hilling of her own to fling at a beggar. She 'll stock a
cottage wanting it with provision for a fortnight or more, and she'll
order the doctor in, and she'll call and see the right things done for
illness. 'But no money; no one'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