d that bridegroom and bride had
consented to take an old man off with them to Italy; perhaps in the
autumn all might meet in Venice.

'And you've never seen Venice,' Beauchamp said to Jenny.

'Everything is new to me,' said she, penetrating and gladly joining the
conspiracy to have him out of England.

Dr. Shrapnel was not so compliant as the young husband. Where he could
land and botanize, as at Madeira, he let time fly and drum his wings
on air, but the cities of priests along the coast of Portugal and Spain
roused him to a burning sense of that flight of time and the vacuity it
told of in his labours. Greatly to his astonishment, he found that it
was no longer he and Beauchamp against Jenny, but Jenny and Beauchamp
against him.

'What!' he cried, 'to draw breath day by day, and not to pay for it by
striking daily at the rock Iniquity? Are you for that, Beauchamp? And in
a land where these priests walk with hats curled like the water-lily's
leaf without the flower? How far will you push indolent unreason to gain
the delusion of happiness? There is no such thing: but there's trance.
That talk of happiness is a carrion clamour of the creatures of prey.
Take it--and you're helping tear some poor wretch to pieces, whom you
might be constructing, saving perchance: some one? some thousands! You,
Beauchamp, when I met you first, you were for England, England! for
a breadth of the palm of my hand comparatively--the round of a copper
penny, no wider! And from that you jumped at a bound to the round of
this earth: you were for humanity. Ay, we sailed our planet among the
icy spheres, and were at blood-heat for its destiny, you and I! And now
you hover for a wind to catch you. So it is for a soul rejecting prayer.
This wind and that has it: the well-springs within are shut down fast! I
pardon my Jenny, my Harry Denham's girl. She is a woman, and has a brain
like a bell that rings all round to the tongue. It is her kingdom, of
the interdicted untraversed frontiers. But what cares she, or any woman,
that this Age of ours should lie like a carcase against the Sun? What
cares any woman to help to hold up Life to him? He breeds divinely
upon life, filthy upon stagnation. Sail you away, if you will, in your
trance. I go. I go home by land alone, and I await you. Here in this
land of moles upright, I do naught but execrate; I am a pulpit of
curses. Counter-anathema, you might call me.'

'Oh! I feel the comparison so, for England s