He bowed to her, and walked to the stables.

She had the art of extracting his word from him.  The word given, she went off with it, disengaged mistress of Esslemont.  And she might have the place for residence, but a decent courtesy required that she should remain at the portico until he was out of sight.  She was the first out of sight, rather insolently.

She returned him without comment the spell he had cast on her, and he was left to estimate the value of a dirited piece of metal not in the currency, stamped false coin.  An odd sense of impoverishment chilled him.  Chilly weather was afflicting the whole country, he was reminded, and he paced about hurriedly until his horses were in the shafts.  After all, his driving away would be much more expected of him than a stay at the house where the Whitechapel Countess resided, chill, dry, talking the language of early Exercises in English, suitable to her Welshmen.  Did she ‘Owain’ them every one?

As he whipped along the drive and left that glassy stare of Esslemont behind him, there came a slap of a reflection:—­here, on the box of this coach, the bride just bursting her sheath sat, and was like warm wax to take impressions.  She was like hard stone to retain them, pretty evidently.  Like women the world over, she thinks only of her side of the case.  Men disdain to plead theirs.  Now money is offered her, she declines it.  Formerly, she made it the principal subject of her conversation.

Turn the mind to something brighter.  Fleetwood strung himself to do so, and became agitated by the question whether the bride sat to left or to right of him when the South-wester blew-a wind altogether preferable to the chill North-east.  Women, when they are no longer warm, are colder than the deadliest catarrh wind scything across these islands.  Of course she sat to left of him.  In the line of the main road, he remembered a look he dropped on her, a look over his left shoulder.

She never had a wooing:  she wanted it, had a kind of right to it, or the show of it.  How to begin?  But was she worth an effort?  Turn to something brighter.  Religion is the one refuge from women, Feltre says:  his Roman Catholic recipe.  The old shoemaker, Mr. Woodseer, hauls women into his religion, and purifies them by the process,—­fancies he does.  He gets them to wear an air.  Old Gower, too, has his Religion of Nature, with free admission for women, whom he worships in similes, running away from them, leering sheepishly.  No, Feltre’s’ rigid monastic system is the sole haven.  And what a world, where we have no safety except in renouncing it!  The two sexes created to devour one another must abjure their sex before they gain ‘The Peace,’ as Feltre says, impressively, if absurdly.  He will end a monk if he has the courage of his logic.  A queer spectacle—­an English nobleman a shaven monk!

Fleetwood shuddered.  We are twisted face about to discover our being saved by women from that horror—­the joining the ranks of the nasal friars.  By what women?  Bacchante, clearly, if the wife we have is a North-easter to wither us, blood, bone, and soul.