knew that he ruled Upstairs as well as
down, and she clung to the fable of the association of interests in the
north of London. The Highmores had a better address--they lived now in
Stanhope Gardens; but Cecil was fearfully artful--he wouldn't hear of
an association of interests nor treat with his mother-in-law save as
a visitor. She didn't like false positions; but on the other hand she
didn't like the sacrifice of everything she was accustomed to. Her
universe at all events was a universe full of card-leavings and charming
houses, and it was fortunate that she couldn't Upstairs catch the sound
of the doom to which, in his little grey den, describing to me his
diplomacy, Limbert consigned alike the country magnates and the
opportunities of London. Despoiled of every guarantee she went to
Stanhope Gardens like a mere maidservant, with restrictions on her very
luggage, while during the year that followed this upheaval Limbert,
strolling with me on the goose-green, to which I often ran down, played
extravagantly over the theme that with what he was now going in for
it was a positive comfort not to have the social kaleidoscope. With a
cold-blooded trick in view what had life or manners or the best society
or flys from the inn to say to the question? It was as good a place as
another to play his new game. He had found a quieter corner than any
corner of the great world, and a damp old house at sixpence a year,
which, beside leaving him all his margin to educate his children, would
allow of the supreme luxury of his frankly presenting himself as a poor
man. This was a convenience that _ces dames_, as he called them, had
never yet fully permitted him.

It rankled in me at first to see his reward so meagre, his conquest so
mean; but the simplification effected had a charm that I finally felt;
it was a forcing-house for the three or four other fine miscarriages
to which his scheme was evidently condemned. I limited him to three or
four, having had my sharp impression, in spite of the perpetual broad
joke of the thing, that a spring had really snapped in him on the
occasion of that deeply disconcerting sequel to the episode of his
editorship. He never lost his sense of the grotesque want, in the
difference made, of adequate relation to the effort that had been the
intensest of his life. He had from that moment a charge of shot in him,
and it slowly worked its way to a vital part. As he met his embarrassments
each year with his p