ctly the road he
chose to go and no other. He had a will.

The world accounted him wildish?

Always from his own offset, to his own ends. Never for another's
dictation or beguilement. Never for a woman. He was born with a
suspicion of the sex. Poetry decorated women, he said, to lime and drag
men in the foulest ruts of prose.

We are to believe he has been effectively captured?

It is positively a marriage; he admits it.

Where celebrated?

There we are at hoodman-blind for the moment. Three counties claim the
church; two ends of London.

She is not a person of society, lineage?

Nor of beauty. She is a witch; ordinarily petticoated and not squeaking
like a shrew-mouse in her flights, but not a whit less a moon-shade
witch. The kind is famous. Fairy tales and terrible romances tell of
her; she is just as much at home in life, and springs usually from the
mire to enthral our knightliest. Is it a popular hero? She has him,
sooner or later. A planet Croesus? He falls to her.

That is, if his people fail to attach him in legal bonds to a damsel of
a corresponding birth on the day when he is breeched.

Small is her need to be young--especially if it is the man who is very
young. She is the created among women armed with the deadly instinct for
the motive force in men, and shameless to attract it. Self-respecting
women treat men as their tamed housemates. She blows the horn of the
wild old forest, irresistible to the animal. O the droop of the eyelids,
the curve of a lip, the rustle of silks, the much heart, the neat ankle;
and the sparkling agreement, the reserve--the motherly feminine petition
that she may retain her own small petted babe of an opinion, legitimate
or not, by permission of superior authority!--proof at once of her
intelligence and her appreciativeness. Her infinitesimal spells are
seen; yet, despite experience, the magnetism in their repulsive display
is barely apprehended by sedate observers until the astounding capture
is proclaimed. It is visible enough then:--and O men! O morals! If she
can but trick the smallest bit in stooping, she has the pick of men.

Our present sample shows her to be young: she is young and a foreigner.
Mr. Chumley Potts vouches for it. Speaks foreign English. He thinks her
more ninny than knave: she is the tool of a wily plotter, picked up off
the highway road by Lord Fleetwood as soon as he had her in his eye. Sir
Meeson Corby wrings his frilled hands to depict the h