es,
a likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in
the frost, to a railway engine. 'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the
man. Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but
he reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling
voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and
men prefer to distantly admire. English women and men feel toward the
quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of
aliens-wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter,
the sin of posturing. A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a
foreigner and potentially a criminal. She is incandescent to a breath of
rumour. It accounted for her having detractors; a heavy counterpoise
to her enthusiastic friends. It might account for her husband's
discontent-the reduction of him to a state of mere masculine antagonism.
What is the husband of a vanward woman? He feels himself but a
diminished man. The English husband of a voluble woman relapses into a
dreary mute. Ah, for the choice of places! Redworth would have yielded
her the loquent lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who
now rejected all, except the public scourging of her. The conviction was
in his mind that the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than
be rid of her. But a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement.

Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her 'enemies' made him set
down her growing crops of backbiters to the trick she had of
ridiculing things English. If the English do it themselves, it is in a
professionally robust, a jocose, kindly way, always with a glance at the
other things, great things, they excel in; and it is done to have the
credit of doing it. They are keen to catch an inimical tone; they will
find occasion to chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it be the
leader of a party, therefore a power; for they respect a power. Redworth
knew their quaintnesses; without overlooking them he winced at the acid
of an irony that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it,
for her sake. He had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood,
bitterly surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and
memorable phrases of enthusiasm for England--Shakespeareland, as she
would sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet.
English fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do
justice to