s. He
often speaks of the weather. English weather and women, he says. But not
my mother. My mother he stood aside by herself--pas capricieuse du tout!
Because she would be out in the weather and brave the weather. She rode,
she swam, best of any woman. If she could have known you, what pleasure
for me! Mother learnt to read mountain weather from father. I did
it too. But sometimes on the high fields' upper snows it is very
surprising. Father has been caught. Here the cloud is down near the
earth and the strong wind keeps the rain from falling. How long the wind
will blow I cannot guess. But you love the mountains. We spoke... And
mountains' adventures we both love. I will talk French if you like,
for, I think, German you do not speak. I may speak English better than
French; but I am afraid of my English with you.'

'Dear me!' quoth Fleetwood, and he murmured politely and cursorily,
attentive to his coachman business. She had a voice that clove the noise
of the wheels, and she had a desire to talk--that was evident. Talk of
her father set her prattling. It became clear also to his not dishonest,
his impressionable mind, that her baby English might be natural. Or she
was mildly playing on it, to give herself an air.

He had no remembrance of such baby English at Baden. There, however, she
was in a state of enthusiasm--the sort of illuminated transparency they
show at the end of fireworks. Mention of her old scapegrace of a father
lit her up again. The girl there and the girl here were no doubt the
same. It could not be said that she had duped him; he had done it for
himself--acted on by a particular agency. This creature had not the
capacity to dupe. He had armed a bluntwitted young woman with his
idiocy, and she had dealt the stroke; different in scarce a degree by
nature from other young women of prey.

But her look at times, and now and then her voice, gave sign that she
counted on befooling him as well, to reconcile him to his bondage. The
calculation was excessive. No woman had done it yet. Idiocy plunged
him the step which reawakened understanding; and to keep his whole mind
alert on guard against any sort of satisfaction with his bargain, he
frankly referred to the cause. Not female arts, but nature's impulses,
it was his passion for the wondrous in the look of a woman's face,
the new morning of the idea of women in the look, and the peep into
imaginary novel character, did the trick of enslaving him. Call it
i