The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to snappish
irritability or the thirst for tenderness. Gower had singular experiences
of him on the drive North-westward. He scarcely spoke; he said once: 'If
you mean to marry, 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 wit