“Ha!” Mr. Pericles flung away from her:  “go and be a little gutter-girl!”

The musical connoisseur drew on his own disappointment alone for eloquence.  Had he been thinking of her, he might have touched cunningly on her love for Italy.  Music was the passion of the man; and a millionaire’s passion is something that can make a stir.  He knew that in Emilia he had discovered a pearl of song rarely to be found, and his object was to polish and perfect her at all cost:  perhaps, as a secondary and far removed consideration, to point to her as a thing belonging to him, for which Emperors might envy him.  The thought of losing her drove him into fits of rage.  He took the ladies one by one, and treated them each to a horrible scene of gesticulation and outraged English.  H accused their brother of conduct which they were obliged to throw (by a process of their own) into the region of Fine Shades, before they dared venture to comprehend him.  Gross facts in relationship with the voice, this grievous “machine, not man,”—­as they said—­stated to them, harshly, impetuously.  The ladies felt that he had bored their ears with hot iron pins.  Adela tried laughter as a defence from his suggestion against Wilfrid, but had shortly afterwards to fly from the fearful anatomist.  She served her brother thoroughly in the Council of Three; so that Mr. Pericles was led by them to trust that there had; been mere fooling in his absence, and that the emotions he looked to as the triumphant reserve in Emilia’s bosom, to be aroused at some crisis when she was before the world, slumbered still.  She, on her part, contrasting her own burning sensations with this quaint, innocent devotion to Art and passion for music, felt in a manner guilty; and whenever he stormed with additional violence, she became suppliant, and seemed to bend and have regrets.  Mr. Pericles would then say, with mollified irritability:  “You will come to Italy to-morrow?—­Ze day after?—­not at all?” The last was given with a roar, for lack of her immediate response.  Emilia would find a tear on her eyelids at times.  Surround herself as she might with her illusions, she had no resting-place in Wilfrid’s heart, and knew it.  She knew it as the young know that they are to die on a future day, without feeling the sadness of it, but with a dimly prevalent idea that this life is therefore incomplete.  And again her blood, as with a wave of rich emotion, washed out the blank spot.  She thought:  “What can he want but my love?” And thus she satisfied her own hungry questioning by seeming to supply an answer to his.

The ladies of Brookfield by no means encouraged Emilia to refuse the generous offer of Mr. Pericles.  They thought, too, that she might—­might she?  Oh! certainly she might go to Italy under his protection.  “Would you let one of your blood?” asked Wilfrid brutally.  With some cunning he led them to admit that Emilia’s parents should rightly be consulted in such a case.