the young lady; but before he seized the burnous Mr.
Lush had ceased to have that intention. Grandcourt quietly took the drapery from
him, and Mr. Lush, with a slight bow, moved away.
    »You had perhaps better put it on,« said Mr. Grandcourt, looking down on her
without change of expression.
    »Thanks; perhaps it would be wise,« said Gwendolen, rising, and submitting
very gracefully to take the burnous on her shoulders.
    After that, Mr. Grandcourt exchanged a few polite speeches with Mrs.
Davilow, and, in taking leave, asked permission to call at Offendene the next
day. He was evidently not offended by the insult directed towards his friend.
Certainly, Gwendolen's refusal of the burnous from Mr. Lush was open to the
interpretation that she wished to receive it from Mr. Grandcourt. But she, poor
child, had had no design in this action, and was simply following her antipathy
and inclination, confiding in them as she did in the more reflective judgments
into which they entered as sap into leafage. Gwendolen had no sense that these
men were dark enigmas to her, or that she needed any help in drawing conclusions
about them - Mr. Grandcourt at least. The chief question was, how far his
character and ways might answer her wishes; and unless she were satisfied about
that, she had said to herself that she would not accept his offer.
 
Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this
consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she
could make her life pleasant? - in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh
vigour making armies of themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring
itself fiercely: when women on the other side of the world would not mourn for
the husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause, and men stinted of
bread on our side of the world heard of that willing loss and were patient: a
time when the soul of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been
beating in him unfelt, until their full sum made a new life of terror or of joy.
    What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind visions?
They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring and fighting. In
these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human
affections.
 

                                  Chapter XII

 »O gentlemen, the time of life is short;
 To spend that shortness basely were too long,
 If life did ride upon a dial's point