ness could not go farther.

'He is a man of cultivation,' Beauchamp said cursorily, trying to avoid
dissension, but in vain. 'I wish I were half as well instructed, and the
world half as charitable as he!--You ask me if I shall admit my sight to
be imperfect. Yes; when you prove to me that priests and landlords are
willing to do their duty by the people in preference to their churches
and their property: but will you ever shake off prejudice?'

Here was opposition sounding again. Cecilia mentally reproached Dr.
Shrapnel for it.

'Indeed, Nevil, really, must not--may I not ask you this?--must not every
one feel the evil spell of some associations? And Dante and Dr.
Shrapnel!'

'You don't know him, Cecilia.'

'I saw him yesterday.'

'You thought him too tall?'

'I thought of his character.'

'How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful!'

'I am immensely indebted to my unconscious advocate.'

'You are clad in steel; you flash back; you won't answer me out of the
heart. I 'm convinced it is pure wilfulness that makes you oppose me.'

'I fancy you must be convinced because you cannot imagine women to have
any share of public spirit, Nevil.'

A grain of truth in that remark set Nevil reflecting.

'I want them to have it,' he remarked, and glanced at a Tory placard,
probably the puppet's fresh-printed address to the electors, on one of
the wayside fir-trees. 'Bevisham looks well from here. We might make a
North-western Venice of it, if we liked.'

'Papa told you it would be money sunk in mud.'

'Did I mention it to him?--Thoroughly Conservative!--So he would leave
the mud as it is. They insist on our not venturing anything--those
Tories! exactly as though we had gained the best of human conditions,
instead of counting crops of rogues, malefactors, egoists, noxious and
lumbersome creatures that deaden the country. Your town down there is one
of the ugliest and dirtiest in the kingdom: it might be the fairest.'

'I have often thought that of Bevisham, Nevil.'

He drew a visionary sketch of quays, embankments, bridged islands, public
buildings, magical emanations of patriotic architecture, with a practical
air, an absence of that enthusiasm which struck her with suspicion when
it was not applied to landscape or the Arts; and she accepted it, and
warmed, and even allowed herself to appear hesitating when he returned to
the similarity of the state of mud-begirt Bevisham and our great sluggish
E