 hands of the police. Beauchamp gave him a great deal of his time,
reading and discussing with him on deck and in the cabin, and projecting future
enterprises, to pacify his restlessness. A translation of Plato had become
Beauchamp's intellectual world. This philosopher singularly anticipated his
ideas. Concerning himself he was beginning to think that he had many years ahead
of him for work. He was with Dr. Shrapnel, as to the battle, and with Jenny as
to the delay in recommencing it. Both the men laughed at the constant employment
she gave them among the Greek islands in furnishing her severely accurate
accounts of sea-fights and land-fights; and the scenes being before them they
could neither of them protest that their task-work was an idle labour. Dr.
Shrapnel assisted in fighting Marathon and Salamis over again cordially - to
shield Great Britain from the rule of a satrapy.
    Beauchamp often tried to conjure words to paint his wife. On grave subjects
she had the manner of speaking of a shy scholar, and between grave and playful,
between smiling and serious, her clear head, her nobly poised character, seemed
to him to have never had a prototype and to elude the art of picturing it in
expression, until he heard Lydiard call her whimsically, »Portia disrobing«:
Portia half in her doctor's gown, half out of it. They met Lydiard and his wife
Louise, and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckham, in Venice, where, upon the first day of
October, Jenny Beauchamp gave birth to a son. The thrilling mother did not
perceive on this occasion the gloom she cast over the father of the child and
Dr. Shrapnel. The youngster would insist on his right to be sprinkled by the
parson, to get a legal name and please his mother. At all turns in the history
of our healthy relations with women we are confronted by the parson! »And, upon
my word, I believe,« Beauchamp said to Lydiard, »those parsons - not bad
creatures in private life: there was one in Madeira I took a personal liking to
- but they 're utterly ignorant of what men feel to them - more ignorant than
women!« Mr. Tuckham and Mrs. Lydiard would not listen to his foolish objections;
nor were they ever mentioned to Jenny. Apparently the commission of the act of
marriage was to force Beauchamp from all his positions one by one.
    »The education of that child?« Mrs. Lydiard said to her husband.
    He considered that the mother would prevail.
    Cecilia feared she would not.
    »
