous; yet admitted of no woefulness, nothing soothingly pathetic. It smothered and barked at the dreams of her blooming spring of life, to which her mind had latterly been turning back, for an escape from sour, one may say cynical, reflections, the present issue of a beautiful young woman's first savour of battle with the world.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
A female free-thinker is one of Satan's concubines
A free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon
All that Matey and Browny were forbidden to write they looked
Cajoled like a twenty-year-old yahoo at college
Could not understand enthusiasm for the schoolmaster's career
Curious thing would be if curious things should fail to happen
Few men can forbear to tell a spicy story of their friends
He began ambitiously—It's the way at the beginning
He loathed a skulker
I'm for a rational Deity
Loathing of artifice to raise emotion
Nevertheless, inclinations are an infidelity
Published Memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity
The despot is alert at every issue, to every chance
Things were lumpish and gloomy that day of the week
We shall want a war to teach the country the value of courage
You'll have to guess at half of everything he tells you
You're going to be men, meaning something better than women