, and she gives him the fuller heart for
his not requiring her to be absorbed--she is the braver mate for him.
Does not that read his meaning? Happiest of the girls of earth, she has
divined it at once, from never having had the bitter ambition to be a
slave, that she might wear rich tissues; and let herself be fettered,
that she might loll in idleness; lose a soul to win a title; escape
commonplace to discover it ghastlier under cloth of gold, and the
animal crowned, adored, fattened, utterly served, in the class called by
consent of human society the Upper.

Reason whispered a reminder of facts to her.

'But I am not the Countess of Ormont!' she said. She felt herself the
girl, her sensations were so intensely simple.

Proceeding to an argument, that the earl did not regard her as the
Countess of Ormont, or the ceremony at the British Embassy as one
serious and binding, she pushed her reason too far: sweet delusion
waned. She waited for some fresh scene to revive it.

Aminta sat unwittingly weaving her destiny.

While she was thus engaged, a carriage was rolling on the more westerly
road down to Steignton. Seated in it were Lady Charlotte Eglett and
Matthew Weyburn. They had met at Arthur Abner's office the previous day.
She went there straight from Lord Ormont's house-agent and upholsterer,
to have a queer bit of thunderous news confirmed, that her brother was
down at Steignton, refurnishing the house, and not for letting. She
was excited: she treated Arthur Abner's closed-volume reticence as a
corroboration of the house-agent's report, and hearing Weyburn speak of
his anxiety to see the earl immediately, in order to get release from
his duties, proposed a seat in her carriage; for down Steignton way she
meant to go, if only as excuse for a view of the old place. She kept
asking what Lord Ormont wanted down at Steignton refurnishing the house,
and not to let it! Her evasions of answers that, plain speculation would
supply were quaint. 'He hasn't my feeling for Steignton. He could let
it--I couldn't. Sacrilege to me to have a tenant in my old home where I
was born. He's furnishing to raise his rent. His country won't give him
anything to do, so he turns miser. That's my brother Rowsley's way of
taking on old age.'

Her brother Rowsley might also be showing another sign of his calamitous
condition. She said to Weyburn, in the carriage, that her brother
Rowsley might like having his hair clipped by the Philistine