gaws of
wealth and rank he combined a humble but intense and growing conviction
of his capacity for leadership, of a spiritual superiority to those
whom he desired to benefit. There was no trace, indeed, of the common
Pharisee in Miltoun, he was simple and direct; but his eyes, his
gestures, the whole man, proclaimed the presence of some secret spring
of certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers
penetrated. He was not devoid of wit, but he was devoid of that kind of
wit which turns its eyes inward, and sees something of the fun that lies
in being what you are. Miltoun saw the world and all the things thereof
shaped like spires--even when they were circles. He seemed to have no
sense that the Universe was equally compounded of those two symbols,
whose point of reconciliation had not yet been discovered.

Such was he, then, when the Member for his native division was made a
peer.

He had reached the age of thirty without ever having been in love,
leading a life of almost savage purity, with one solitary breakdown.
Women were afraid of him. And he was perhaps a little afraid of woman.
She was in theory too lovely and desirable--the half-moon in a summer
sky; in practice too cloying, or too harsh. He had an affection for
Barbara, his younger sister; but to his mother, his grandmother, or his
elder sister Agatha, he had never felt close. It was indeed amusing to
see Lady Valleys with her first-born. Her fine figure, the blown roses
of her face, her grey-blue eyes which had a slight tendency to roll, as
though amusement just touched with naughtiness bubbled behind them; were
reduced to a queer, satirical decorum in Miltoun's presence. Thoughts
and sayings verging on the risky were characteristic of her robust
physique, of her soul which could afford to express almost all that
occurred to it. Miltoun had never, not even as a child, given her his
confidence. She bore him no resentment, being of that large, generous
build in body and mind, rarely--never in her class--associated with the
capacity for feeling aggrieved or lowered in any estimation, even its
own. He was, and always had been, an odd boy, and there was an end of
it! Nothing had perhaps so disconcerted Lady Valleys as his want
of behaviour in regard to women. She felt it abnormal, just as she
recognized the essential if duly veiled normality of her husband and
younger son. It was this feeling which made her realize almost more
vividly than s