, the fair cousins were unable to perceive a comic element in the
scene: and if the world was for laughing, as their instant apprehension
foresaw it, the world was an ignoble beast. They did not discuss
Carinthia's latest craziness at night, hardly alluded to it while they
were in the interjectory state.

Henrietta was Livia's guest, her husband having hurried away to Vienna:
'To get money! money!' her angry bluntness explained his absence, and
dealt its blow at the sudden astounding poverty into which they had
fallen. She was compelled to practise an excessive, an incredible
economy:--'think of the smallest trifles!' so that her Chillon travelled
unaccompanied, they were separated. Her iterations upon money were the
vile constraint of an awakened interest and wonderment at its powers.
She, the romantic Riette, banner of chivalry, reader of poetry, struck
a line between poor and rich in her talk of people, and classed herself
with the fallen and pinched; she harped on her slender means, on the
enforced calculations preceding purchases, on the living in lodgings;
and that miserly Lord Levellier's indebtedness to Chillon--large sums!
and Chillon's praiseworthy resolve to pay the creditors of her father's
estate; and of how he travelled like a common man, in consequence of the
money he had given Janey--weakly, for her obstinacy was past endurance;
but her brother would not leave her penniless, and penniless she had
been for weeks, because of her stubborn resistance to the earl--quite
unreasonably, whether right or wrong--in the foul retreat she had
chosen; apparently with a notion that the horror of it was her vantage
ground against him: and though a single sign of submission would place
the richest purse in England at her disposal. 'She refuses Esslemont!
She insists on his meeting her! No child could be so witless. Let him be
the one chiefly or entirely to blame, she might show a little tact--for
her brother's sake! She loves her brother? No: deaf to him, to me, to
every consideration except her blind will.'

Here was the skeleton of the love match, earlier than Livia had
expected.

It refreshed a phlegmatic lady's disposition for prophecy. Lovers
abruptly tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew: but
they are, or the weaker of the two is, hard upon any third person who
tugs at them for subsistence or existence. The condition, if they
are much beaten about, prepares true lovers, through their mutual