e's to expect money of her. The shots you
hear in Esslemont grounds out of season are she and her maid, always
alongside her, at it before a target on a bank, trying that old Lord
Levellier's gunpowder out of his mill; and he's got no money either; not
for his workmen, they say, until they congregate, and a threatening to
blow him up brings forth half their pay, on account. But he 's a known
miser. She's not that. She's a pleasant-faced lady for the poor. She has
the voice poor people like. It's only her enemy, maybe her husband, she
can be terrible to. She'd drive a hole through a robber stopping her on
the road, as soon as look at him.

This was Esslemont's atmosphere working its way to the earl, not so very
long after the establishment of his countess there. She could lay
hold of the English, too, it seemed. Did she call any gentleman of the
district by his Christian name? Lord Simon Pitscrew reported her doing
so in the case of one of the Welshmen. Those Welshmen! Apparently they
are making a push for importance in the kingdom!

CHAPTER XXXV. IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED

Behind his white plaster of composure, Lord Fleetwood had alternately
raged and wondered during the passage of the Welsh cavalcade up
Eastward: a gigantic burlesque, that would have swept any husband of
their heroine off the scene had he failed to encounter it deferentially,
preserving his countenance and ostensibly his temper. An idiot of a
woman, incurable in her lunacy, suspects the father of the infant as
guilty of designs done to death in romances; and so she manages to
set going solemnly a bigger blazing Tom Fool's show than any known or
written romance gives word of! And that fellow, Gower Woodseer, pleads,
in apology, for her husband's confusion, physiologically, that it comes
of her having been carried off and kept a prisoner when she was bearing
the child and knitting her whole mind to ensure the child. But what
sheer animals these women are, if they take impressions in such a
manner! And Mr. Philosopher argues that the abusing of women proves the
hating of Nature; names it 'the commonest insanity, and the deadliest,'
and men are 'planted in the bog of their unclean animal condition until
they do proper homage to the animal Nature makes the woman be.' Oh,
pish, sir!--as Meeson Corby had the habit of exclaiming when Abrane's
'fiddler' argues him into a corner. The fellow can fiddle fine things
and occasionally clear se