’No, no—­of course you did not.  Well, though I never saw his face, to my knowledge, till a short time ago, I know enough to say that, if earnest representations can prevent it, this marriage shall not be.  Father knew him, or about him, very well; and he once told me—­what I cannot tell you.  Fancy, I have seen him three times—­yesterday, last night, and this morning—­besides helping him on the road some weeks ago, and never once considered that he might be Lord Mountclere.  He is here almost in disguise, one may say; neither man nor horse is with him; and his object accounts for his privacy.  I see how it is—­she is doing this to benefit her brothers and sisters, if possible; but she ought to know that if she is miserable they will never be happy.  That’s the nature of women—­they take the form for the essence, and that’s what she is doing now.  I should think her guardian angel must have quitted her when she agreed to a marriage which may tear her heart out like a claw.’

’You are too warm about it, Kit—­it cannot be so bad as that.  It is not the thing, but the sensitiveness to the thing, which is the true measure of its pain.  Perhaps what seems so bad to you falls lightly on her mind.  A campaigner in a heavy rain is not more uncomfortable than we are in a slight draught; and Ethelberta, fortified by her sapphires and gold cups and wax candles, will not mind facts which look like spectres to us outside.  A title will turn troubles into romances, and she will shine as an interesting viscountess in spite of them.’

The discussion with Faith was not continued, Christopher stopping the argument by saying that he had a good mind to go off at once to Knollsea, and show her her danger.  But till the next morning Ethelberta was certainly safe; no marriage was possible anywhere before then.  He passed the afternoon in a state of great indecision, constantly reiterating, ’I will go!’

41.  Workshops—­an inn—­the street

On an extensive plot of ground, lying somewhere between the Thames and the Kensington squares, stood the premises of Messrs. Nockett and Perch, builders and contractors.  The yard with its workshops formed part of one of those frontier lines between mangy business and garnished domesticity that occur in what are called improving neighbourhoods.  We are accustomed to regard increase as the chief feature in a great city’s progress, its well-known signs greeting our eyes on every outskirt.  Slush-ponds may be seen turning into basement-kitchens; a broad causeway of shattered earthenware smothers plots of budding gooseberry-bushes and vegetable trenches, foundations following so closely upon gardens that the householder may be expected to find cadaverous sprouts from overlooked potatoes rising through the chinks of his cellar floor.  But the other great process, that of internal transmutation, is not less curious than this encroachment of grey upon green.  Its first erections are often only the milk-teeth of a suburb, and as the district rises in dignity they are dislodged by those which are to endure.  Slightness becomes supplanted by comparative solidity, commonness by novelty, lowness and irregularity by symmetry and height.