Ethelberta stood for a moment reflecting, and reflecting hoped that Mrs. Doncastle had not noticed her momentary perplexity.  Crises were becoming as common with her as blackberries; and she had foreseen this one a long time.  It was not that she was to meet Lord Mountclere, for he was only a name and a distant profile to her:  it was that her father would necessarily be present at the meeting, in the most anomalous position that human nature could endure.

However, having often proved in her disjointed experience that the shortest way out of a difficulty lies straight through it, Ethelberta decided to dine at the Doncastles’, and, as she murmured that she should have great pleasure in meeting any friend of theirs, set about contriving how the encounter with her dearest relative might be made safe and unsuspected.  She bade them adieu blithely; but the thoughts engendered by the invitation stood before her as sorrowful and rayless ghosts which could not be laid.  Often at such conjunctures as these, when the futility of her great undertaking was more than usually manifest, did Ethelberta long like a tired child for the conclusion of the whole matter; when her work should be over, and the evening come; when she might draw her boat upon the shore, and in some thymy nook await eternal night with a placid mind.

28.  Ethelberta’s—­Mr. Chickerel’s room

The question of Neigh or no Neigh had reached a pitch of insistence which no longer permitted of dallying, even by a popular beauty.  His character was becoming defined to Ethelberta as something very differently composed from that of her first imagining.  She had set him down to be a man whose external in excitability owed nothing to self-repression, but stood as the natural surface of the mass within.  Neigh’s urban torpor, she said, might have been in the first instance produced by art, but, were it thus, it had gone so far as to permeate him.  This had been disproved, first surprisingly, by his reported statement; wondrously, in the second place, by his call upon her and sudden proposal; thirdly, to a degree simply astounding, by what had occurred in the city that day.  For Neigh, before the fervour had subsided which was produced in him by her look and general power while reading ‘Paradise Lost,’ found himself alone with her in a nook outside the church, and there had almost demanded her promise to be his wife.  She had replied by asking for time, and idly offering him the petals of her rose, that had shed themselves in her hand.  Neigh, in taking them, pressed her fingers more warmly than she thought she had given him warrant for, which offended her.  It was certainly a very momentary affair, and when it was over seemed to surprise himself almost as much as it had vexed her; but it had reminded her of one truth which she was in danger of forgetting.  The town gentleman was not half so far removed from Sol and Dan, and the hard-handed order in general, in his passions as in his philosophy.  He still continued to be the male of his species, and when the heart was hot with a dream Pall Mall had much the same aspect as Wessex.