artist's brush on a finished portrait, which will alter
the expression without discomposing a feature, so that you cannot say it is
another face, yet it is not the former one. His habits were invariable, as were
his meditations. He thought less of Romfrey Castle than of his dogs and his
devices for trapping vermin; his interest in birds and beasts and herbs, what
ninnies call Nature in books, to quote him, was undiminished; imagination he had
none to clap wings to his head and be off with it. He betrayed as little as he
felt that the coming Earl of Romfrey was different from the cadet of the family.
    A novel sharpness in the »Stop that,« with which he crushed Beauchamp's
affectedly gentle and unusually roundabout opening of the vexed Shrapnel
question, rang like a shot in the room at Steynham, and breathed a different
spirit from his customary easy pugnacity that welcomed and lured on an adversary
to wild outhitting. Some sorrowful preoccupation is, however, to be expected in
the man who has lost a brother, and some degree of irritability at the intrusion
of past disputes. He chose to repeat a similar brief forbidding of the subject
before they started together for the scene of the accident and Romfrey Castle.
No notice was taken of Beauchamp's remark, that he consented to go though his
duty lay elsewhere. Beauchamp had not the faculty of reading inside men, or he
would have apprehended that his uncle was engaged in silently heaping
aggravations to shoot forth one fine day a thundering and astonishing
counterstroke.
    He should have known his uncle Everard better.
    In this respect he seemed to have no memory. But who has much that has given
up his brains for a lodging to a single idea? It is at once a devouring dragon,
and an intractable steam-force; it is a tyrant that has eaten up a senate, and a
prophet with a message. Inspired of solitariness and gigantic size, it claims
divine origin. The world can have no peace for it.
    Cecilia had not pleased him; none had. He did not bear in mind that the
sight of Dr. Shrapnel sick and weak, which constantly reanimated his feelings of
pity and of wrath, was not given to the others of whom he demanded a
corresponding energy of just indignation and sympathy. The sense that he was
left unaided to the task of bending his tough uncle, combined with his
appreciation of the righteousness of the task to embitter him and set him on a
pedestal, from which he descended at every sign of an opportunity for striking,
and to which he retired continually