One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
sea!’ were the satirist’s present black beast. ‘So these moneyed
English shoulder to the front place; and that is the appearance
they offer to their commercial God!’ He gazed along
the miles of ‘English countenance,’ drearily laughing.
Changeful ocean seemed to laugh at the spectacle. Some
Orphic joke inspired his exclamation: ‘Capital!’
‘Come where the shops are,’ said Nesta.
‘And how many thousand parsons have you here?’
‘Ten, I think,’ she answered in his vein, and warmed him;
leading him contemplatively to scrutinize her admirers: the
Rev. Septimus; Mr. Sowerby.
‘News of our friend of the whimpering flute?’
‘Here? no. I have to understand you!’
Colney cast a weariful look backward on the ‘regiments of
Anglo-Chinese’ represented to him by the moneyed terraces,
and said: ‘The face of a stopped watch!—the only meaning
it has is past date.’
He had no liking for Dudley Sowerby. But it might have been
an allusion to the general view of the houses. But again, ‘the
meaning of it past date,’ stuck in her memory. A certain face
close on handsome, had a fatal susceptibility to caricature.
She spoke of her ‘exile’: wanted Skepsey to come down to
her; moaned over the loss of her Louise. The puzzle of the
reason for the long separation from her parents, was evident
in her mind, and unmentioned.
They turned on to the pier.
Nesta reminded him of certain verses he had written to
celebrate her visit to the place when she was a child:
‘“And then along the pier we sped,
And there we saw a Whale
He seemed to have a Normous Head,
And not a bit of Tail!”’
‘Manifestly a foreigner to our shores, where the exactly inverse
condition rules,’ Colney said.
‘“And then we scampered on the beach,
To chase the foaming wave;
And when we ran beyond its reach
We all became more brave.”’
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