very word ‘respect’ pitched him upon her character; to see it a character that emerged beneath obstacles, and overcame ridicule, won suffrages, won a reluctant husband’s admiration, pricked him from distaste to what might really be taste for her companionship, or something more alarming to contemplate in the possibilities,—­thirst for it.  He was driving away, and he longed to turn back.  He did respect her character:  a character angular as her features were, and similarly harmonious, splendid in action.

Respect seems a coolish form of tribute from a man who admires.  He had to say that he did not vastly respect beautiful women.  Have they all the poetry?  Know them well, and where is it?

The pupil of Gower Woodseer asked himself to specify the poetry of woman.  She is weak and inferior, but she has it; civilized men acknowledge it; and it is independent, or may be beside her gift of beauty.  She has more of it than we have.  Then name it.

Well, the flowers of the field are frail things.  Pluck one, and you have in your hand the frailest of things.  But reach through the charm of colour and the tale of its beneficence in frailty to the poetry of the flower, and secret of the myriad stars will fail to tell you more than does that poetry of your little flower.  Lord Feltre, at the heels of St. Francis, agrees in that.

Well, then, much so with the flowers of the two hands and feet.  We do homage to those ungathered, and reserve our supremacy; the gathered, no longer courted, are the test of men.  When the embraced woman breathes respect into us, she wings a beast.  We have from her the poetry of the tasted life; excelling any garden-gate or threshold lyrics called forth by purest early bloom.  Respect for her person, for her bearing, for her character that is in the sum a beauty plastic to the civilized young man’s needs and cravings, as queenly physical loveliness has never so fully been to him along the walks of life, and as ideal worships cannot be for our nerving contentment.  She brings us to the union of body and soul; as good as to say, earth and heaven.  Secret of all human aspirations, the ripeness of the creeds, is there; and the passion for the woman desired has no poetry equalling that of the embraced respected woman.

Something of this went reeling through Fleetwood; positively to this end; accompanied the while with flashes of Carinthia, her figure across the varied scenes.  Ridicule vanished.  Could it ever have existed?  If London had witnessed the scene down in Wales, London never again would laugh at the Whitechapel Countess.

He laughed amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these views, on the part of a nobleman whose airy pleasure it had been to flout your sober citizens, with their toad-at-the-hop notions, their walled conceptions, their drab propriety; and felt a petted familiar within him dub all pulpitizing, poetizing drivellers with one of those detested titles, invented by the English as a corrective of their maladies or the excesses of their higher moods.  But, reflection telling him that he had done injury to Carinthia—­had inflicted the sorest of the wounds a young woman a new bride can endure, he nodded acquiescence to the charge of misbehaviour, and muzzled the cynic.