[539] Deformem vocant quidam, as in other cases also: but that is because she has eyes and they have none.
[540] For instance, in Highbury or Cranford there might be scandal about a young bachelor's very late visits to a pretty widow. But the adult portion of the population, at any rate, would hardly lay booby-traps to trip him in a river on his return.
[541] An old schoolmaster, whom Raymonde has deeply offended by upsetting his just-gathered mushrooms at the beginning of the book, and who is warmly attached to Antoine, turns out to be the girl's legal father—her mother, a disagreeable, handsome person, having been run away twenty years earlier by another character who has passed hitherto as respectable husband and paterfamilias.
[542] Excepting some of the "Johnny Ludlow" stories, which were, I think, in their kind, better than anything M. Ohnet ever did to my knowledge—I may perhaps observe that the above notice was written, exactly as it stands, before M. Ohnet's death, but under the impression that the death had occurred. When it did, there were things in the obituaries which made me raise my eyebrows. That he was a "belated Romantic" had certainly never occurred to me; but I have no quarrel with the description of him, in another place, as a practitioner of the roman bourgeois.
[543] V. sup. p. 277-280.
[544] The great scene in Mr. Disraeli's Young Duke, when that youthful nobleman loses, what is it? two hundred and seventeen thousand pounds, I think; the brief but poignant plucking of Mr. Dawkins; the occasion in Sans Merci where the hero will not lead trumps, and thereby, though not at once, seals his fate; and a quite nice game at Marmora in Mr. E. F. Benson's The Babe, B.A. emerge from many memories, reinforced by some of actual experience. Marmora is a nice game: with penny stakes, and three players only, you may have five pounds in the pool before you know where you are. But I do not know anything more really exciting than a game at which you guess how many marbles the other fellow holds in his fist. The sequel, however, in which you have to ask for an advance of pocket-money to settle your "differences", is not so pleasant.
[545] Another scene, which brings on the dénouement and in which Claire is again supposed to have the beau rôle, does not please me much better. Thinking that her husband is flirting with the detested Duchess, she publicly orders her out of the house—a very natural, but a rather "fish-faggy" proceeding.
[546] It has been, and will be, pointed out that he was in all ways studious to run before the wind; and it was just at this time, if I remember rightly, that the catchword of "conflict" began to pester one in criticism. Perhaps this was the reason.
[547] The argument, or assumption rather, is all the odder because, on the one hand, orthodoxy holds Free-will (if it accepts that) as a Divine endowment of the Soul: and, on the other, serious Atheism is almost always Determinist. But the study of M. Ohnet was probably not much among the Sentences.
[548] The obituarist above mentioned, who thought M. Ohnet a belated Romantic, thought also that he was "struggling against the rising tide of Realism." I do not think you would ever have found him struggling against rising tides, and, as a matter of fact, the tide was already on the turn.