er, it was
shut away from her by the lock of a key that opened on no estimable
worldly advantage in exchange, but opened on a dreary, clouded round,
such as she had used to fancy it must be to the beautiful creamy
circus-horse of the tossing mane and flowing tail and superb step. She
was admired; she was just as much doomed to a round of paces, denied the
glorious fling afield, her nature's food. Hitherto she would have been
shamefaced as a boy in forming the word 'love': now, believing it denied
to her for good and all--for ever and ever--her bosom held and uttered
the word. She saw the word, the nothing but the word that it was, and she
envisaged it, for the purpose of saying adieu to it--good-bye even to the
poor empty word.

This condition was attributable to a gentleman's wild rageing with the
word, into which he had not infused the mystic spirit. He poured hot wine
and spiced. If not the spirit of love, it was really the passion of the
man. Her tremors now and again in the reading of his later letters
humiliated her, in the knowledge that they came of no response to him,
but from the temporary base acquiescence; which is, with women, a
terrible perception of the gulf of their unsatisfied nature.

The secretary, cheerful at his work, was found for just the opening of a
door. Sometimes she hesitated--to disturb him, she said to herself,--and
went up-stairs or out visiting. He protested that he could work on and
talk too. She was able to amuse her lord with some of his ideas. He had a
stock of them, all his own.

Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to
the humanity they visit to help uplift, it from the state of beast. In
the England of that, period original or unknown ideas were a smoking
brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air,
jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and the
cherished, the ivy-clad and celestially haloed. They carried the
dishevelled Maenad's torch. A step with them, and we were on the
Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution. For a publication of simple
ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not
pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded: the
horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them up,
wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an execrable
brimstone stench.

Lord Ormont broke through his shouts or grunts at Aminta's report of