esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture or
utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a wind-in-the-orchard
style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with
uncouth bluster; sentences without commencements running to abrupt
endings and smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary
words giving a hand to street-slang, and accents falling on them
haphazard, like slant rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a
breeze, the whole book producing a kind of electrical agitation in
the mind and the joints. This was its effect on the lady. To her the
incomprehensible was the abominable, for she had our country's high
critical feeling; but he, while admitting that he could not quite master
it, liked it. He had dug the book out of a bookseller's shop in Malta,
captivated by its title, and had, since the day of his purchase, gone at
it again and again, getting nibbles of golden meaning by instalments, as
with a solitary pick in a very dark mine, until the illumination of an
idea struck him that there was a great deal more in the book than there
was in himself. This was sufficient to secure the devoted attachment of
young Mr. Beauchamp. Rosamund sighed with apprehension to think of his
unlikeness to boys and men among his countrymen in some things. Why
should he hug a book he owned he could not quite comprehend? He said
he liked a bone in his mouth; and it was natural wisdom, though
unappreciated by women. A bone in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and
worry, corrects the vagrancies and promotes the healthy activities,
whether there be marrow in it or not. Supposing it furnishes only
dramatic entertainment in that usually vacant tenement, or powder-shell,
it will be of service.

Nevil proposed to her that her next present should be the entire list
of his beloved Incomprehensible's published works, and she promised, and
was not sorry to keep her promise dangling at the skirts of memory, to
drop away in time. For that fire-and-smoke writer dedicated volumes
to the praise of a regicide. Nice reading for her dear boy! Some weeks
after Nevil was off again, she abused herself for her half-hearted love
of him, and would have given him anything--the last word in favour of
the Country versus the royal Martyr, for example, had he insisted on
it. She gathered, bit by bit, that he had dashed at his big blustering
cousin Cecil to vindicate her good name. The direful youths fought in
the Steynha