 Dr. Shrapnel
for it.
    »Indeed, Nevil, really, must not - may I not ask you this? - must not every
one feel the evil spell of some associations? And Dante and Dr. Shrapnel!«
    »You don't know him, Cecilia.«
    »I saw him yesterday.«
    »You thought him too tall?«
    »I thought of his character.«
    »How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful!«
    »I am immensely indebted to my unconscious advocate.«
    »You are clad in steel; you flash back; you won't answer me out of the
heart. I 'm convinced it is pure wilfulness that makes you oppose me.«
    »I fancy you must be convinced because you cannot imagine women to have any
share of public spirit, Nevil.«
    A grain of truth in that remark set Nevil reflecting.
    »I want them to have it,« he remarked, and glanced at a Tory placard,
probably the puppet's fresh-printed address to the electors, on one of the
wayside fir-trees. »Bevisham looks well from here. We might make a North-western
Venice of it, if we liked.«
    »Papa told you it would be money sunk in mud.«
    »Did I mention it to him? - Thoroughly Conservative! - So he would leave the
mud as it is. They insist on our not venturing anything - those Tories! exactly
as though we had gained the best of human conditions, instead of counting crops
of rogues, malefactors, egoists, noxious and lumbersome creatures that deaden
the country. Your town down there is one of the ugliest and dirtiest in the
kingdom: it might be the fairest.«
    »I have often thought that of Bevisham, Nevil.«
    He drew a visionary sketch of quays, embankments, bridged islands, public
buildings, magical emanations of patriotic architecture, with a practical air,
an absence of that enthusiasm which struck her with suspicion when it was not
applied to landscape or the Arts; and she accepted it, and warmed, and even
allowed herself to appear hesitating when he returned to the similarity of the
state of mud-begirt Bevisham and our great sluggish England.
    Was he not perhaps to be pitied in his bondage to the Frenchwoman, who could
have no ideas in common with him?
    The rare circumstance that she and Nevil Beauchamp had found a subject of
agreement, partially overcame the sentiment Cecilia entertained for the foreign
lady; and having now one idea in common with him, she conceived the possibility
