us from being thus wise and miserable for ever. Benson's
excuse was that he believed in his master, who was menaced. And moreover,
notwithstanding his previous tribulation, to spy upon Cupid was sweet to
him. So he peeped, and he saw a sight. He saw Time's full face; or, in
other words, he saw the wiles of woman and the weakness of man: which is
our history, as Benson would have written it, and a great many poets and
philosophers have written it.

Yet it was but the plucking of the Autumn primrose that Benson had seen:
a somewhat different operation from the plucking of the Spring one: very
innocent! Our staid elderly sister has paler blood, and has, or thinks
she has, a reason or two about the roots. She is not all instinct. "For
this high cause, and for that I know men, and know him to be the flower
of men, I give myself to him!" She makes that lofty inward exclamation
while the hand is detaching her from the roots. Even so strong a
self-justification she requires. She has not that blind glory in excess
which her younger sister can gild the longest leap with. And if,
moth-like, she desires the star, she is nervously cautious of candles.
Hence her circles about the dangerous human flame are wide and shy. She
must be drawn nearer and nearer by a fresh reason. She loves to
sentimentalize. Lady Blandish had been sentimentalizing for ten years.
She would have preferred to pursue the game. The dark-eyed dame was
pleased with her smooth life and the soft excitement that did not ruffle
it. Not willingly did she let herself be won.

"Sentimentalists," says The Pilgrim's Scrip, "are they who seek to enjoy
without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done."

"It is," the writer says of Sentimentalism elsewhere, "a happy pastime
and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a
damning one to them who have anything to forfeit."

However, one who could set down the dying for love, as a sentimentalism,
can hardly be accepted as a clear authority. Assuredly he was not one to
avoid the incurring of the immense debtorship in any way: but he was a
bondsman still to the woman who had forsaken him, and a spoken word would
have made it seem his duty to face that public scandal which was the last
evil to him. What had so horrified the virtuous Benson, Richard had
already beheld in Daphne's Bower; a simple kissing of the fair white
hand! Doubtless the keyhole somehow added to Benson's horror. The two
simil