There was a lamentable susceptibility to ladies’ charms.  On the other hand, for the protection of the sex, a remainder of shyness kept him from active enterprise and in the state of suffering, so long as indications of encouragement were wanting.  He had killed the soft ones, who came to him, attracted by the softness in him, to be killed:  but clever women alarmed and paralyzed him.  Their aptness to question and require immediate sparkling answers; their demand for fresh wit, of a kind that is not furnished by publications which strike it into heads with a hammer, and supply it wholesale; their various reading; their power of ridicule too; made them awful in his contemplation.

Supposing (for the inflammable officer was now thinking, and deeply thinking, of a clever woman), supposing that Lady Camper’s pistols were needed in her defence one night:  at the first report proclaiming her extremity, valour might gain an introduction to her upon easy terms, and would not be expected to be witty.  She would, perhaps, after the excitement, admit his masculine superiority, in the beautiful old fashion, by fainting in his arms.  Such was the reverie he passingly indulged, and only so could he venture to hope for an acquaintance with the formidable lady who was his next neighbour.  But the proud society of the burglarious denied him opportunity.

Meanwhile, he learnt that Lady Camper had a nephew, and the young gentleman was in a cavalry regiment.  General Ople met him outside his gates, received and returned a polite salute, liked his appearance and manners and talked of him to Elizabeth, asking her if by chance she had seen him.  She replied that she believed she had, and praised his horsemanship.  The General discovered that he was an excellent sculler.  His daughter was rowing him up the river when the young gentleman shot by, with a splendid stroke, in an outrigger, backed, and floating alongside presumed to enter into conversation, during which he managed to express regrets at his aunt’s turn for solitariness.  As they belonged to sister branches of the same Service, the General and Mr. Reginald Roller had a theme in common, and a passion.  Elizabeth told her father that nothing afforded her so much pleasure as to hear him talk with Mr. Roller on military matters.  General Ople assured her that it pleased him likewise.  He began to spy about for Mr. Roller, and it sometimes occurred that they conversed across the wall; it could hardly be avoided.  A hint or two, an undefinable flying allusion, gave the General to understand that Lady Camper had not been happy in her marriage.  He was pained to think of her misfortune; but as she was not over forty, the disaster was, perhaps, not irremediable; that is to say, if she could be taught to extend her forgiveness to men, and abandon her solitude.  ‘If,’ he said to his daughter, ’Lady Camper should by any chance be induced to contract a second alliance, she would, one might expect, be humanized, and we should have highly agreeable neighbours.’  Elizabeth artlessly hoped for such an event to take place.