the road? I surrendered to security, I
perhaps even grossly took my ease in it; and I was to breathe from
beginning to end of our visit, which began with our sitting again at
luncheon, an air--so unlike that of Witley!--in which it seemed to me
frankly that nothing but the blest obvious, or at least the blest
outright, could so much as attempt to live. These elements hung sociably
and all auspiciously about us--it was a large and simple and almost
empty occasion; yet empty without embarrassment, rather as from a
certain high guardedness or defensiveness of situation, literally
indeed from the material, the local sublimity, the fact of our all
upliftedly hanging together over one of the grandest sweeps of view in
England. Remembered passages again people, however, in their proportion,
the excess of opportunity; each with that conclusive note of the
outright all unadorned. What could have partaken more of this quality
for instance than the question I was startled to hear launched before we
had left the table by the chance of Mrs. Greville's having happened to
mention in some connection one of her French relatives, Mademoiselle
Laure de Sade? It had fallen on my own ear--the mention at least
had--with a certain effect of unconscious provocation; but this was as
nothing to its effect on the ear of our host. "De Sade?" he at once
exclaimed with interest--and with the consequence, I may frankly add, of
my wondering almost to ecstasy, that is to the ecstasy of curiosity, to
what length he would proceed. He proceeded admirably--admirably for the
triumph of simplification--to the very greatest length imaginable, as
was signally promoted by the fact that clearly no one present, with a
single exception, recognised the name or the nature of the scandalous,
the long ignored, the at last all but unnameable author; least of all
the gentle relative of Mademoiselle Laure, who listened with the
blankest grace to her friend's enumeration of his titles to infamy,
among which that of his most notorious work was pronounced. It was the
homeliest, frankest, most domestic passage, as who should say, and most
remarkable for leaving none of us save myself, by my impression, in the
least embarrassed or bewildered; largely, I think, because of the
failure--a failure the most charmingly flat--of all measure on the part
of auditors and speaker alike of what might be intended or understood,
of what, in fine, the latter was talking about.

He struck m