should imagine. It 's Romfrey's fun.«
    »And this disgraceful squib is a part of the fun?«
    »That I know nothing about, my dear. I 'm sorry, but there 's pitch and tar
in politics as well as on ship-board.«
    »I do not see that there should be,« said Cecilia resolutely.
    »We can't hope to have what should be.«
    »Why not? I would have it: I would do my utmost to have it,« she flamed out.
    »Your utmost?« Her father was glancing at her fore-gone mimicry of
Beauchamp's occasional strokes of emphasis. »Do your utmost to have your bonnet
on in time for us to walk to church. I can't bear driving there.«
    Cecilia went to her room with the curious reflection, awakened by what her
father had chanced to suggest to her mind, that she likewise could be fervid,
positive, uncompromising - who knows? Radicalish, perhaps, when she looked eye
to eye on an evil. For a moment or so she espied within herself a gulf of
possibilities, wherein black night-birds, known as queries, roused by shot of
light, do flap their wings. - Her utmost to have be what should be! And why not?
    But the intemperate feeling subsided while she was doing duty before her
mirror, and the visionary gulf closed immediately.
    She had merely been very angry on Nevil Beauchamp's behalf, and had dimly
seen that a woman can feel insurgent, almost revolutionary, for a personal
cause, Tory though her instinct of safety and love of smoothness make her.
    No reflection upon this casual piece of self or sex revelation troubled her
head. She did, however, think of her position as the friend of Nevil in utter
antagonism to him. It beset her with contradictions that blew rough on her
cherished serenity; for she was of the order of ladies who, by virtue of their
pride and spirit, their port and their beauty, decree unto themselves the rank
of princesses among women, before our world has tried their claim to it. She had
lived hitherto in upper air, high above the clouds of earth. Her ideal of a man
was of one similarly disengaged and lofty - loftier. Nevil, she could honestly
say, was not her ideal; he was only her old friend, and she was opposed to him
in his present adventure. The striking at him to cure him of his mental errors
and excesses was an obligation; she could descend upon him