pricked him from
distaste to what might really be taste for her companionship, or
something more alarming to contemplate in the possibilities,--thirst for
it. He was driving away, and he longed to turn back. He did respect
her character: a character angular as her features were, and similarly
harmonious, splendid in action.

Respect seems a coolish form of tribute from a man who admires. He had
to say that he did not vastly respect beautiful women. Have they all the
poetry? Know them well, and where is it?

The pupil of Gower Woodseer asked himself to specify the poetry
of woman. She is weak and inferior, but she has it; civilized men
acknowledge it; and it is independent, or may be beside her gift of
beauty. She has more of it than we have. Then name it.

Well, the flowers of the field are frail things. Pluck one, and you
have in your hand the frailest of things. But reach through the charm of
colour and the tale of its beneficence in frailty to the poetry of the
flower, and secret of the myriad stars will fail to tell you more than
does that poetry of your little flower. Lord Feltre, at the heels of St.
Francis, agrees in that.

Well, then, much so with the flowers of the two hands and feet. We do
homage to those ungathered, and reserve our supremacy; the gathered, no
longer courted, are the test of men. When the embraced woman breathes
respect into us, she wings a beast. We have from her the poetry of the
tasted life; excelling any garden-gate or threshold lyrics called forth
by purest early bloom. Respect for her person, for her bearing, for her
character that is in the sum a beauty plastic to the civilized young
man's needs and cravings, as queenly physical loveliness has never so
fully been to him along the walks of life, and as ideal worships cannot
be for our nerving contentment. She brings us to the union of body
and soul; as good as to say, earth and heaven. Secret of all human
aspirations, the ripeness of the creeds, is there; and the passion for
the woman desired has no poetry equalling that of the embraced respected
woman.

Something of this went reeling through Fleetwood; positively to this
end; accompanied the while with flashes of Carinthia, her figure across
the varied scenes. Ridicule vanished. Could it ever have existed? If
London had witnessed the scene down in Wales, London never again would
laugh at the Whitechapel Countess.

He laughed amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these