not offended by the insult directed
toward his friend. Certainly Gwendolen's refusal of the burnous from
Mr. Lush was open to the interpretation that she wished to receive it
from Mr. Grandcourt. But she, poor child, had no design in this action,
and was simply following her antipathy and inclination, confiding in
them as she did in the more reflective judgments into which they
entered as sap into leafage. Gwendolen had no sense that these men were
dark enigmas to her, or that she needed any help in drawing conclusions
about them--Mr. Grandcourt at least. The chief question was, how far
his character and ways might answer her wishes; and unless she were
satisfied about that, she had said to herself that she would not accept
his offer.

Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history
than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of
the way in which she could make her life pleasant?--in a time, too,
when ideas were with fresh vigor making armies of themselves, and the
universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely; when women on the
other side of the world would not mourn for the husbands and sons who
died bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of bread on our side of
the world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a time when the
soul of man was walking to pulses which had for centuries been beating
in him unfelt, until their full sum made a new life of terror or of joy.

What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind
visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are
enduring and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward
through the ages the treasure of human affections.

CHAPTER XII.

"O gentlemen, the time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long,
If life did ride upon a dial's point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour."
--SHAKESPEARE: _Henry IV_.

On the second day after the Archery Meeting, Mr. Henleigh Mallinger
Grandcourt was at his breakfast-table with Mr. Lush. Everything around
them was agreeable: the summer air through the open windows, at which
the dogs could walk in from the old green turf on the lawn; the soft,
purplish coloring of the park beyond, stretching toward a mass of
bordering wood; the still life in the room, which seemed the stiller
for its sober antiquated elegance, as if it kept a conscious, well-bred
silence, unlike the restlessness o