ends; for Mr. Austin smiled effusively in alluding to the
illustrious Roman pleader's foible of verse: but Pliny bore no
resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil Beauchamp: she could not
realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer, student, statesman,
benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern English gentleman,
though he was. 'Yes!' she would reply encouragingly to Seymour Austin's
fond brooding hum about his hero; and 'Yes!' conclusively: like an
incarnation of stupidity dealing in monosyllables. She was unworthy of
the society of a scholar. Nor could she kneel at the feet of her especial
heroes: Dante, Raphael, Buonarotti: she was unworthy of them. She longed
to be at Mount Laurels. Mr. Tuckham's conversation was the nearest
approach to it--as it were round by Greenland; but it was homeward.

She was really grieved to lose him. Business called him to England.

'What business can it be, papa?' she inquired: and the colonel replied
briefly: 'Ours.'

Mr. Austin now devoted much of his time to the instruction of her in the
ancient life of the Eternal City. He had certain volumes of Livy,
Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning
the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no
jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient. A gentle
cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious of and
laughed over during their peregrinations in and out of Rome: she pulled
for the Republic of the Scipios; his predilections were toward the Rome
of the wise and clement emperors. To Cecilia's mind Rome rocked at a
period so closely neighbouring her decay: to him, with an imagination
brooding on the fuller knowledge of it, the city breathed securely, the
sky was clear; jurisprudence, rhetoric, statesmanship, then flourished
supreme, and men eminent for culture: the finest flowers of our race, he
thought them: and he thought their Age the manhood of Rome.

Struck suddenly by a feminine subtle comparison that she could not have
framed in speech, Cecilia bowed to his views of the happiness and
elevation proper to the sway of a sagacious and magnanimous Imperialism
of the Roman pattern:--he rejected the French. She mused on dim old
thoughts of the gracious dignity of a woman's life under high
governorship. Turbulent young men imperilled it at every step. The
trained, the grave, the partly grey, were fitting lords and mates for
women aspiring to moral be