less than that? they
exclaimed. An excellent husband, who might easily have been less than
that, he was the most devoted of cousins, and the liberal expenditure of
his native eloquence for the furtherance of Philip's love-suit was the
principal cause of the misfortune, if misfortune it could subsequently be
called to lose an Adiante.

The Adister family were not gifted to read into the heart of a young man
of a fanciful turn. Patrick had not a thought of shame devolving on him
from a kinsman that had shot at a mark and hit it. Who sees the shame of
taking an apple from a garden of the Hesperides? And as England
cultivates those golden, if sometimes wrinkled, fruits, it would have
seemed to him, in thinking about it, an entirely lucky thing for the
finder; while a question of blood would have fired his veins to rival
heat of self-assertion, very loftily towering: there were Kings in
Ireland: cry for one of them in Uladh and you will hear his name, and he
has descendants yet! But the youth was not disposed unnecessarily to
blazon his princeliness. He kept it in modest reserve, as common
gentlemen keep their physical strength. His reluctance to look on
Earlsfont sprang from the same source as unacknowledged craving to see
the place, which had precipitated him thus far upon his road: he had a
horror of scenes where a faithless girl had betrayed her lover. Love was
his visionary temple, and his idea of love was the solitary light in it,
painfully susceptible to coldair currents from the stories of love abroad
over the world. Faithlessness he conceived to be obnoxious to nature; it
stained the earth and was excommunicated; there could be no pardon of the
crime, barely any for repentance. He conceived it in the feminine; for
men are not those holy creatures whose conduct strikes on the soul with
direct edge: a faithless man is but a general villain or funny monster, a
subject rejected of poets, taking no hue in the flat chronicle of
history: but a faithless woman, how shall we speak of her! Women,
sacredly endowed with beauty and the wonderful vibrating note about the
very mention of them, are criminal to hideousness when they betray. Cry,
False! on them, and there is an instant echo of bleeding males in many
circles, like the poor quavering flute-howl of transformed beasts, which
at some remembering touch bewail their higher state. Those women are
sovereignly attractive, too, loathsomely. Therein you may detect the
fiend.