the Sun? What cares
any woman to help to hold up Life to him? He breeds divinely upon life,
filthy upon stagnation. Sail you away, if you will, in your trance. I go.
I go home by land alone, and I await you. Here in this land of moles
upright, I do naught but execrate; I am a pulpit of curses.
Counter-anathema, you might call me.'

'Oh! I feel the comparison so, for England shining spiritually bright,'
said Jenny, and cut her husband adrift with the exclamation, and saw him
float away to Dr. Shrapnel.

'Spiritually bright!'

'By comparison, Nevil.'

'There's neither spiritual nor political brightness in England, but a
common resolution to eat of good things and stick to them,' said the
doctor: 'and we two out of England, there's barely a voice to cry scare
to the feeders. I'm back! I'm home!'

They lost him once in Cadiz, and discovered him on the quay, looking
about for a vessel. In getting him to return to the Esperanza, they
nearly all three fell into the hands of the police. Beauchamp gave him a
great deal of his time, reading and discussing with him on deck and in
the cabin, and projecting future enterprises, to pacify his restlessness.
A translation of Plato had become Beauchamp's intellectual world. This
philosopher singularly anticipated his ideas. Concerning himself he was
beginning to think that he had many years ahead of him for work. He was
with Dr. Shrapnel, as to the battle, and with Jenny as to the delay in
recommencing it. Both the men laughed at the constant employment she gave
them among the Greek islands in furnishing her severely accurate accounts
of sea-fights and land-fights: and the scenes being before them they
could neither of them protest that their task-work was an idle labour.
Dr. Shrapnel assisted in fighting Marathon and Salamis over again
cordially--to shield Great Britain from the rule of a satrapy.

Beauchamp often tried to conjure words to paint his wife. On grave
subjects she had the manner of speaking of a shy scholar, and between
grave and playful, between smiling and serious, her clear head, her nobly
poised character, seemed to him to have never had a prototype and to
elude the art of picturing it in expression, until he heard Lydiard call
her whimsically, 'Portia disrobing'

Portia half in her doctor's gown, half out of it. They met Lydiard and
his wife Louise, and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckham, in Venice, where, upon the
first day of October, Jenny Beauchamp gave birth to a son.