"I love to hear you talk of your youth," she said one day, when he had been talking of his boyhood at Marlborough, and at home—the dull old parsonage—the house-mother, always busy, and often scolding, troubled about many things; the father, chewing the cud of somebody else's sermon, in a shabby little den of a study, reeking of tobacco; a sermon to be dribbled out slowly next Sunday morning, in a style of elocution, or non-elocution, happily almost extinct.
"Tell me about your life in Paris," she went on, encouraging him to forget his present pains in those old memories. "That must have been full of interest."
"It was a life of grinding toil, and gnawing anxiety," he answered impatiently. "There is not a detail that could interest you."
"Everything in your past history interests me, Julian. I know how hard you worked in Paris. I saw your desk, the place where you sat night after night, the lamp that lighted you. Mr. Blümenlein has altered nothing in your rooms."
"Vastly civil of him," muttered Wyllard, as if revolting against patronage from a dealer in fancy goods.
"But however hard you worked, you must have had some associations with the outer world," pursued Dora. "You must have felt the fever and the excitement of that time. You must have been interested in the men who governed France."
"I was interested in the stocks that went up and down, and in the men who governed France, so far as their conduct influenced the Bourse. A man who is running a race, neck or nothing, a race that means life or death, has no time to think of anything outside the course. The external world has no existence for him."
"And you knew nothing of the master-spirits of the Empire, the men of science, the writers, the painters?"
"My child, how innocent you are! The men who write books and paint pictures have no more direct influence upon an epoch than the tailors who build coats and the milliners who make gowns. The master-spirits are the politicians and financiers. Those are the rulers of their age. All the rest are servants."
Bothwell had shown himself deeply moved by the affliction that had fallen on his cousin's husband. Every feeling of ill-will vanished in a breath before the face of that supreme misfortune—a life smitten to the dust. Bothwell was too generous-hearted to remember that the master of Penmorval had not been altogether kind in the past. His only thought was how he could help, were it by ever so little, to lighten Julian Wyllard's burden. He was all the more sympathetic when he found that the sufferer had thought of him and of his interests even in the hour of calamity, while the blow that crushed him was still a new thing.