hat they
were filled with tears.

'What have I to forgive?' she said, more gently, wondering on what
sort of strange sportsman she had fallen. 'You treat me like an
equal; you will deign to argue with me. But men in general--oh,
they hide their contempt for us, if not their own ignorance, under
that mask of chivalrous deference!' and then in the nasal fine
ladies' key, which was her shell, as bitter brusquerie was his, she
added, with an Amazon queen's toss of the head,--'You must come and
see us often. We shall suit each other, I see, better than most
whom we see here.'

A sneer and a blush passed together over Lancelot's ugliness.

'What, better than the glib Colonel Bracebridge yonder?'

'Oh, he is witty enough, but he lives on the surface of everything!
He is altogether shallow and blase. His good-nature is the fruit of
want of feeling; between his gracefulness and his sneering
persiflage he is a perfect Mephistopheles-Apollo.'

What a snare a decently-good nickname is! Out it must come, though
it carry a lie on its back. But the truth was, Argemone thought
herself infinitely superior to the colonel, for which simple reason
she could not in the least understand him.

[By the bye, how subtly Mr. Tennyson has embodied all this in The
Princess. How he shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on
the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral
punishment, by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh,
which is either woman's highest blessing or her bitterest curse; how
she loses all feminine sensibility to the under-current of feeling
in us poor world-worn, case-hardened men, and falls from pride to
sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity. I should have
honoured myself by pleading guilty to stealing much of Argemone's
character from The Princess, had not the idea been conceived, and
fairly worked out, long before the appearance of that noble poem.]

They said no more to each other that evening. Argemone was called
to the piano; and Lancelot took up the Sporting Magazine, and read
himself to sleep till the party separated for the night.

Argemone went up thoughtfully to her own room. The shower had
fallen, and the moon was shining bright, while every budding leaf
and knot of mould steamed up cool perfume, borrowed from the
treasures of the thundercloud. All around was working the infinite
mystery of birth and growth, of giving and tak