And now the author of the System was on trial under the eyes of the lady who loved him.  What so kind as they?  Yet are they very rigorous, those soft watchful woman’s eyes.  If you are below the measure they have made of you, you will feel it in the fulness of time.  She cannot but show you that she took you for a giant, and has had to come down a bit.  You feel yourself strangely diminishing in those sweet mirrors, till at last they drop on you complacently level.  But, oh beware, vain man, of ever waxing enamoured of that wonderful elongation of a male creature you saw reflected in her adoring upcast orbs!  Beware of assisting to delude her!  A woman who is not quite a fool will forgive your being but a man, if you are surely that:  she will haply learn to acknowledge that no mortal tailor could have fitted that figure she made of you respectably, and that practically (though she sighs to think it) her ideal of you was on the pattern of an overgrown charity-boy in the regulation jacket and breech.  For this she first scorns the narrow capacities of the tailor, and then smiles at herself.  But shouldst thou, when the hour says plainly, Be thyself, and the woman is willing to take thee as thou art, shouldst thou still aspire to be that thing of shanks and wrests, wilt thou not seem contemptible as well as ridiculous?  And when the fall comes, will it not be flat on thy face, instead of to the common height of men?  You may fall miles below her measure of you, and be safe:  nothing is damaged save an overgrown charity-boy; but if you fall below the common height of men, you must make up your mind to see her rustle her gown, spy at the looking-glass, and transfer her allegiance.  The moral of which is, that if we pretend to be what we are not, woman, for whose amusement the farce is performed, will find us out and punish us for it.  And it is usually the end of a sentimental dalliance.

Had Sir Austin given vent to the pain and wrath it was natural he should feel, he might have gone to unphilosophic excesses, and, however much he lowered his reputation as a sage, Lady Blandish would have excused him:  she would not have loved him less for seeing him closer.  But the poor gentleman tasked his soul and stretched his muscles to act up to her conception of him.  He, a man of science in life, who was bound to be surprised by nothing in nature, it was not for him to do more than lift his eyebrows and draw in his lips at the news delivered by Ripton Thompson, that ill bird at Raynham.

All he said, after Ripton had handed the letters and carried his penitential headache to bed, was:  “You see, Emmeline, it is useless to base any system on a human being.”

A very philosophical remark for one who has been busily at work building for nearly twenty years.  Too philosophical to seem genuine.  It revealed where the blow struck sharpest.  Richard was no longer the Richard of his creation—­his pride and his joy—­but simply a human being with the rest.  The bright star had sunk among the mass.