knew!--almost as rich as we dreamed! But then the
instant we are away from her we find ourselves bankrupt, beggared. How is
that? We do not ask. We hurry to her and bask hungrily in her orbs. The
eye must be feminine to be thus creative: I cannot say why. Lady Judith
understood Richard, and he feeling infinitely vile, somehow held to her
more feverishly, as one who dreaded the worst in missing her. The spirit
must rest; he was weak with what he suffered.

Austin found them among the hills of Nassau in Rhineland: Titans, male
and female, who had not displaced Jove, and were now adrift, prone on
floods of sentiment. The blue-flocked peasant swinging behind his oxen of
a morning, the gaily-kerchiefed fruit-woman, the jackass-driver, even the
doctor of those regions, have done more for their fellows. Horrible
reflection! Lady Judith is serene above it, but it frets at Richard when
he is out of her shadow. Often wretchedly he watches the young men of his
own age trooping to their work. Not cloud-work theirs! Work solid,
unambitious, fruitful!

Lady Judith had a nobler in prospect for the hero. He gaped blindfolded
for anything, and she gave him the map of Europe in tatters. He swallowed
it comfortably. It was an intoxicating cordial. Himself on horseback
overriding wrecks of Empires! Well might common sense cower with the
meaner animals at the picture. Tacitly they agreed to recast the
civilized globe. The quality of vapour is to melt and shape itself anew;
but it is never the quality of vapour to reassume the same shapes.
Briareus of the hundred unoccupied hands may turn to a monstrous donkey
with his hind legs aloft, or twenty thousand jabbering apes. The
phantasmic groupings of the young brain are very like those we see in the
skies, and equally the sport of the wind. Lady Judith blew. There was
plenty of vapour in him, and it always resolved into some shape or other.
You that mark those clouds of eventide, and know youth, will see the
similitude: it will not be strange, it will barely seem foolish to you,
that a young man of Richard's age, Richard's education and position,
should be in this wild state. Had he not been nursed to believe he was
born for great things? Did she not say she was sure of it? And to feel
base, yet born for better, is enough to make one grasp at anything
cloudy. Suppose the hero with a game leg. How intense is his faith to
quacks! with what a passion of longing is he not seized to break
somebody