h made himself talk French with some fluency, and he looked back on
his performance of the evening with a boy's complacency.

For the rest, Venice was a mere trial of his patience! As his gondola
brought him home, struggling with wind and wave, Ashe had no eye
whatever for the beauty of this Venice in storm. His mind was in
England, in London, wrestling with a hundred difficulties and
possibilities. The old literary and speculative habit was fast
disappearing in the stress of action and success. His well-worn Plato or
Horace still lay beside his bedside; but when he woke early, and lit a
candle carefully shaded from Kitty, it was not to the poets and
philosophers that he turned; it was to a heap of official documents and
reports, to the letters of political friends, or an unfinished letter of
his own, the phrases of which had perhaps been running through his
dreams. The measures for which he was wrestling against the intrigues of
Lord Parham and Lord Parham's clique filled all his mind with a lively
ardor of battle. They were the children--the darlings--of his thoughts.

Nevertheless, as he entered his wife's dim-lit room the eager arguments
and considerations that were running through his head died away. He
stood beside her, overwhelmed by a rush of feeling, alive through all
his being to the appeal of her frail sweetness, the helplessness of her
sleep, the dumb significance of the thin, blue-veined hand--eloquent at
once of character and of physical weakness--which lay beside her. Her
face was hidden, but the beautiful hair with its childish curls and
ripples drew him to her--touched all the springs of tenderness.

It was a loveliness so full, it seemed, of meaning and of promise. Hand,
brow, mouth--they were the signs of no mere empty and insipid beauty.
There was not a movement, not a feature, that did not speak of
intelligence and mind.

And yet, were he to wake her now and talk to her of the experience of
his evening, how little joy would either get out of it.

Was it because she had no intellectual disinterestedness? Well, what
woman had! But other women, even if they saw everything in terms of
personality, had the power of pursuing an aim, steadily, persistently,
for the sake of a person. He thought of Lady Palmerston--of Princess
Lieven fighting Guizot's battles--and sighed.

By Jove! the women could do most things, if they chose. He recalled
Kitty's triumph in the great party gathered to welcome Lord Parh