. Once he had thought the great
General a great man. He now regarded him as a mere soldier, a soured
veteran; socially as a masker and a trifler, virtually a callous angler
playing his cleverly-hooked fish for pastime.

What could be the meaning of Lady Charlotte's 'that, man Morsfield, who
boasts of your Lady Ormont, and does it unwhipped'?

Weyburn stopped his questioning, with the reflection that he had no right
to recollect her words thus accurately. The words, however, stamped
Morsfield's doings and sayings and postures in the presence of Aminta
with significance. When the ladies were looking on at the fencers,
Morsfield's perfect coxcombry had been noticeable. He knew the art of
airing a fine figure. Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had spoken of it, and Aminta
had acquiesced; in the gravely simple manner of women who may be thinking
of it much more intently than the vivacious prattler. Aminta confessed to
an admiration of masculine physical beauty; the picador, matador, of the
Spanish ring called up an undisguised glow that English ladies show
coldly when they condescend to let it be seen; as it were, a line or two
of colour on the wintriest of skies. She might, after all, at heart be
one of the leisured, jewelled, pretty-winged; the spending, never
harvesting, world she claimed and sought to enter. And what a primitive
world it was!--world of the glittering beast and the not too swiftly
flying prey, the savage passions clothed in silk. Surely desire to belong
to it writes us poor creatures. Mentally, she could hardly be maturer
than the hero-worshipping girl in the procession of Miss Vincent's young
seminarists. Probably so, but she carried magic. She was of the order of
women who walk as the goddesses of old, bearing the gift divine. And, by
the way, she had the step of the goddess. Weyburn repeated to himself the
favourite familiar line expressive of the glorious walk, and accused Lord
Ormont of being in cacophonous accordance with the perpetual wrong of
circumstance, he her possessor, the sole person of her sphere insensible
to the magic she bore! So ran his thought.

The young man chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly. He was, in
truth, often casting about for the chances of his meeting on some
fortunate day the predestined schoolmaster's wife: a lady altogether
praiseworthy for carrying principles of sound government instead of
magic. Consequently, susceptible to woman's graces though he knew himself
to be