the great Commander Beauchamp. »Did
you like it?« he asked. »Ah, but if you meddle with politics, you must submit to
be held up on the prongs of a fork, my boy; soaped by your backers and shaved by
the foe; and there 's a figure for a gentleman! as your uncle Romfrey says.«
    Cecilia did not join this discussion, though she had heard from her father
that something grotesque had been written of Nevil. Her foolishness in blushing
vexed body and mind. She was incensed by a silly compliment that struck at her
feminine nature when her intellect stood in arms. Yet more hurt was she by the
reflection that a too lively sensibility might have conjured up the idea of the
compliment. And again, she wondered at herself for not resenting so rare a
presumption as it implied, and not disdaining so outworn a form of flattery. She
wondered at herself too for thinking of resentment and disdain in relation to
the familiar commonplaces of licenced impertinence. Over all which hung a
darkened image of her spirit of independence, like a moon in eclipse.
    Where lay his weakness? Evidently in the belief that he had thought
profoundly. But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was discernible?
She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes and metaphors: they
set him staggering and groping like an ancient knight of faëry in a forest
bewitched.
    »Your specific for the country is, then, Radicalism,« she said, after
listening to an attack on the Tories for their want of a policy and indifference
to the union of classes.
    »I would prescribe a course of it, Cecilia; yes,« he turned to her.
    »The Dr. Dulcamara of a single drug?«
    »Now you have a name for me! Tory arguments always come to epithets.«
    »It should not be objectionable. Is it not honest to pretend to have only
one cure for mortal maladies? There can hardly be two panaceas, can there be?«
    »So you call me quack?«
    »No, Nevil, no,« she breathed a rich contralto note of denial: »but if the
country is the patient, and you will have it swallow your prescription ...«
    »There 's nothing like a metaphor for an evasion,« said Nevil, blinking over
it.
    She drew him another analogy, longer than was at all necessary; so tedious
that her father struck through it with the remark:
    »Concerning that quack - that 's one in the background, though!«
    »I know of none,