One of Our Conquerors - World eBook Library

George Meredith
keep down their anxious minds and allow him to stand in
wet clothing to eat his cold pie and salad.
Miss Priscilla Graves entering to them, became a witness
that they were seductresses for inducing him to drink wine—
and a sparkling wine.
‘It is to warm him,’ they pleaded; and she said: ‘He must
be warm from his walk’; and they said: ‘But he is wet’; and
said she, without a show of feeling: ‘Warm water, then’; and
Skepsey writhed, as if in the grasp of anatomists, at being
the subject of female contention or humane consideration.
Miss Graves caught signs of the possible proselyte in him;
she remarked encouragingly:
‘I am sure he does not like it; he still has a natural taste.’
She distressed his native politeness, for the glass was in his
hand, and he was fully aware of her high-principled aversion;
and he profoundly bowed to principles, believing his
England to be pillared on them; and the lady looked like one
who bore the standard of a principle; and if we slap and
pinch and starve our appetites, the idea of a principle seems
entering us to support. Subscribing to a principle, our energies
are refreshed; we have a faith in the country that was not
with us before the act; and of a real well-founded faith come
the glowing thoughts which we have at times: thoughts of
England heading the nations; when the smell of an English
lane under showers challenges Eden, and the threading of a
London crowd tunes discords to the swell of a cathedral organ.
It may be, that by the renunciation of any description of
alcohol, a man will stand clearer-headed to serve his country.
He may expect to have a clearer memory, for certain: he will
not be asking himself, unable to decide, whether his master
named a Mr. Journeyman or a Mr. Jarniman, as the person he
declined to receive. Either of the two is repulsed upon his application,
owing to the guilty similarity of sounds but what we
are to think of is, our own sad state of inefficiency in failing to
remember; which accuses our physical condition, therefore
our habits.—Thus the little man debated, scarcely requiring
more than to hear the right word, to be a convert and make
him a garland of the proselyte’s fetters.
Destructively for the cause she advocated, Miss Priscilla
gestured the putting forth of an abjuring hand, with the recommendation
to him, so to put aside temptation that instant;
and she signified in a very ugly jerk of her features, the
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