rl had a certain hold of him,
but with a great deal of swagger he hadn't the spirit of a sheep: he was
in fear of his father and would never commit himself in Lord Considine's
lifetime. The most Flora might achieve was that he wouldn't marry some
one else. Geoffrey Dawling, to Mrs. Meldrum's knowledge (I had told her
of the young man's visit) had attached himself on the way back from Italy
to the Hammond Synge group. My informant was in a position to be
definite about this dangler; she knew about his people; she had heard of
him before. Hadn't he been a friend of one of her nephews at Oxford?
Hadn't he spent the Christmas holidays precisely three years before at
her brother-in-law's in Yorkshire, taking that occasion to get himself
refused with derision by wilful Betty, the second daughter of the house?
Her sister, who liked the floundering youth, had written to her to
complain of Betty, and that the young man should now turn up as an
appendage of Flora's was one of those oft-cited proofs that the world is
small and that there are not enough people to go round. His father had
been something or other in the Treasury; his grandfather on the mother's
side had been something or other in the Church. He had come into the
paternal estate, two or three thousand a year in Hampshire; but he had
let the place advantageously and was generous to four plain sisters who
lived at Bournemouth and adored him. The family was hideous all round,
but the very salt of the earth. He was supposed to be unspeakably
clever; he was fond of London, fond of books, of intellectual society and
of the idea of a political career. That such a man should be at the same
time fond of Flora Saunt attested, as the phrase in the first volume of
Gibbon has it, the variety of his inclinations. I was soon to learn that
he was fonder of her than of all the other things together. Betty, one
of five and with views above her station, was at any rate felt at home to
have dished herself by her perversity. Of course no one had looked at
her since and no one would ever look at her again. It would be eminently
desirable that Flora should learn the lesson of Betty's fate.

I was not struck, I confess, with all this in my mind, by any symptom on
our young lady's part of that sort of meditation. The one moral she saw
in anything was that of her incomparable aspect, which Mr. Dawling,
smitten even like the railway porters and the cabmen by the doom-dealing
gods,