the shielding of him was a different thing; it dragged her down so low, that in her condemnation of the Tory squib she found herself asking herself whether haply Nevil had flung off the yoke of the French lady; with the foolish excuse for the question, that if he had not, he must be bitterly sensitive to the slightest public allusion to her.  Had he?  And if not, how desperately faithful he was! or else how marvellously seductive she!

Perhaps it was a lover’s despair that had precipitated him into the mire of politics.  She conceived the impression that it must be so, and throughout the day she had an inexplicable unsweet pleasure in inciting him to argumentation and combating him, though she was compelled to admit that he had been colloquially charming antecedent to her naughty provocation; and though she was indebted to him for his patient decorum under the weary wave of the Reverend Mr. Brisk.  Now what does it matter what a woman thinks in politics?  But he deemed it of great moment.  Politically, he deemed that women have souls, a certain fire of life for exercise on earth.  He appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of convictions.  He quoted the Bevisham doctor

’Convictions are generally first impressions that are sealed with later prejudices,’ and insisted there was wisdom in it.  Nothing tired him, as he had said, and addressing woman or man, no prospect of fatigue or of hopeless effort daunted him in the endeavour to correct an error of judgement in politics—­his notion of an error.  The value he put upon speaking, urging his views, was really fanatical.  It appeared that he canvassed the borough from early morning till near midnight, and nothing would persuade him that his chance was poor; nothing that an entrenched Tory like her father, was not to be won even by an assault of all the reserve forces of Radical pathos, prognostication, and statistics.

Only conceive Nevil Beauchamp knocking at doors late at night, the sturdy beggar of a vote! or waylaying workmen, as he confessed without shame that he had done, on their way trooping to their midday meal; penetrating malodoriferous rooms of dismal ten-pound cottagers, to exhort bedraggled mothers and babes, and besotted husbands; and exposed to rebuffs from impertinent tradesmen; and lampooned and travestied, shouting speeches to roaring men, pushed from shoulder to shoulder of the mob! . . .

Cecilia dropped a curtain on her mind’s picture of him.  But the blinding curtain rekindled the thought that the line he had taken could not but be the desperation of a lover abandoned.  She feared it was, she feared it was not.  Nevil Beauchamp’s foe persisted in fearing that it was not; his friend feared that it was.  Yet why?  For if it was, then he could not be quite in earnest, and might be cured.  Nay, but earnestness works out its own cure more surely than frenzy, and it should be preferable to think him sound of heart, sincere though mistaken.  Cecilia could not decide upon what she dared wish for his health’s good.  Friend and foe were not further separable within her bosom than one tick from another of a clock; they changed places, and next his friend was fearing what his foe had feared:  they were inextricable.