ear, lifted a silken
covering to show the child asleep; entirely at her ease and unhurried.
These women get aid from their pride of maternity. And when they can
boast a parson behind them, they are indecorous up to insolent in their
ostentation of it.

She resumed her advance, with a slight abatement of her challengeing
match, sedately; very collectedly erect; changed in the fulness of her
figure and her poised calm bearing.

He heard her voice addressing Gower: 'Yes, they do; we noticed the
slate-roofs, looking down on them. They do look like a council of rooks
in the hollow; a parliament, you said. They look exceedingly like, when
a peep of sunshine falls. Oh, no; not clergymen!'

She laughed at the suggestion.

She might be one of the actresses by nature.

Is the man unsympathetic with women a hater of Nature deductively? Most
women are actresses. As to worshipping Nature, we go back to the state
of heathen beast, Mr. Philosopher Gower could be answered....

Fleetwood drew in his argument. She stood before him. There was on his
part an insular representation of old French court salute to the lady,
and she replied to it in the exactest measure, as if an instructed
proficient.

She stood unshadowed. 'We have come to bid you adieu, my lord,' she
said, and no trouble of the bosom shook her mellow tones. Her face was
not the chalk-quarry or the rosed rock; it was oddly individual, and,
in a way, alluring, with some gentle contraction of her eyelids. But
evidently she stood in full repose, mistress of herself.

Upon him, it appeared, the whole sensibility of the situation was to be
thrown. He hardened.

'We have had to settle business here,' he said, speaking resonantly, to
cover his gazing discomposedly, all but furtively.

The child was shown, still asleep. A cunning infant not a cry in him
to excuse a father for preferring concord or silence or the bachelor's
exemption.

'He is a strong boy,' the mother said. 'Our doctor promises he will ride
over all the illnesses.'

Fleetwood's answer set off with an alarum of the throat, and dwindled to
'We 'll hope so. Seems to sleep well.'

She had her rocky brows. They were not barren crags, and her shape
was Nature's ripeness, it was acknowledged: She stood like a lance in
air-rather like an Amazon schooled by Athene, one might imagine. Hues of
some going or coming flush hinted the magical trick of her visage.
She spoke in modest manner, or it might be indifferen