and wonder. We can live at sea, in a yacht; anywhere with you but
in England. This country frowns on me; I can hardly fetch my breath here, I am
suffocated. The people all walk in lines in England. Not here, Nevil! They are
good people, I am sure; and it is your country: but their faces chill me, their
voices grate; I should never understand them; they would be to me like their
fogs eternally; and I to them? O me! it would be like hearing sentence in the
dampness of the shroud perpetually. Again I say I do not doubt that they are
very good: they claim to be; they judge others; they may know how to make
themselves happy in their climate; it is common to most creatures to do so, or
to imagine it. Nevil! not England!«
    Truly the mad commander and his French marquise of the Bevisham Election
ballad would make a pretty figure in England!
    His friends of his own class would be mouthing it. The story would be a
dogging shadow of his public life, and, quite as bad, a reflection on his party.
He heard the yelping tongues of the cynics. He saw the consternation and grief
of his old Bevisham hero, his leader and his teacher.
    »Florence,« he said, musing on the prospect of exile and idleness: »there 's
a kind of society to be had in Florence.«
    Renée asked him if he cared so much for society.
    He replied that women must have it, just as men must have exercise.
    »Old women, Nevil; intriguers, tattlers.«
    »Young women, Renée.«
    She signified no.
    He shook the head of superior knowledge paternally.
    Her instinct of comedy set a dimple faintly working in her cheek.
    »Not if they love, Nevil.«
    »At least,« said he, »a man does not like to see the woman he loves banished
by society and browbeaten.«
    »Putting me aside, do you care for it, Nevil?«
    »Personally not a jot.«
    »I am convinced of that,« said Renée.
    She spoke suspiciously sweetly, appearing perfect candour.
    The change in him was perceptible to her. The nature of the change was
unfathomable.
    She tried her wits at the riddle. But though she could be an actress before
him with little difficulty, the torment of her situation roused the fever within
her at a bare effort to think acutely. Scarlet suffused her face: her brain
whirled.
    »Remember, dearest