alone: that is, without a man to guard. He 's
too chivalrous.

The sending of Weyburn, she now fancied, was her own doing, and Lady
Charlotte attributed it to her interpretation of her brother's heart of
chivalry; though it would have been the wiser course, tending straight
and swift to the natural end, if the two women and their Morsfield had
received the dismissal to travel as they came.

One sees it after the event. Yes, only Rowsley would not have dismissed
her without surety that she would be protected. So it was the right
thing prompted on the impulse of the moment. And young Weyburn would
meet some difficulty in protecting his 'Lady Ormont,' if she had no
inclination for it.

Analyzing her impulse of the moment, Lady Charlotte credited
herself, not unjustly, with a certain considerateness for the woman,
notwithstanding the woman's violent intrusion between brother and
sister. Knowing the world, and knowing the upper or Beanstalk world
intimately, she winked at nature's passions. But when the legitimate
affection of a brother and sister finds them interposing, they are, as
little parsonically as possible, reproved. If persistently intrusive,
they are handed to the constable.

How, supposing the case of a wife? Well, then comes the contest; and it
is with an inferior, because not a born, legitimacy of union; which
may be, which here and there is, affection; is generally the habit of
partnership. It is inferior, from not being the union of the blood; it
is a matter merely of the laws and the tastes. No love, she reasoned,
is equal to the love of brother and sister: not even the love of parents
for offspring, or of children for mother and father. Brother and sister
have the holy young days in common; they have lastingly the recollection
of their youth, the golden time when they were themselves, or the
best of themselves. A wife is a stranger from the beginning; she is
necessarily three parts a stranger up to the finish of the history.
She thinks she can absorb the husband. Not if her husband has a sister
living! She may cry and tear for what she calls her own: she will act
prudently in bowing her head to the stronger tie. Is there a wife in
Europe who broods on her husband's merits and his injuries as the sister
of Thomas Rowsley, Earl of Ormont does? or one to defend his good name,
one to work for his fortunes, as devotedly?

Over and over Lady Charlotte drove her flocks, of much the same pattern,
like billows