One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

One of Our Conquerors
distant, very faint idea, that it had better not be mentioned
just yet, for a reason entirely undefined.
He consulted his watch. The maid had come in for the
robeing of her mistress. Nataly’s mind had turned to the little
country cottage which would have given her such great happiness.
She raised her eyes to him; she could not check their
filling; they were like a river carrying moonlight on the
smooth roll of a fall.
He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them. With an
impatient, ‘There, there!’ and a smart affectionate look, he
retired, thinking in our old satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour
to satisfy a woman’s mind without the intrusion of
hard material statements, facts. Even the best of women, even
the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest beauty,
have this gross ravenousness for facts. You must not expect
to appease them unless you administer solids. It would almost
appear that man is exclusively imaginative and poetical;
and that his mate, the fair, the graceful, the bewitching,
with the sweetest and purest of natures, cannot help being
something of a groveller.
Nataly had likewise her thoughts.
CHAPTER VII
BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THIN
WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL
RATHER EARLIER in the afternoon of that day, Simeon Fenellan,
thinking of the many things which are nothing, and so melancholy
for lack of amusements properly to follow Old Veuve,
that he could ask himself whether he had not done a deed of
night, to be blinking at his fellow-men like an owl all mad
for the reveller’s hoots and flights and mice and moony roundels
behind his hypocritical judex air of moping composure,
chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln’s Inn
pumps lawyers into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of
Chancery Lane. He was in the state of the wine when a shake
will rouse the sluggish sparkles to foam. Sight of Mrs.
Burman’s legal adviser had instantly this effect upon him:
his bubbling friendliness for Victor Radnor, and the desire
of the voice in his bosom for ears to hear, combined like the
rush of two waves together, upon which he may be figured
as the boat: he caught at Mr. Carling’s hand more heartily
48