rt tells me: money fabulous, and necessary to a younger son
devoured with ambition. The elder brother, Lord Creedmore, is a common
Nimrod, always absent in Hungary, Russia, America, hunting somewhere.
Mr. Dacier will be in the Cabinet with the next Ministry.' No more of
him. A new work by ANTONIA was progressing.
The Summer in South Tyrol passed like a royal procession before young
eyes for Diana, and at the close of it, descending the Stelvio, idling
through the Valtelline, Como Lake was reached, Diana full of her work,
living the double life of the author. At Bellagio one afternoon Mr.
Percy Dacier appeared. She remembered subsequently a disappointment she
felt in not beholding Mr. Redworth either with him or displacing him. If
engaged to a lady, he was not an ardent suitor; nor was he a pointedly
complimentary acquaintance. His enthusiasm was reserved for Italian
scenery. She had already formed a sort of estimate of his character, as
an indifferent observer may do, and any woman previous to the inflaming
of her imagination, if that is in store for her; and she now fell to
work resetting the puzzle it became as soon her positive conclusions had
to be shaped again. 'But women never can know young men,' she wrote
to Emma, after praising his good repute as one of the brotherhood. 'He
drops pretty sentences now and then: no compliments; milky nuts. Of
course he has a head, or he would not be where he is--and that seems
always to me the most enviable place a young man can occupy.' She
observed in him a singular conflicting of a buoyant animal nature with
a curb of studiousness, as if the fardels of age were piling on his
shoulders before youth had quitted its pastures.
His build of limbs and his features were those of the finely-bred
English; he had the English taste for sports, games, manly diversions;
and in the bloom of life, under thirty, his head was given to bend. The
head bending on a tall upright figure, where there was breadth of chest,
told of weights working. She recollected his open look, larger than
inquiring, at the introduction to her; and it recurred when she uttered
anything specially taking. What it meant was past a guess, though
comparing it with the frank directness of Redworth's eyes, she saw the
difference between a look that accepted her and one that dilated on two
opinions.
Her thought of the gentleman was of a brilliant young charioteer in the
ruck of the race, watchful for his chance to push
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