little act of gentleness at the moment of the red-of-the-powder smoke
was divinest bread and wine, when calamity hung around, with the future
an unfooted wilderness, her powers untried, her husband her enemy.

CHAPTER XXXI. WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN

The most urgent of Dames is working herself up to a grey squall in her
detestation of imagerial epigrams. Otherwise Gower Woodseer's dash at
the quintessential young man of wealth would prompt to the carrying of
it further, and telling how the tethered flutterer above a 'devil on his
back on a river' was beginning to pull if not drag his withholder and
teaser.

Fleetwood had almost a desire to see the small dot of humanity which
drew the breath from him;--and was indistinguishably the bubbly grin and
gurgle of the nurses, he could swear. He kicked at the bondage to our
common fleshly nature imposed on him by the mother of the little animal.
But there had been a mother to his father: odd movements of a warmish
curiosity brushed him when the cynic was not mounting guard. They were,
it seemed, external--no part of him: like blasts of a wayside furnace
across wintry air. They were, as it chanced, Nature's woman in him
plucking at her separated partner, Custom's man; something of an
oriental voluptuary on his isolated regal seat; and he would suck the
pleasures without a descent into the stale old ruts where Life's convict
couple walk linked to one another, to their issue more.

There was also a cold curiosity to see the male infant such a mother
would have. The grandson of Old Lawless might turn out a rascal,--he
would be no mean one, no coward.

That mother, too, who must have been a touch astonished to find herself
a mother:--Fleetwood laughed a curt bark, and heard rebukes, and pleaded
the marriage-trap to the man of his word; devil and cherub were at
the tug, or say, dog and gentleman, a survival of the schoolboy--that
mother, a girl of the mountains, perhaps wanted no more than smoothing
by the world. 'It is my husband' sounded foolish, sounded freshish,--a
new note. Would she repeat it? The bit of simplicity would bear
repeating once. Gower Woodseer says the creature grows and studies to
perfect herself. She's a good way off that, and may spoil herself in the
process; but she has a certain power. Her donkey obstinacy in refusing
compliance, and her pursuit of 'my husband,' and ability to drench him
with ridicule, do not exhibit