."

"You can have three hundred a year. But you must live in town and be
ready to look after things when I want you. I shall be rather hard up."

"If you are not going to be at Ryelands this winter, I might run down
there and let you know how Swinton goes on."

"If you like. I don't care a toss where you are, so that you keep out
of sight."

"Much obliged," said Lush, able to take the affair more easily than he
had expected. He was supported by the secret belief that he should
by-and-by be wanted as much as ever.

"Perhaps you will not object to packing up as soon as possible," said
Grandcourt. "The Torringtons are coming, and Miss Harleth will be
riding over here."

"With all my heart. Can't I be of use in going to Gadsmere."

"No. I am going myself."

"About your being rather hard up. Have you thought of that plan--"

"Just leave me alone, will you?" said Grandcourt, in his lowest audible
tone, tossing his cigar into the fire, and rising to walk away.

He spent the evening in the solitude of the smaller drawing-room,
where, with various new publications on the table of the kind a
gentleman may like to have on hand without touching, he employed
himself (as a philosopher might have done) in sitting meditatively on
the sofa and abstaining from literature--political, comic, cynical, or
romantic. In this way hours may pass surprisingly soon, without the
arduous invisible chase of philosophy; not from love of thought, but
from hatred of effort--from a state of the inward world, something like
premature age, where the need for action lapses into a mere image of
what has been, is, and may or might be; where impulse is born and dies
in a phantasmal world, pausing in rejection of even a shadowy
fulfillment. That is a condition which often comes with whitening hair;
and sometimes, too, an intense obstinacy and tenacity of rule, like the
main trunk of an exorbitant egoism, conspicuous in proportion as the
varied susceptibilities of younger years are stripped away.

But Grandcourt's hair, though he had not much of it, was of a fine,
sunny blonde, and his moods were not entirely to be explained as ebbing
energy. We mortals have a strange spiritual chemistry going on within
us, so that a lazy stagnation or even a cottony milkiness may be
preparing one knows not what biting or explosive material. The navvy
waking from sleep and without malice heaving a stone to crush the life
out of his still sleeping comrade, is underst