stay where she was, the Fates
having brought her there. Henrietta was too generous to hesitate in her
choice between her husband's sister and the earl. She removed from
Livia's house to Lord Fleetwood's. My lord was at Esslemont two days;
then established his quarters at Scrope's hotel, five minutes' walk from
the wedded lady to whom the right to bear his title was granted, an
interview with him refused. Such a squaring for the battle of spouses had
never--or not in mighty London--been seen since that old fight began.

CHAPTER XXVI

AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD

Dame Gossip at this present pass bursts to give us a review of the social
world siding for the earl or for his countess; and her parrot cry of
'John Rose Mackrell!' with her head's loose shake over the smack of her
lap, to convey the contemporaneous tipsy relish of the rich good things
he said on the subject of the contest, indicates the kind of intervention
it would be.

To save the story from having its vein tied, we may accept the reminder,
that he was the countess's voluble advocate at a period when her friends
were shy to speak of her. After relating the Vauxhall Gardens episode in
burlesque Homeric during the freshness of the scandal, Rose Mackrell's
enthusiasm for the heroine of his humour set in. He tracked her to her
parentage, which was new breath blown into the sunken tradition of some
Old Buccaneer and his Countess Fanny: and, a turn of great good luck
helping him to a copy of the book of the MAXIMS FOR MEN, he would quote
certain of the racier ones, passages of Captain John Peter Kirby's
personal adveres in various lands and waters illustrating the text, to
prove that the old warrior acted by the rule of his recommendations. They
had the repulsive attraction proper to rusty lumber swords and truncehons
that have tasted brains. They wove no mild sort of halo for the head of a
shillelagh-flourishing Whitechapel Countess descended from the writer and
doer.

People were willing to believe in her jump of thirty feet or more off a
suburban house-top to escape durance, and her midnight storming of her
lord's town house, and ousting of him to go find his quarters at Scrope's
hotel. He, too, had his band of pugilists, as it was known; and he might
have heightened a rageing scandal. The nobleman forbore. A woman's blow
gracefully taken adds a score of inches to our stature, floor us as it
may: we win the world's after-thoughts. Ros