s if she were burnt paper held
at the fire consuming her. His hopes hung elsewhere. Nevertheless, an
intellectual demon-imp very lively in his head urged him to speculate on
such a contest between them, and weigh the engaging forces. Difficulties
were perceived, the scornful laughter on her side was plainly heard; but
his feeling of savage mastery, far from beaten down, swelled so as to
become irritable for the trial; and when he was near her house he held a
review of every personal disadvantage he could summon, incited by an
array of limping deficiencies that flattered their arrogant leader with
ideas of the power he had in spite of them.

In fact, his emancipation from sentiment inspired the genial mood to
tease. Women, having to encounter a male adept at the weapon for the
purpose, must be either voluble or supportingly proud to keep the skin
from shrinking: which is a commencement of the retrogression; and that
has frequently been the beginning of a rout. Now the Countess Livia was a
lady of queenly pose and the servitorial conventional speech likely at a
push to prove beggarly. When once on a common platform with a man of
agile tongue instigated by his intellectual demon to pursue inquiries
into her moral resources, after a ruthless exposure of the wrecked
material, she would have to be, after the various fashions, defiant, if
she was to hold her own against pressure; and seeing, as she must, the
road of prudence point to conciliation, it was calculable that she would
take it. Hence a string of possible events, astounding to mankind, but
equally calculable, should one care to give imagination headway. Gower
looked signally Captain Abrane's 'fiddler' while he waited at Livia's
house door. A studious intimacy with such a lady was rather like the
exposure of the silver moon to the astronomer's telescope.

The Dame will have nought of an interview and colloquy not found
mentioned in her collection of ballads, concerning a person quite
secondary in Dr. Glossop's voluminous papers. She as vehemently prohibits
a narration of Gower Woodseer's proposal some hours later, for the hand
of the Countess of Fleetwood's transfixed maid Madge, because of the
insignificance of the couple; and though it was a quaint idyll of an
affection slowly formed, rationally based while seeming preposterous,
tending to bluntly funny utterances on both sides. The girl was a
creature of the enthusiasms, and had lifted that passion of her
constitu