, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had
undergone. Counting her absent brother, with himself, his father, and
the two Whitechapel girls, it certainly was an unexampled fall, to
say of her, that they and those two girls had become by the twist of
circumstances the most serviceable of her friends.

Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young
lord,--burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the
moment it was his own. Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the
gamingtables,--fine haunts for the study of our lower man. He could be
magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness. He coveted beauty
in women hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower
judged by the light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent
observations of him. Why marry her to cast her off instantly? The crude
philosopher asked it as helplessly as the admiral. And, further, what
did the girl Madge mean by the drop of her voice to a hum of enforced
endurance under injury, like the furnace behind an iron door? Older men
might have understood, as he was aware; he might have guessed, only he
had the habit of scattering meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.

Dame Gossip boils. Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis
persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed,
that is the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the
succession of collisions. The fault of the method is, that they do not
instruct; so the breath is out of them before they are put aside; for
the uninstructive are the humanly deficient: they remain with us like
the tolerated old aristocracy, which may not govern, and is but socially
seductive. The deuteragonist or secondary person can at times tell
us more of them than circumstances at furious heat will help them to
reveal; and the Dame will have him only as an index-post. Hence her
endless ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the inscrutability of
character,--in a plain world, in the midst of such readable people! To
preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we
must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than
shaking the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing
activity of the head.

Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the
sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham's order that the visitor was to
stay at his house until he sho