-lastingly the
shopkeeper's! Purse, pence, ease, increase of worldly goods, personal importance
- the pound, the English pound! Dare do that, and you forfeit your share of Port
wine in this world; you won't be dubbed with a title; you 'll be fingered at!
Lord, Lord! is it the region inside a man, or out, that gives him peace? Out,
they say; for they have lost faith in the existence of an inner. They haven't
it. Air-sucker, blood-pump, cooking machinery, and a battery of trained
instincts, aptitudes, fill up their vacuum. I repeat, ma'am, why should young
Captain Beauchamp spend an hour consulting his family? They won't approve him;
he knows it. They may annoy him; and what is the gain of that? They can't move
him; on that I let my right hand burn. So it would be useless on both sides. He
thinks so. So do I. He is one of the men to serve his country on the best field
we can choose for him. In a ship's cabin he is thrown away. Ay, ay, War, and he
may go aboard. But now we must have him ashore. Too few of such as he!«
    »It is matter of opinion,« said Rosamund, very tightly compressed; scarcely
knowing what she said.
    How strange, besides hateful, it was to her to hear her darling spoken of by
a stranger who not only pretended to appreciate but to possess him! A stranger,
a man of evil, with monstrous ideas! A terribly strong inexhaustible man, of a
magical power too; or would he otherwise have won such a mastery over Nevil?
    Of course she could have shot a rejoinder, to confute him with all the force
of her indignation, save that the words were tumbling about in her head like a
world in disruption, which made her feel a weakness at the same time that she
gloated on her capacity, as though she had an enormous army, quite overwhelming
if it could but be got to move in advance. This very common condition of the
silent-stricken, unused in dialectics, heightened Rosamund's disgust by causing
her to suppose that Nevil had been similarly silenced, in his case vanquished,
captured, ruined; and he dwindled in her estimation for a moment or two. She
felt that among a sisterhood of gossips she would soon have found her voice, and
struck down the demagogue's