Had that been done, even to the hint of it, instead of the lordly indifference shown, Gower might have ventured on a suggestion, that the priceless woman he could call wife was fast slipping away from him and withering in her allegiance.  He did allude to his personal sentiment.  ’One takes aim at Philosophy; Lady Fleetwood pulls us up to pay tribute to our debts.’  But this was vague, and his hearer needed a present thunder and lightning to shake and pierce him.

‘I pledged myself to that yacht,’ said Fleetwood, by way of reply, ’or you and I would tramp it, as we did once-jolly old days!  I shall have you in mind.  Now turn back.  Do the best you can.’

They parted midway up the street, Gower bearing away a sharp contrast of the earl and his countess; for, until their senses are dulled, impressionable young men, however precociously philosophical, are mastered by appearances; and they have to reflect under new lights before vision of the linked eye and mind is given them.

Fleetwood jumped into his carriage and ordered the coachman to drive smartly.  He could not have admitted the feeling small; he felt the having been diminished, and his requiring a rapid transportation from these parts for him to regain his proper stature.  Had he misconducted himself at the moment of danger?  It is a ghastly thought, that the craven impulse may overcome us.  But no, he could reassure his repute for manliness.  He had done as much as a man could do in such a situation.

At the same time, he had done less than the woman.

Needed she to have gone so far?  Why precipitate herself into the jaws of the beast?

Now she, proposes to burn the child’s wound.  And she will do it if they let her.  One, sees her at the work,—­pale, flinty; no faces; trebly the terrific woman in her mild way of doing the work.  All because her old father recommended it.  Because she thinks it a duty, we will say; that is juster.  This young woman is a very sword in the hand of her idea of duty.  She can be feminine, too,—­there is one who knows.  She can be particularly distant, too.  If in timidity, she has a modest view of herself—­or an enormous conception of the magi that married her.  Will she take the world’s polish a little?

Fleetwood asked with the simplicity of the superior being who will consequently perhaps bestow the debt he owes. . .

But his was not the surface nature which can put a question of the sort and pass it.  As soon as it had been formed, a vision of the elemental creature calling him husband smote to shivers the shell we walk on, and caught him down among the lower forces, up amid the higher; an infernal and a celestial contest for the extinction of the one or the other of them, if it was not for their union.  She wrestled with him where the darknesses roll their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns of the netherworld.  She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital heat, to bear unwithering beside her the test of light.  They flew, they chased, battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the count of their deeds, compared them,—­and name the one crushed!  It was the one weighted to shame, thrust into the cellar-corner of his own disgust, by his having asked whether that starry warrior spirit in the woman’s frame would ‘take polish a little.’