“We are well off for wild flowers here,” he answered.

“Do not leave him, Mr. Whitford.”

“He will not want me.”

“You are devoted to him.”

“I can’t pretend that.”

“Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee . . .  If any occur, why should they drive you away?”

“Well, I’m two and thirty, and have never been in the fray:  a kind of nondescript, half scholar, and by nature half billman or bowman or musketeer; if I’m worth anything, London’s the field for me.  But that’s what I have to try.”

“Papa will not like your serving with your pen in London:  he will say you are worth too much for that.”

“Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked above them.”

“They are wasted, he says.”

“Error!  If they have their private ambition, they may suppose they are wasted.  But the value to the world of a private ambition, I do not clearly understand.”

“You have not an evil opinion of the world?” said Miss Middleton, sick at heart as she spoke, with the sensation of having invited herself to take a drop of poison.

He replied:  “One might as well have an evil opinion of a river:  here it’s muddy, there it’s clear; one day troubled, another at rest.  We have to treat it with common sense.”

“Love it?”

“In the sense of serving it.”

“Not think it beautiful?”

“Part of it is, part of it the reverse.”

“Papa would quote the ‘mulier formosa’”.

“Except that ‘fish’ is too good for the black extremity.  ‘Woman’ is excellent for the upper.”

“How do you say that?—­not cynically, I believe.  Your view commends itself to my reason.”

She was grateful to him for not stating it in ideal contrast with Sir Willoughby’s view.  If he had, so intensely did her youthful blood desire to be enamoured of the world, that she felt he would have lifted her off her feet.  For a moment a gulf beneath had been threatening.  When she said, “Love it?” a little enthusiasm would have wafted her into space fierily as wine; but the sober, “In the sense of serving it”, entered her brain, and was matter for reflection upon it and him.

She could think of him in pleasant liberty, uncorrected by her woman’s instinct of peril.  He had neither arts nor graces; nothing of his cousin’s easy social front-face.  She had once witnessed the military precision of his dancing, and had to learn to like him before she ceased to pray that she might never be the victim of it as his partner.  He walked heroically, his pedestrian vigour being famous, but that means one who walks away from the sex, not excelling in the recreations where men and women join hands.  He was not much of a horseman either.  Sir Willoughby enjoyed seeing him on horseback.  And he could scarcely be said to shine in a drawingroom, unless when seated beside a person ready for real talk.  Even more than his merits, his demerits