, you'll be wanting to marry soon, of
course,' and his curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to
signify, the sooner the better, and deliverance for both of us. Honest
though he might, be sometimes deep and sometimes picturesque, the
philosopher's day had come to an end. How can Philosophy minister to
raw wounds, when we are in a rageing gale of the vexations, battered
to right and left! Religion has a nourishing breast: Philosophy is
breastless. Religion condones offences: Philosophy has no forgiveness,
is an untenanted confessional: 'wide air to a cry in anguish,' Feltre
says.

All the way to London Fleetwood endured his companion, letting him talk
when he would.

He spent the greater part of the night discussing human affairs
and spiritual with Lord Feltre, whose dialectical exhortations and
insinuations were of the feeblest, but to an isolated young man,
yearning for the tenderness of a woman thinking but of her grievances,
the ointment brought comfort.

It soothed him during his march to and away from Ambrose Mallard's
grave; where it seemed to him curious and even pitiable that Chumley
Potts should be so inconsolably shaken. Well, and if the priests have
the secret of strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in
calamity, why not go to the priests, Chummy? Potts's hearing was not
addressed; nor was the chief person in the meditation affected by a
question that merely jumped out of his perturbed interior.

Business at Calesford kept Fleetwood hanging about London several days
further; and his hatred of a place he wasted time and money to decorate
grew immeasurable. It distorted the features of the beautiful woman for
whose pleasure the grand entertainments to be held there had, somewhere
or other--when felon spectres were abroad over earth--been conceived.

He could then return to Esslemont. Gower was told kindly, with
intentional coldness, that he could take a seat in the phaeton if he
liked; and he liked, and took it. Anything to get to that girl of his!

Whatever the earl's inferiors did, their inferior station was not
suffered to discolour it for his judgement. But an increasing antagonism
to Woodseer's philosophy--which the fellow carried through with
perpetual scorings of satisfaction--caused him to set a hard eye on the
damsel under the grisly spotting shadow of the sottish bruiser, of whom,
after once touching the beast, he could not rub his hands clean; and
he chose to consider th