One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
the roadway or riverway of a true story, unless we press to
invent; his mind had been too busy on the way for him to
clothe in speech his impressions of the passage of incidents at
the call for them. Things had happened, numbers of interesting
minor things, but they all slipped as water through the
fingers; and he being of the band of honest creatures who will
not accept a lift from fiction, drearily he sat before the ladies,
confessing to an emptiness he was far from feeling.
Nesta professed excessive disappointment. ‘Now, if it had
been in England, Skips!’ she said, under her mother’s gentle
gloom of brows.
He made show of melancholy submission.
‘There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,’
Nataly said.
And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent to
prove to us that they can be a blessing; instead of the dreadful
cry to Providence for the reason of the spread of the race
of man by their means! He declared his readiness, rejecting
excuses, to state his case to them, but for his fear of having it
interpreted as an appeal for their kind aid in obtaining his
master’s forgiveness. Mr. Durance had very considerately
promised to intercede. Skepsey dropped a hint or two of his
naughty proceedings drily aware that their untutored antipathy
to the manly art would not permit of warmth.
Nesta said: ‘Do you know, Skips, we saw a grand exhibition
of fencing in Paris.’
He sighed. ‘Ladies can look on at fencing! foils and masks!
Captain Dartrey Fenellan has shown me, and says, the French
are our masters at it.’ He bowed constrainedly to mademoiselle.
‘You box, M. Skepsey!’ she said.
His melancholy increased: ‘Much discouragement from
Government, Society! If ladies … but I do not venture. They
are not against Games. But these are not a protection … to
them, when needed; to the country. The country seems asleep
to its position. Mr. Durance has remarked on it:—though I
would not always quote Mr. Durance … indeed, he says,
that England has invested an Old Maid’s All in the Millennium,
and is ruined if it delays to come. “Old Maid,” I do
not see. I do not—if I may presume to speak of myself in the
same breath with so clever a gentleman, agree with Mr. Durance
in everything. But the chest-measurement of recruits,
the stature of the men enlisted, prove that we are losing the
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