«
    »Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee ...? If any occur, why
should they drive you away?«
    »Well, I'm two and thirty, and have never been in the fray: a kind of
nondescript, half-scholar, and by nature half billman or bowman or musketeer; if
I'm worth anything, London 's the field for me. But that's what I have to try.«
    »Papa will not like your serving with your pen in London: he will say you
are worth too much for that.«
    »Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked above them.«
    »They are wasted, he says.«
    »Error! If they have their private ambition, they may suppose they are
wasted. But the value to the world of a private ambition I do not clearly
understand.«
    »You have not an evil opinion of the world?« said Miss Middleton, sick at
heart as she spoke, with the sensation of having invited herself to take a drop
of poison.
    He replied: »One might as well have an evil opinion of a river: here it's
muddy, there it's clear; one day troubled, another at rest. We have to treat it
with common sense.«
    »Love it?«
    »In the sense of serving it.«
    »Not think it beautiful?«
    »Part of it is, part of it the reverse.«
    »Papa would quote the mulier formosa.«
    »Except that fish is too good for the black extremity. Woman is excellent
for the upper.«
    »How do you say that? - not cynically, I believe. Your view commends itself
to my reason.«
    She was grateful to him for not stating it in ideal contrast with Sir
Willoughby's view. If he had, so intensely did her youthful blood desire to be
enamoured of the world, that she felt he would have lifted her off her feet. For
a moment a gulf beneath had been threatening. When she said, »Love it?« a little
enthusiasm would have wafted her into space fierily as wine; but the sober, »In
the sense of serving it,« entered her brain, and was matter for reflection upon
it and him.
    She could think of him in pleasant liberty, uncorrected by her woman's
instinct of peril. He had neither arts nor graces; nothing of his cousin's easy
social front-face. She had once witnessed the military precision of his
