st. Women, when they are no longer warm, are colder
than the deadliest catarrh wind scything across these islands. Of course
she sat to left of him. In the line of the main road, he remembered a
look he dropped on her, a look over his left shoulder.

She never had a wooing: she wanted it, had a kind of right to it, or the
show of it. How to begin? But was she worth an effort? Turn to something
brighter. Religion is the one refuge from women, Feltre says: his Roman
Catholic recipe. The old shoemaker, Mr. Woodseer, hauls women into his
religion, and purifies them by the process,--fancies he does. He gets
them to wear an air. Old Gower, too, has his Religion of Nature, with
free admission for women, whom he worships in similes, running away from
them, leering sheepishly. No, Feltre's' rigid monastic system is
the sole haven. And what a world, where we have no safety except in
renouncing it! The two sexes created to devour one another must abjure
their sex before they gain 'The Peace,' as Feltre says, impressively, if
absurdly. He will end a monk if he has the courage of his logic. A queer
spectacle--an English nobleman a shaven monk!

Fleetwood shuddered. We are twisted face about to discover our being
saved by women from that horror--the joining the ranks of the nasal
friars. By what women? Bacchante, clearly, if the wife we have is a
North-easter to wither us, blood, bone, and soul.

He was hungry; he waxed furious with the woman who had flung him out
upon the roads. He was thirsty as well. The brightest something to
refresh his thoughts grew and glowed in the form of a shiny table,
bearing tasty dishes, old wines; at an inn or anywhere. But, out
of London, an English inn to furnish the dishes and the wines for a
civilized and self-respecting man is hard to seek, as difficult to find
as a perfect skeleton of an extinct species. The earl's breast howled
derision of his pursuit when he drew up at the sign of the Royal
Sovereign, in the dusky hour, and handed himself desperately to Mrs.
Rundles' mercy.

He could not wait for a dinner, so his eating was cold meat. Warned by a
sip, that his drinking, if he drank, was to be an excursion in chemical
acids, the virtues of an abstainer served for his consolation. Tolerant
of tobacco, although he did not smoke, he fronted the fire, envying
Gower Woodseer the contemplative pipe, which for half a dozen puffs
wafted him to bracing deserts, or primaeval forests, or old highways
wi