‘And now he yawns,’ is what I shall say of you only when I am sure you have just heard a good thing.  You really are the best fellow of your set that I have come across, and the only one pretending to brains.  Your modesty in estimating your value as a leader of Pandours will be pleasing to them who like that modesty.  Good-bye.  This little Emilia is a marvel of flying moods.  Yesterday she went about as if she said, ’I’ve promised Apollo not to speak till to-morrow.’  To-day, she’s in a feverish gabble —­or began the day with a burst of it; and now she’s soft and sensible.  If you fancy a girl at her age being able to see, that it’s a woman’s duty to herself and the world to be artistic—­to perfect the thing of beauty she is meant to be by nature!—­and, seeing, too, that Love is an instrument like any other thing, and that we must play on it with considerate gentleness, and that tearing at it or dashing it to earth, making it howl and quiver, is madness, and not love!—­I assure you she begins to see it!  She does see it.  She is going to wear a wreath of black briony (preserved and set by Miss Ford, a person cunning in these matters).  She’s going to the ball at Penarvon Castle, and will look—­ supply your favourite slang word.  A little more experience, and she will have malice.  She wants nothing but that to make her consummate.  Malice is the barb of beauty.  She’s just at present a trifle blunt.  She will knock over, but not transfix.  I am anxious to watch the effect she produces at Penarvon.  Poor little woman!  I paid a compliment to her eyes.  ‘I’ve got nothing else,’ said she.  Dine as well as you can while you are in England.  German cookery is an education for the sentiment of hogs.  The play of sour and sweet, and crowning of the whole with fat, shows a people determined to go down in civilization, and try the business backwards.  Adieu, curst Croat!  On the Wallachian border mayst thou gather philosophy from meditation.”

CHAPTER XLIV

Dexterously as Wilfrid has turned Tracy to his uses by means of the foregoing correspondence, in doing so he had exposed himself to the retributive poison administered by that cunning youth.  And now the Hippogriff seized him, and mounted with him into mid-air; not as when the idle boy Ganymede was caught up to act as cup-bearer in celestial Courts, but to plunge about on yielding vapours, with nothing near him save the voice of his desire.

The Philosopher here peremptorily demands the pulpit.  We are subject, he says, to fantastic moods, and shall dry ready-minted phrases picture them forth?  As, for example, can the words ‘delirium,’ or ‘frenzy,’ convey an image of Wilfrid’s state, when his heart began to covet Emilia again, and his sentiment not only interposed no obstacle, but trumpeted her charms and fawned for her, and he thought her lost, remembered that she had been his own, and was ready to do any madness to obtain her?